In Natalia Leite’s 2017 M.F.A., a timid third-year Fine Arts student Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) voices the riposte, “I guess that depends on what law you break” to a women’s student group as its leader condescends to her frustration at Southern California’s exclusive Balboa (actually Chapman University) campus’s complicit rape tolerance policy by warning her that, “If you break the law, there will be consequences.”
This administration-friendly group endorses Rohypnol-sensitive nail polish and keeps busy raising funds to support a woman in Rio de Janeiro who was gang-raped by thirty-three men (the number of assailants and the distant crime site inspires them to name their initiative, ‘Heroes for Rio’): here, Noelle’s protest situates the logic of a truly feminist rape-revenge horror film: patriarchal systems of law force rape victims to take the law into our own hands in order to survive.
The post-millennial surge of stylish female directed horror, Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation), Jennifer Kent (Monster, The Babadook, The Nightingale), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Bad Batch), Julia Ducournau (Raw) and Jen McGowan (Rust Creek), for example, foreground women for whom institutionalized avenues are blocked, and this same impasse catalyzes M.F.A.’s action.
Check out the trailer for M.F.A.
Leite establishes Eastwood’s Noelle as distinctly privileged: she is slender, beautiful, Alice + Olivia fashionable, and her pied-à-terre defies even Hollywood standards of student living. But Noelle’s reserved self-portraits do not impress her life-drawing professor Rudd (Marlon Young), who goads her to “Get messy! Feel! Get into the deep end this year!” before her pretentious “fellow” artists and, not incidentally, the class’s silent fleshy (read: ‘messy’) nude model. Excitement does call, when Noelle’s art-crush, the vacuous hipster class-star Luke, invites her to a party and it turns ugly when he woos her to his bedroom with “craft”-babble about his ceramics, and rapes her.
Stunned, Noelle confides in her seemingly sexually sophisticated suitemate (screenwriter Leah McKendrick), who had urged her to bring men home for evening sex swims in their private pool, but gets the “Forget it: it was one shitty night” advice. She then decides to confront Luke who, to composer Sonya Belousova’s pulsating score, accidentally takes a fatal topple down his staircase. Denied the opportunity to, in Roxanne Gay’s term, send out any dispatch[i] of his violence and betrayal, Luke’s death propels Noelle’s mission: to investigate and avenge not only her own rape but Balboa College’s systemic denial of its campus rape culture. She is going to get messy indeed and ensure that some rapists are going to experience truly “shitty nights.”
I use rape “culture” advisedly here, as it is crucial to stay aware of cultures in which rape is truly normative, rather than (at least officially) aberrant,[ii] but Noelle’s lovely, sun-drenched Balboa campus acts like a “Victim-Blame” Academy. She appeals to other rape-survivors, to the campus police detective unit, to the student support group, and finally to Melinda Saunders, Balboa’s sneeringly insensitive dean of students who grills her about her drinking at Luke’s party, showering evidence away and so forth.
By this point, Noelle, and the audience, has had enough: she transforms into what the L.A. Times’ Katie Walsh termed, “a millennial Dirty Harry,”[iii] and avenges not only her rape, but Balboa campus’s series of unpunished rape cases.
Life Drawing Class Model
Leite uses her camera subtly to understand all of this campus’s women as potential objects of sexual attack. She frames the art class model and even Dean Saunders to pull their pubic areas into focus: whatever our rank, M.F.A. argues, women are vulnerable to a predatory gaze. This aligns with the way Leite constructs Noelle’s eye-line as well.
Saunders Interviewing Noelle
Initially insecure of her identity as an artist and player in her campus community, Noelle takes on a mission and an authentic focus. She counters arguments such as her real-life art student rape survivor Emma Sulkowicz’s, “Let’s repair rapists, not destroy them. The ‘let’s murder rapists’ mentality incentivized them to cover their tracks and deny guilt” [iv] with action. And though M.F.A. is credited to Villianess Productions, Noelle has no other option: MF.A. constructs a horror (Noelle does rack up five kills) fantasy much more relatable than the rape-revenge classics, I Spit on Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) and Jackson County Jail (Miller, 1976). M.F.A. gives us a final girl “grown up,” whom many in her audience, and particularly a university audience, can identify with.
Artist Noelle Gets Messy
Sexually Confident Noelle’s “Killer” Gaze
Ironically, however, as Chuck Bowen has noted, this introverted student’s rape is, “the inciting incident for Noelle’s emergence as a daring artist and her identity as a [superficially] confident sexual being.” [v] She “dives into the deep end,” her art gets intense and her professor praises her with, “what have you done with the old Noelle?”
