We Need to Talk About How TV and Movies Use Trauma to Tell Stories
By Ruth Young
Image: Netflix
Content warning: this article contains references to sexual assault, school shootings.
About an hour into Luckiest Girl Alive, with zero warning, there’s a scene where the protagonist, a young woman named Ani, is lying on a bathroom floor, her hair soaked in sweat. She’s clearly unaware of her surroundings. Slowly, the camera pans down to show one of her classmates between her legs. Then, one of his friends walks into the bathroom and laughingly asks if he’s “still at it.” What follows is a series of uncomfortable and graphic scenes of sexual assault. As I listened to Ani scream “stop” and “no” at her classmates (a third man eventually joins in) while clearly scared and in pain, I desperately wanted to be able to step through my television and help her.
And that was the point. Luckiest Girl Alive is based on the 2015 book of the same name by author Jessica Knoll, who experienced a similar assault when she was a student at a private high school. Knoll wrote the screenplay and executive produced the film, and made the deliberate decision to include graphic scenes. She told Today that while she wasn’t on set when these scenes were filmed, she did watch them later and realized that audiences needed to see what happened so they couldn’t minimize it. “I think I normalize what happened to me so that I can live with it. Then when you see it [on screen], you're like, ‘Oh, there's no rationalizing here. I don't need to minimize this. This was really bad,’” she told the outlet earlier this month.
I understand the value in unflinching stories about assault, but between Luckiest Girl Alive and other shows that delve deep into characters’ trauma to tell a story, including Euphoria and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, I’m tired of being inundated with pain and trauma—and worried these depictions are doing more harm than good.
Trauma in storytelling is not a new phenomenon and has been a common plot device used in film and television for decades—characters ranging from Tony Stark to Sansa Stark battle with their pasts in their present. However, the conversation around the use of gratuitous trauma in film and television along with the advent of the term ‘trauma porn’ is relatively new. Barbara Klinger, a professor of film and media studies argues that as we have shifted into the post-network environment, television services and genres must “reinvent conventions to attract audiences.” Klinger specifically looked at crime dramas and their use of white, female victims as entry points for greater narratives to play out, suggesting female trauma has become a visual or structural device in this new era of television.
When we first meet Ani in Luckiest Girl Alive, she’s an adult, a writer in New York who has carefully calculated the image she projects out onto the world, ticking boxes on her list of necessary achievements until she is the type of person she believes would not be assaulted by guys at a high school party. (These achievements include marrying a man from a wealthy family, maintaining a petite figure and landing a job at New York magazine.) The film portrays her as a cold, self-centered, fake person who is constantly haunted by her past— though at first, we don’t quite know what that past entails. The truth is slowly revealed through flashbacks to Ani’s teenage years, ultimately leading to those graphic scenes where we find out she was sexually assaulted. Not wanting to face her mother and the associated shame of the event, Ani decides to confide in two other classmates, Arthur and Ben, both of whom had been subjected to bullying at the hands of the teenagers who assaulted Ani. The film then goes on to show Arthur and Ben enacting revenge in the form of a school shooting, where two of Ani’s attackers are killed and one is left paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Present-day Ani does her best not to think about this traumatic event, but when she is approached by a director who is working on an upcoming documentary about the school shooting, she’s forced to relive it.
Luckiest Girl Alive does everything it can to frame Ani’s resistance to discussing or speaking openly about the sexual assault she experienced as a teenager as a fight against her acceptance of the term ‘victim.’ This terminology is first mentioned in the film when the director of the documentary asks Ani if she prefers the term survivor or victim because he knows “that’s a big thing these days.” But while the film tries to show the complicated nature of the healing process, those scenes draw all of the viewer’s attention.
Luckiest Girl Alive isn’t alone in this. Netflix’s latest true crime series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story faced similar criticism. Many viewers found the show to be insensitive towards Dahmer’s victims and families and in the end glorified this serial killer and the crimes he committed. “The one good thing a show like this can do is steal the spotlight from the murderer and show who these people actually were. But Dahmer, for the most part, is unfortunately too infatuated with its star attraction for that,” said Stuart Heritage in a piece for The Guardian. In fact, the series frames Dahmer’s actions as coming from a place of loneliness and abandonment and implies that his crimes were an attempt to avoid these feelings. Personally, I found it strange to watch this series and, by the end, find myself feeling sorry for a man who had murdered 17 people.
Meanwhile, Euphoria is known for both its beautifully shot and aesthetically pleasing scenes as well as its harsh and rugged depictions of violence, drug use and sexual assault. This combination is what made the show stand out in the first place, but some argued that its second season may have gone too far, especially episode five, which showed Rue (Zendaya) delving further into her addiction and caught in a dangerous situation from which she had no escape. That was the case for Refinery29’s Katherine Singh, who wrote about how difficult it was to watch this episode at the time. “With my sister beside me, I had to look away several times as Rue put herself in increasingly precarious and dangerous positions on her search for a high. As Rue was undressed by Laurie and shot up with morphine, I felt antsy and short of breath. As Rue woke the next morning, trapped and desperately pulling on locked doors and windows to escape, my sister told me she felt physically sick. Ten minutes after the episode finished, while brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she had a full-fledged panic attack,” she said. “Watching my sister have such a physical and visceral reaction to a fictional episode of TV wasn’t only alarming, but eye-opening.”
Of course, the ways these stories affect us differs from person to person. After watching Luckiest Girl Alive, I called my mum to find out what she thought, as I do after watching anything new on Netflix. Her reaction was almost the complete opposite to mine. I was left with many unanswered questions and a lingering feeling of uneasiness, while she found the film offered an important perspective on sexual assault, albeit through an uncomfortable viewing experience. But while not all of us may have such a strong reaction to an episode of television or a film, it's important to note that some do.
That’s not to say these stories should not be told through film and television, but I think we owe it to ourselves to ask if the message these shows and movies are intending to send get lost when they’re told through the lens of violence and trauma?