| Doug Carmoody |
Outrage plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, December 8th, through Tuesday, December 10th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen
Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the 2020s (Promising Young Woman, Women Talking). But in 1950, when Lupino helmed Outrage, this recipe conjured a modestly received B-movie. She released her movie 70 years ahead of its time.
By depicting rape in a 1950s film noir, Lupino tackled a subject that classical Hollywood cinema was not built to handle. Most obviously, Outrage has to contend with the industry-wide censorship under the Hays Production Code. Per the Code, even “[w]here essential to the plot,” rape “must not be more than suggested” and “even the struggle preceding rape must not be shown.”1 Lupino presses against these boundaries, especially by staging a terrifying chase sequence prior to Ann’s sexual assault. But the Code’s strictures do explain why the script never uses the terms “rape” or “sexual assault”, instead referring to the act as a “criminal assault” (a legal term which at the time seems to have encompassed both rape and forms of non-sexual violence). These moralistic guidelines create an aesthetic quandary: the crime that the narrative centers on can never be shown or even named.
However, the more crucial difficulty presented by 1950s Hollywood convention involves the narrative form itself. The drive from conflict to neat resolution in under 90 minutes is hardly an appropriate format for portraying a traumatic, endemic social ill. Lupino works around these conventions with bravery and guile. The fruits of this approach are most obvious in the first act, in which Lupino weaponizes a variety of formally disruptive aesthetic strategies to foreground the culture of leeriness and casual misogyny that permits the victimization of her heroine.
Mixed Perspective
Lupino’s disruption of convention begins even before the narrative does. The film opens with an extreme high-angle shot of a woman running, apparently chased, through an abandoned city street. In subsequent shots amid the opening credits, the woman catches her breath and then keeps running. Lupino never shows the woman’s face and never indicates whether she made it to safety. The sequence doesn’t relate back to the narrative in any literal sort of way—the next scene opens to the protagonist Ann cheerily ordering cake from a coffee shop and enduring verbal harassment from her server. While Ann isn’t the same woman who was just shown being pursued, the sense of threat established in that abstract opening seeps through entire the initial act of the film.
Both Ann and this nameless woman are trapped in a social world controlled by unfriendly looks. Whereas the nameless woman seems to be running from an individual stalker, Ann has to contend with several nosy people. After being badgered at the coffee shop, Ann consorts with her boyfriend. But an older woman makes a pointed glance that prevents the couple from kissing. Cleverly, Lupino never commits to strictly filming from either the perspective of the onlookers or the young woman, but instead alternates between the two.
As Outrage moves toward depicting Ann’s assault, this leery social milieu becomes increasingly ominous. But Lupino never drops the mixed perspective between Ann and her onlookers. This formal strategy juxtaposes Ann’s subjective terror against the sociopathic ease with which she is stalked. As the sequence leading to her assault begins, Ann and her coworker joke around at the shop before returning to work. While they walk away, the shot lingers, emphasizing the hands of their server in the foreground while the score turns menacing. The next shot reverses the perspective, revealing that the audience has unwittingly been sharing a viewpoint with Ann’s tormentor. We remain locked in his perspective as he waits for Ann to leave work and begins to follow her.
But rather than falling into this voyeuristic perspective, Lupino opts to reverse it again. When the attacker shouts after Ann, the perspective flips so that the characters are moving toward the camera. Now rather than following after her, the audience is placed into a sequence of shots that first show Ann’s terrified reactions, and later her assailant moving aggressively toward the screen. By the time the man assaults Ann, the film has abandoned any sense of voyeurism. The sequence ends with Ann’s point of view as she faints (replete with fade-out effect) followed by a backward tracking crane shot that (in accordance with the Production Code) pulls the audience away from the scene of the rape.
The Looming City
The mixed perspective also demonstrates the way that the city’s social space conspires to oppress our protagonist. Whereas previously Ann could not get people to stop looking at her, when being stalked she finds it impossible to get anyone’s attention. She unsuccessfully tries to hail a taxi and, in a scene that neatly anticipates Halloween, bangs on someone’s window to plead for help. In both cases, Ann is ignored.
The editing also produces the sensation of a fragmented, unfriendly space. As the film shifts to Ann’s perspective, the shots become directionally confused. The heroine subsequently walks from left to right across the screen, then right to left, and then from the background into the foreground. In each shot the actor exhibits increasing confusion, but her masculine pursuer moves directly and with confidence.
At this moment the framing itself begins to drive home the sense of spatial menace. Lupino re-adopts the extremely high angle from the opening sequence of the film, showing Ann lost in space and framed by a massive expressionist shadow. At the scene of the assault, Lupino adopts an (early) version of the classic Psycho motif and visually “cuts” the body of her protagonist. But rather than using extreme closeups, Lupino deploys the mise en scène to achieve the dismembering effect, showing Ann’s head, hands, and legs in turn segmented by the objects in a shipping yard. Not only does the choice to portray urban space in this manner heighten the emotional horror of the scene, it also primes the audience to understand the crime committed against Ann as being generated by a social environment rather than an isolated individual.
Social Damages
The plight of the silent woman in the opening scene hangs over Ann’s assault like a dark cloud. Whereas the latter sequence opts to pull the audience into a specific and empathetic portrayal of sexual violence, the former reminds us that these crimes are a recurring social phenomenon.