Professor Rudd’s “clinsult” envelopes M.F.A.’s ambiguity: it makes Noelle’s rape positively transformative, an egregious conceit that engendered a somewhat heated debate in my classroom. What college student does not want to be sexy, confident, and talented? Still, I argue that this very ambiguity makes the film relevant in ways that no other rape-revenge horror has been. Rape is not, as we are coming to know, a crime that is easily reportable, or easily recuperable. It feminizes its targets and reopens wounds and so is inherently confusing, as Leite shows us: in M.F.A.’s narrative, the survivors Noelle avenges are troubled, even tragically in her roommate’s case, rather than grateful for her action on their behalf.
I find it productive to compare this film to the earlier but strikingly similar rape revenge hit, Sudden Impact (1983), and not only because this fourth movie in the Dirty Harry series starred, and was directed by, Francesa Eastwood’s (Noelle) father Clint. Like M.F.A., Sudden Impact also concerns a female rape survivor, Jennifer Spencer, who lives in Southern California (the Embarcadero area), and is a reticent artist whose “disturbing” paintings prove successful, and whom bureuacratic corruption and inertia have driven to take the law into her own hands.
Of course as a Dirty Harry movie, the camera constantly draws us to its titular character, and it can be no spoiler to reveal that Harry Callahan, the reliably “unorthodox” cop ends up taking the law out of Jennifer’s hands by both appropriating her revenge and ensuring that she escapes arrest and indictment for her three murders. Like Noelle, Jennifer also avenges another rape victim, her catatonic sister, who is understandably unresponsive; she also recasts voyeurism, as Carol Clover has argued, as a female power in horror,[vi] toward her viewers through her staring shrieking and somewhat cheesy self-portraits.
Jennifer’s Disturbing Art
What separates these two movies is attributable to genre, gender, and historical period. Though we had experienced at least two waves of feminism by 1983, even Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape[vii] was still ten years off, and the public image of “the rapist” featured strangers, sometimes operating in gangs, and almost exclusively othered: poor men, men of color, deranged men. Jennifer and her sister are slumming in the Embarcadero amusement park when a crew of carnies led by a hooting butch lesbian assaults them, which is especially ironic today given Hannah Gadsby’s redefinition of ”good men.” [viii] Sudden Impact is also helmed by a man, and not any man, but a star whose Dirty Harry Callahan persona is predicated on saving hapless women. Finally, Sudden Impact is not a horror film: its construction depends upon Callahan as the antidote to everyday horrors of constitutional freedoms spinning out of control.
Though they are rich to watch in tandem, this essay argues that a more pressing and perhaps more controversial difference between these ostensibly close films is worth serious discussion. This asks if we can support the premise that justice is itself ambiguous, that it really does “depend on what law you break.” Can a female protagonist’s right to justice, even if her actions result in campus violence, support justice for all? Unlike Sudden Impact’s conclusion, that a renegade cop can determine civic law, M.F.A. risks interpretation and debate: after all, Noelle is arrested at both her degree’s, and M.FA.’s, commencement.
You can stream M.F.A. on Amazon:
Related: Check out our posts on two other important rape-revenge horror films, 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave and Coralie Fargeat’s recent Revenge (2017).
[i] Gay, Roxanne. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Harper Perennial (May 1, 2018) pp. 6-10.
[ii] A number of my female Somali students at the University of Minnesota have urged me to remember this reality when discussing rape as a “culture,” rather than a symptom of patriarchy.
[iii] Walsh, Katie. “Francesca Eastwood Cleans up a Campus”. The Los Angeles Times. January 5, 2018.
[iv] Sulkowicz, Emma. Twitter feed. September 30, 2018.
[v] Bowen, Chuck. “Review: M.F.A.”. Slant, October 10, 2017.
[vi] Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Films. Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 169-173.
[vii] Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Ballantine Press, 1993.
[viii] Gadsby, Hannah. Good Men and Misogyny (Lecture). “Women and Entertainment. The Hollywood Reporter. December 5th, 2018.
Dr. Michelle Y. Lekas earned her BAs at the University of Illinois (U-C), her MA at the University of Florida, and her PhD at UMTC: dissertation, A Brief Epistemology of Seriality. She has taught at UF, Carleton College, Macalester College, McNallySmith College of Music, Hamline University, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and at UMTC since 1988. Lekas is a long-time fan of horror and 60’s-70’s surf culture, and continues her research on seriality and “undervalued” cinemas.
