The Shame Is on the Aggressor: The Image of Rape in Films about Bosnia and in the Films of Angelina Jolie

In her Summit keynote speech, Angelina Jolie aimed her weapons straight at the rapists. (screenshot of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider)

In her Summit keynote speech, Angelina Jolie aimed her weapons straight at the rapists. (screenshot from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider)

“‘The shame is on the aggressor’ made headlines when Angelina Jolie used the phrase in her London keynote speech at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in June 2014.  She merely stated the obvious, but it caught people’s attention because usually victims are shamed, sometimes to death.  Mass rape was international news during the Bosnian War and society’s response to rape can be seen in films about that war.  Of those films, only Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey shames the rapist, as does the revised fairy-tale Maleficent, which casts her as an assault victimAs an actor, Jolie has also played aggressors and avengers.  As a director, her film Unbroken seems to imply, with historic support, that the sadistic Japanese POW guard suffered parental rape.”

This article appears in Bright Lights Film Journal.


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18
Feb 2015
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Kutcher Punk’d Wozniak and Brogrammed “Jobs” to Hide the Women

Katherine’s analysis of the movie Jobs is published in the online film journal Bright LightsTaxonomy is about seeing the relationships between different elements of the material being organized.  That’s what I did for this article.  I paid attention to the details and found a very different movie.  Here’s the article’s first paragraph.

“Ashton Kutcher, producer and star of MTV’s celebrity prankster series Punk’d, played a prank on Steve Wozniak in the film Jobs, where he stars in the title role. The prank symbolically places Woz in a female role and gives primary engineering credit to early Apple employee Rod Holt. Kutcher’s motive may have been Wozniak’s agreement to help Aaron Sorkin with another Jobs biopic and his refusal to work with Kutcher and director Joshua Michael Stern on this one. With Woz as the feminine lead, Kutcher and Stern hide Apple’s female innovators and trivialize the women in Jobs’ life using brogramming techniques that discourage women from entering the technology field.”


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14
Apr 2014
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