Says a woman cop in Unbelievable, a wrenching new Netflix original, “Rape has three crime scenes. The body of the victim. The body of the rapist. And the place where the crime actually happens.” The series also adds another crime scene to the list without naming it. The mind of the victim. Against which, a cruel warfare is waged by a brutal, desensitised justice system.
What is remarkable about the series is not just that it is based on a real story but how that story is told.
For the longest time, rape has been narrated and filmed in cinema in a way that disempowers, brutalises and shames the female body while showing us how it is subjugated. Here we do not see the crime through a voyeuristic camera gaze but in bits and pieces that survivors can bear to recall through the filter of their pain and horror.
One of the most shattering moments is when Marie , a young girl while being attacked in her own home, can not look away from a photograph of herself. In which, almost in another lifetime, her body was free, playful, full of joy as she ran into the waves on a beach.
We see the terribly invasive post rape medical procedures Marie (played with heartbreaking pathos and fragile strength by Kaitlyn Dever ) has to go through post her trauma. The cold, clinical questions surrounding her bruised body, her stunned mind, her faltering memory.
And the wall of disbelief that she almost instantly runs into. Without a word, the series plunges you, gut first, into the horror of alienation and apathy that women face AFTER experiencing physical assault. When instead of support, they are offered only scrutiny that weighs the one question that is still the most relevant in any milieu. Is she believable?
As a pathologically inconsiderate foster mom says about Marie to a cop investigating her case. “Something is off.” Because, the young girl has not fallen to pieces. Because she has a history of seeking attention. Did she really go through what she said she went through? Much later Marie compares her own disillusionment with the premise of the film Zombieland. Where you are let down not so much by the monsters who show you who they are. But those who are supposed to watch out for you but don’t. Even people who mean well, she says, look away from you when your truth is inconvenient, when it does not fit into their normalcy.
Marie is subjected to systematic procedural gaslighting that discredits her testimony to such an extent that she feels compelled to retract it to preserve the little sanity she is left with.
There are devastating shots of her lonely, small frame waging a quiet, wordless war for dignity but the most powerful display of the intention behind the series appears when we see the rapist, stripped of all vestiges of human dignity and standing in a cell, without a stitch of clothing on. This is possibly the first time on film, that we see a sexual predator presented without the power that cinema and society have traditionally accorded him. Here, in this moment, he is just a male body, denuded of any means to hurt another woman. Ever.
This is an important point because in almost all forms of media and reporting, stories about gender violence disempower women with imagery that objectifies their bodies and embeds their helplessness in mass memory.
The web series is based on the 2018 non-fiction novel An Unbelievable Story of Rape, written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong originally and was co-created by Susannah Grant (who wrote the screenplay of Erin Brockovich), Ayelet Waldman, and Michael Chabon. The story recounts how Marie’s rape was not just dismissed as a figment of her imagination but how she was charged with making a false police report—a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. Marie, eager to snatch back some amount of peace, even accepted a plea deal that sentenced her to among other things, a $500 payment for court fees!
This in the end, is not a series about the rapist who hurt Marie and many others grievously. As a story about rape and retribution, what Unbelievable gets right most of all is not just the optics of how a story like this should be filmed but who should get to tell it. So from the moment Merritt Wever and then Toni Collette magnificently walk into the frame, the tonality of the narrative changes. In the way, the two female cops talk to the other rape survivors. In the way, they begin to lean on each other to find a criminal who has trained himself to be invisible. In the anger Collette’s character displays against policing that would have been much more pro-active if men were as vulnerable as women are. And in the way Merritt Wever’s character heeds her instinct through late night vigils till that moment when she finds her man and walks him in handcuffs out of his anonymity into a jail cell.
Unlike Delhi Crime, where despite a powerful female protagonist, the story in the end delegitimises civil society protests, and becomes a homage to policing, here the story does not flinch from calling out lapses in a primarily male-centric system that underserves women at every level. Similar nuance could be found in Ivan Iyer’s wonderful little film Soni which highlighted the struggles that even women in uniform face with subordinates and seniors and in the homes and lives that they inhabit.
Despite its not so subtle depiction of the role that religious faith can play in a world bleached of hope and light, Unbelievable is however at every other level , faultless and credibly shows what women in positions of power can do for those who don’t have any. Marie went on to sue the city that had botched her case . She won and told ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom this year, “I didn’t want it to ruin the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I wasn’t going to let him destroy me.” And that exactly is the biggest triumph of Unbelievable. It vindicates what all women like Marie have known regardless of what has been taken away from them. That they are inviolable. And unbreakable.
**Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.