Even the visual motif shared across the two scenes (a super high angle of a woman running through an expressionistically lit urban setting) underlines the social context of the violence these women experience. In addition to contributing to the intimidating sense of space described above, the shots share a perspective that suggests social apathy; the camera almost seems to be peering out of someone’s apartment window. This suspicion is confirmed when, during Ann’s actual assault, the shot cranes back to this high angle to reveal a man glancing out of his window briefly (without seeing the crime) before slamming it shut. This minor moment of apathy solidifies the extent to which Ann’s safety is determined by the vision of the people around her. She finds herself unable to escape one man’s gaze and tragically unable to find another’s.
The fallout from her assault also demonstrates a social problem, where Ann finds herself driven from the city by a pervasive sense of stalking. “They are all staring at this house,” she says to her mother. Worse still than leering, the men of the city take it upon themselves to touch Ann. A stranger grabs her arm to “help” her onto a bus. A detective grabs her arm to convince her to try and identify the perpetrator. Waiting for the police lineup, her fiancé grabs her hand before she pulls it away. When this same fiancé takes the opportunity to propose moving their wedding date to the next weekend, Ann snaps, declaring “I don’t want to get married, ever. I don’t want you to touch me.” On an obvious level, Ann’s declaration is a traumatic response to the violence she has suffered. But on a closer reading, she also seems to be making a justified plea for a whole host of men to stop violating her personal boundaries. This part of the film may be the most subversive from a political perspective, driving home the idea that 1950s social norms subject women to a series of everyday violations that are similar in character to the worst sorts of sexual crimes.
Lupino’s brilliance in constructing this opening is the primary reason that Outrage resonates to this day. Once Ann hops on the bus away from the city, the film’s narrative starts rolling toward a tidy resolution, seeking both a comforting explanation of the violent first act and a cure for the harm done to Ann. But even in the midst of this narrative necessity, Lupino still relies on a key third act scene in order to preserve the sense of unresolved social sickness established in the opening.
The Search for a Cure
Once she steps off her bus on the outskirts of a typically American small town, Ann finds herself embroiled in a series of events that seem contrived to allow her to be investigated by a smarmy trio of masculine experts (pastor, judge, and psychiatrist). Upon her arrival, the town’s pastor (the ultra-corny Reverend Ferguson) begins to probe into her past. Lupino positions him as an inverted noir protagonist. Rather than a jaded war veteran who obsesses over a woman’s guilt as a proxy for his own damaged soul, the Reverend is a hopeful veteran who offers his own spiritual healing (his “second look” at life) as a blueprint for Ann’s potential to heal.
Before she can get started on healing, though, Ann ends up “attacking” one of the town’s young men with a wrench in an apparent trauma response. This assault leads to a criminal trial in which the Reverend serves as Ann’s legal representation and negotiates with a judge and an offscreen psychiatrist to decide whether Ann is guilty. The notion that a movie addressing rape ends up literally placing the victim on trial is deeply upsetting (maybe that’s why they called it Outrage?), but it speaks partly to the lack of appropriate generic frameworks for handling this material in 1950s Hollywood.
In the trial Reverend Ferguson speaks for Ann, offering a neat explanation of both her psychological damage and the crime perpetrated on her. Per the pastor, it was all part of an “evil chain reaction” where the responsibility is ultimately with society as a whole (or at least the wartime generation which “has produced too many neuroses”). Happily, the rest of the boys agree, deeming Ann innocent (although in need of therapy). The reverend even ventures a quick fix for the social ill itself: “We need more hospitals, more clinics. More trained men to turn human scrap back into human beings.”
The reverend here diagnoses a problem confined to the periphery of society: a clean line between well-meaning “human beings” and the “human scrap” who are in need of curing. This perspective also implicitly maintains a dichotomy wherein their agrarian community (free of “scrap”) is a place of healing, while the city remains foreboding. There is, however, a critical issue with the reverend’s diagnosis. The “attack” that Ann made against the young man was entirely in self-defense, as he attempted to force himself onto her. In other words, Lupino has snuck a second, unacknowledged instance of sexual violence into her film.
Malaise
It is impossible to know exactly how a 1950s audience would have felt about Ann’s rural harasser, but his onscreen actions are clearly actual (not imagined) reenactments of Ann’s original assault. He creeps up behind Ann, touches her hair repeatedly, tries to force her to dance, verbally threatens her, and then tries to forcibly kiss her. Before she finally defends herself, Ann and the audience share a vision of this young man’s neck dissolving into the scarred neck of her rapist.
For Reverend Ferguson, Ann’s conflation of this young man with her assailant proves her innocence. He sees her response as a moment of temporary insanity, justified because of her untreated trauma. Critically, the reverend only arrives at this reading of events because he begins from the assumption that Ann’s harasser is innocent.
But Lupino places the audience in a position to see that, while Ann does attack the man based on a trauma response, it isn’t at all an irrational one. Her experience in the first act allows her to see precisely the kind of man she is dealing with, and respond appropriately. Ann also adopts a coping mechanism from the first act by fleeing from the community that harmed her. Lupino composes this flight into a shot with striking depth of frame. This composition represents the most horrific possible ending—a young woman so thoroughly betrayed by both of the communities she trusted that she ends up jettisoned from society at large.
Only by accepting the reverend’s faulty diagnosis (that the young man “meant her no harm”) and insufficient cure (therapy) is Ann able to avoid this fate. After this acceptance, she can be safely shipped back to her fiancé, who the reverend assumes she still wants to marry. For any audience members who’ve been listening to what Ann says she wants, or watching the ordeals she has been through, the ending strikes an odd note. Lupino has managed to maneuver the viewer into the exact same position as Ann. We can have our happy ending, but only by accepting Reverend Ferguson’s version of events. It is a bitter pill to swallow.
Footnotes
1 Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 354
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon