Blink Twice And The Master’s Tools

Rape/revenge is always an ambivalent empowerment fantasy.

So, just in case you care about this sort of thing, there will be pretty thorough spoilers here. I think you can guess at most of the twists pretty easily if you’ve seen the trailer or know anything about the film, and despite the hype I don’t think twists are actually what this film is about (to its credit.)

But, you know, if spoilers are something you care about, be warned.

***

Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice has high production values, a name cast, and a veneer of elegance. You shouldn’t let that fool you though. This is an= rape/revenge film, and that genre’s grimy exploitation history—Deliverance, I Spit On Your Grave, Ms. 45, The Last House on the Left—is very intentionally used as both springboard and contrast. Kravitz, perhaps the only Black female director to work in the genre, re-examines the tropes through a bitter, brutal lens. Or at least she does until the end, where the film, arguably, betrays, or at least forgets, its roots and its self.

The victim and protagonist here is Frida (Naomi Ackie), a waitress who has a yearly gig at a tech billionaire party. She and her friend and fellow server Jess (Alia Shawkat), decide to defy their boss and dress up in slinky attire to mingle with the hoi polloi. Frida falls (literally, thanks to a broken high heel) for mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum). He invites the two of them to his island retreat, where they consume alcohol and hallucinogens and have a great time.

Unless, maybe they don’t.

Again, spoilers on the way.

Slater, it turns out, is not the nice guy he appears. He and his buddies sexually assault the women every night, and then give them a drug in their perfume that makes them forget what’s happened to them. Frida accidentally stumbles on an antidote, and she and new friend Sarah (Adria Arjona) manage to turn the tables on the men, murdering them all in bloody ways, as per the rape/revenge script.

The differences in the usual genre narrative are important too, though. In classic rape/revenge—going back to the genre’s core modern text Deliverance —the villains are generally lower-class men. The power of the scythe swinging back and forth is in the way that gender and class are pitted against each other, alternately exploited and exploiter. Poor whites function as a kind of racialized monstrosity, embodying a fear of, and desire for, the working class as the middle-class victims embody fear of and desire for women.

Kravitz dispenses with this shilly-shallying. The rapists here are also billionaires; the women are also marginalized by economics and (in Frida’s case) by race. Slater is already about as powerful as he could be; he is not taking revenge for economic marginalization or economic anxiety. To the extent he has a grievance, it’s that he was held accountable for some sort of unnamed sexual harassment or misconduct in the past and is enraged that he has had to apologize. A scene where he screams “I’m sorry” at a bound and helpless Frida is the film’s creepy, ugly thematic climax—a wealthy rapist parodying his own manufactured contrition as a form of terror and control.

In that context, the film’s obsession with forgetting can be read as a commentary on its genre, and on the way we displace culpability for violence onto the poor. Kravitz uses cuts to chop up the narrative; the party becomes an endless fractured bacchanal, in which moments of terror—like the women running and running from some nameless something—become silly games, the source of the danger disappearing into amnesia, just as the source of bruises and black eyes are lost at each dawn. Aesthetics—or, if you will, propaganda—erases cause from effect, leaving the wealthy to bask without consequence in the admiration of their unknowing victims.

Blink Twice is, then, both more straightforward in its dynamics and more fragmented in its presentation (as well as less explicit in its visual depiction of sexual violence) than many of its predecessors. The narrative blade as a result doesn’t have quite the same vicious back and forth as some of the genre’s touchstones; the horror and the answering horror aren’t linked in the same inevitable swing and return of blood and violence.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Kravitz is trying to get viewers to assemble the fragments of evidence and think through the mechanics of abuse, rather than just feel fear and rage and fear and rage. The more contemplative approach allows for a deeper class and racial analysis. It makes it clearer who the villains are.

When the villains are clearer, though, it can be less easy to see the villain in yourself. Many rape/revenge films are, at least to some degree, about how revenge and seizing the means of violence turns you into the thing you hate. To murder the murderer is to become a murderer; the victim may be debased by victimization, but is even more debased by becoming the victimizer. Rape/revenge films are rarely unproblematic empowerment fantasies.

Frida, in contrast, gets something very like a straightforward happy ending. The movie does not pick up on suggestions early on that women’s friendships and solidarity could create a feminist alternative to billionaire bro culture. Instead, Frida manages to use the amnesia chemical on Slater at the end of the film. By keeping him drugged and docile, she takes over his company while James Brown’s “Paid the cost to be the boss” plays in the background. Frida has become Slater, appropriating his financial power and using his own tools to control him nonsexually, and perhaps sexually as well.

I’m not saying there’s no ambivalence in the film. I’m sure Kravitz is aware of the irony and tension, and you’re intended to recoil at least a bit. But there’s little indication at the end that Frida is unhappy or conflicted; she doesn’t seem ready to blink twice to signal distress. Instead, the revenge resolution, the victorious climax, is that a Black woman has the power—including the power of sexual assault—previously reserved for white men.

You could sort of see this, perhaps, as a metaphor for Kravitz herself holding the camera that in the past has rarely been held, or used, by Black women. And Kravitz has in fact done something different with her artistic control, and added something important to genre and to film. But the ending also feels like a kind of capitulation—a not entirely intentional acknowledgement of the limits of passing the same knife into someone else’s hands.