If There's a Way to Talk About Sexual Abuse on TV, 'The Honorable Woman' Got It Right
"Who do you trust?" asks Baroness Nessa Stein
(Maggie Gyllenhaal) at the start of every episode of Hugo Blick's The Honorable Woman, a miniseries set amid the ongoing rift between
Israel and Palestine. "We all have secrets. We all tell
lies,"
she
continues, finally admitting that, "It's a wonder we
trust anyone at all."
She's speaking, of course, about that clichéd spy
thriller genre dictum:
"Trust no one." Yet given the various instances
of sexual violence that mark Nessa's character arc in the series,
they speak just as easily to the fascinating discussion of sexual abuse that
this Emmy-nominated miniseries brings to the forefront with aplomb and
tenacity.
By episode six, this opening voiceover bleeds into
blurry images of Nessa at a bar, the camera losing focus as a man
addresses her. When we catch
up with the couple at a nondescript apartment, she is drunkenly asking
whether
the man "has a bed, at least."
"Not for you," he replies.
Issues
of secrets and trust, central to the show's grammar, here are vividly
connected to sexual abuse. Fully aware of who Baroness Stein
is, the man takes unexpected glee in humiliating Nessa, showering her
with
alcohol and teasing her for probably having "gotten away
with this before."
He
means an anonymous sexual dalliance. It's true: Early in the series we
see Nessa engage in consensual sex with her main security guy.
No sexual relationship in the show, it turns out, is devoid of the power
games and secrets the spy genre requires. When it's clear the
man will do as he pleases with her, we see Nessa writhing on the floor, much
too confused and drunk to fight him back, merely pleading, "Let me go," less a whimper and more a hollow
command. We then see him throw a bottle at her.
The camera follows the bottle as it empties itself out over the carpet.
It's a stylized
way of representing the sexual violence taking place off-screen; alcohol
becoming both reason and weapon, excuse and cover for what befalls Nessa within
those walls. It's only later, when we see her groggy and bleeding
out on the street, that we see the full extent of the assault.
The shot of the alcohol bottle may seem a cheap way to distance viewers
from this horrible episode of Nessa's life, but in denying us access
to Nessa's humiliation, it gives weight to her character's integrity,
refusing the unnamed, vicious man control of the narrative.
This isn't, of course, the first instance of sexual
violence in the show. In episode four, we witness Nessa being raped by her
kidnapper eight years prior. The scene was joyless, explicitly framed in terms
of the sociopolitical consequences it would, quite literally, engender. Nessa's subsequent pregnancy, it turns out, is yet
another calculated chess move on the part of the man who'd despised
her father enough to have him killed and her abducted. Abstracted from the
actual violence imposed on Nessa's body, we'd be tempted
to look at these set of events as examples of the way rape has been co-opted by
prestige television to give its female characters a complex backstory.
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