By Harry Gay
*Spoilers*
Conversations around sexual assault and gaslighting have become high visibility topics in the past few years with several high-profile cases of domestic and systemic abuse. It is within a post-#MeToo climate that films like Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, dip their toes into the miasma of various court cases, legal decisions, celebrity accusations and arguments over memory, consent and power clinging to the air in the last decade. The film attempts to waft its way through, sometimes successfully and other times not.
Blink Twice follows Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawcat), two working-class women invited to tech CEO Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) private island for a seemingly endless summer of debauchery and hedonism. What begins as frivolity soon turns to nightmare as the women on the island discover that they have been violently abused by their male comrades and made to forget these encounters through an amnesiac fluid hidden in their perfume. It is only through violent revenge that they are able to free themselves from their abusers’ clutches, but Frida’s decision to keep King alive as her slave in Blink Twice‘s denouement complicates what is a fairly tight revenge thriller.
Before going to see Blink Twice, I had coincidentally been reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Moustache, a French novella that follows a man who, after shaving off his moustache on a whim, is told by those around him that he never had one. What begins as an absurdist comedy, soon diverts into existential horror, and one that mirrors the experiences of being in an abusive relationship. Blink Twice similarly starts as a comedic sideshow act, parading the exorbitant wealth and privilege of its characters, but it is soon turned on its head by the violent and triggering second half. It took me a while to get fully into the movie. The first half I found irritating, the constant partying and noise felt as though Kravitz was emulating How to Have Sex and its Dante-esque depiction of debauchery, each bottle of alcohol anxiously counted by uneasy audience members.
Once the film’s midpoint reversal came in, however, I was hooked. Kravitz shows off some real technical skill here as a first-time writer/director. Things set up early on recur later, there are shots that are really inventive, sequences that are fun. Tatum also delivers a great performance, deftly handling both comedy and serious drama, sometimes blurring the two.
As stated before, Blink Twice tackles issues of cancel culture, sexual misconduct allegations, #MeToo, and gaslighting. Similar to The Moustache, physical objects become powerful tools to break one’s usually stable relationship with reality. In the novel, the protagonist’s reliance on photographs of his trip to Java with his wife, when he demonstrably has a moustache, reassures him of his grip on reality. Once these mysteriously disappear, doubt plagues his mind and further dislocates him from any grounding in truth. In the film, supporting character Sarah (Adria Arjona) only suspects something isn’t right when she finds the name ‘Jess’ on a lighter, a name she didn’t remember moments prior. A knife that was stashed away by Jess is found behind Frida’s mirror unexpectedly, which proves a memory she had of the night before had in fact been real. Later on, Frida steals a collection of photographs which reveal she had been a visitor to the island a year ago.
Unlike in a lot of real-life cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse, Frida and the other women in Blink Twice are able to remain secure in their knowledge of the truth through their relationship with physical objects as evidence that disprove the narrative fed to them by the men. Oftentimes, allegations remain as mere allegations—spoken words and written accounts that pit one person’s story against another and are sometimes discarded by the legal courts and court of public opinion. Even with overwhelming collections of evidence, women can still be silenced and have their reputations destroyed, their abusers left to roam free.
This all makes the denouement of Blink Twice rather troubling. I couldn’t help feeling uneasy that, after all the actions taken by both Frida and Sarah, they wind up saving Slater, despite killing everyone else. On top of that, Frida is now be the CEO of King Tech. One could argue that Kravitz is making a commentary on how some women will throw other women and their experiences under the bus for capitalist gains. Frida, who begins the film as a working-class woman, is continually presented as selfish and an opportunist. She lunges at the first opportunity to be around Slater despite his history; she jumps at the chance to visit his island; she enjoys the lavish world she finds herself in; and she refuses to help Jess when she expresses her desire to leave. One could believe her heel turn towards becoming a ‘girlboss feminist she-o’ in the last act if not for her earlier decisions after learning what had happened to Jess. After the midpoint reversal, Frida continuously sacrifices herself for the safety of the other women, embodying what Sarah expresses as the essential thesis of Blink Twice in one of their many dinner parties: the importance of sisterhood and looking out for others.
This is also ignoring Geena Davis as Slater’s sister, Stacy, who is clearly positioned to be the symbol of opportunism. Upon remembering the violent acts orchestrated by her son, she attacks Frida, yelling that she “didn’t want to remember,” clearly demarcating her character as one who would rather ignore the plight of other women if it meant she could continue enjoying her lavish lifestyle.
Blink Twice ultimately presents a very confused vision of how to navigate a post-#MeToo world. The film is full of contradictions. The tone is all over the place, unable to decide if what it’s showing us is comedic or horrifying, exemplified best in the harrowing sexual assault sequence that is both graphic but over the top and contrasted with goofy performances and an incongruous funky music cue. The film attempts to preach sisterhood and the importance of women’s looking out for one another, but continually, in the first act, utilises the white gaze against a racialized other. Through a sustained series of lingering shots accompanied by a sinister soundtrack sting, the employees tasked with maintaining the compound are ‘othered’ as they merely go about their job. These filmic choices, exploiting the audience’s assumptions about a minority group and oppressed class, is used only for the purposes of creating a red herring, rather than for any social commentary. At the same time, having the protagonist switch up their personality in the last moments to suddenly become the abuser, shows a disregard for any ideas of sisterhood as well as continuity of character. That Sarah is okay with this decision becomes the icing on the cake. One cannot preach a sense of sisterhood if it does not include those who are systematically oppressed, be it through class, race, gender or a combination of all three.
Frida’s choice, in Blink Twice, to join the establishment rather than rebel against it is a disturbing insight into the minds of Hollywood’s most glitzy and glamorous, where abusers are continually shielded through wealth and privilege. It suggests an assumption by Kravitz about those who carry out violent retribution or revolutionary acts of defiance that they will immediately assume a role upholding these systems of powerful oppression once given a modicum of power, rather than continuing to try and rebel. Maybe that’s just Kravitz’s view, but I’d like to hope for a better future.
Harry Gay is a freelance writer and editor, currently undergoing preliminary research for his PhD thesis. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Advanced Studies (Honours) at the University of Sydney, and has lectured at various Film Studies conferences around the world. He has a chapter in the upcoming Critical Insights into Science Fiction: Exploring Posthumanism, Alternate Realities, and Cyberculture from Adamas University, to be published by Springer Nature.
