Gerald's Game

The Horror of Marital Rape

Gerald’s Game

In the opening scene of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, we see two people packing vacation bags. We see it from above, at a bit of a distance. But then we see the man, after the woman has finished and left the room, pack two sets of handcuffs into a top compartment in his bag. He very carefully arranges the chains, fetishistically and lovingly. All we see are his hands, not his face; yet, somehow, it’s easy to tell he’s aroused. He zips his bag. So, from the get-go, we know this is going to be a horror movie that has something to do with BDSM.

And pretty soon, we are given to understand that the BDSM the husband is planning is a. remedial and b. probably not mutually desired: in the car, we see the husband (who is driving) slide the wife’s dress up with his hand, and fondle her upper thigh. She picks up his hand, moves it, and brings it up and away from her leg, ostensibly to kiss it. To anyone who’s been touched by someone in a way they did not like or consent to, this scene clearly reads as the wife’s trying to avoid his groping, but not wanting to shame him or incur his anger for saying no. His immediate response is to say, “This is going to be good for us, Jess, really good.” So now, we know that the husband—the titular Gerald—is planning to jumpstart their sex life using bondage toys.

Once they arrive at their secluded Maine house, we see Gerald secretly popping a little blue pill—and we don’t wonder, because he’s easily 20 years Jess’s senior. Gerald is eager to get things going, so pretty soon we’re in the bedroom, hearing Jess sighing in resignation. She says, “Ok, I’m ready,” and he comes out with the handcuffs. She laughs nervously, and says, “Wow, babe,” indicating that the handcuffs are not in normal rotation in their sex life. Gerald is upping the ante. Jess looks very nervous. He’s smiling at her, and she says she wasn’t expecting hard-core handcuffs. He says that cheaper ones “just break,” indicating that he’s got a lot more experience with BDSM than she has. Jess is visibly terrified, and Carla Gugino plays it exquisitely.

Quickly, we realize that at least part of the horror of this film will be that it approaches and crosses the limits of consensual sex in marriage. Jess has agreed to let Gerald play his “game,” but she does not, in fact, want to participate. We know that. He knows that. But it’s going to happen anyway.

As Gerald approaches her, Jess is breathing hard. Gerald says, “This is good. You’ll like this.” He handcuffs her left hand to the bedpost. As anyone who has endured or studied sexual abuse or assault will know, it often begins in exactly this way: one party is eager, the other is terrified, but paralyzed by the fear of rejecting the aggressor. The aggressor tries to ease the terrified party into something by promising that she or he will like what’s coming.

Gerald cuffs Jess’s other hand to the other bedpost. She looks like she’s being crucified—almost certainly not an accident, given director Mike Flanagan’s love for Christianity-based horror (e.g.: Midnight Mass). Gerald pretends he is not Gerald, but some strange man. He refuses to answer to his own name when Jess addresses him. He says to Jess, “Try to call for help.” The role-play he has in mind is a rape. A stranger rape, no less. Things are feeling pretty dark to Jess, and to the viewer, She says, “Calling for help…it’s kind of…what are we trying to do here?” Because she can’t quite process what’s happening. She can’t quite process that what gets her husband off is the idea of raping her. She says, “I’m feeling a little weird, and I thought the point was to feel sexy.” He bites her fiercely on the breast, and when she shouts in pain, he covers her mouth, hard. We see the flesh on her face contorted under the pressure of his hand. Jess starts screaming for him to stop, and he does, but not without criticizing her. She calls him out for the “rape fantasy” that he was having. Then she says, “I feel ridiculous.” He responds, “Nice, now I’m ridiculous.” Once his masculinity is impugned in this way—or he imagines it to be—things go from dark to abject. He says he’ll be “sweet” and starts trying to rape her. He kisses her, very much against her will. She bites his lip to defend herself. He leans up, shocked and angry, and then has a massive heart attack and collapses on top of her, in missionary position, without having uncuffed her. She is trapped, supine, with her assailant between her legs, pressing down on her, restricting her breath.

So, this is a film about marital rape. And it comes at that issue from a variety of different angles. “Games,” “fantasies,” “accidents,” trying to “spice things up.” Gerald tries to spin it all as “game” or play, but everything that Gerald does is abuse. Jess only reluctantly allows him to cuff her. She telegraphs her uncertainty and hesitation at all points. Her eyes radiate fear.  What the film begs viewers to understand is that reluctant consent is not consent. Even in a marriage (a point I’ll get back to shortly).

After Gerald dies, Jess manages to lift his corpse from her body with her foot, but then inadvertently rolls him off the bed. She is able to sit upright, but finds that she cannot get the cuffs off the bedposts. She is trapped, alone, in a house with a dead husband who tried to rape her.

To save her own life, she begs his dead body, “Get back up. You can do anything you want. I mean it.” This is one way that rape can go: victims submit to sexual violence in an effort to save their own lives. In this case, Jess invites a dead man to rape her in order to save herself. Jess knows she is probably going to die, because she’s in their secluded Maine house, and the cleaners and landscapers aren’t due for days. She has no water, no food. Gerald’s twisted and abusive sex play has lined her up to die a slow, agonizing, dehumanizing death.

Why do I say dehumanizing, specifically? Because this is a rape film that deeply understand that at the core of sexual violence is the belief in the victim’s nonhumanity.

The film locks that idea in explicitly when Jess begins hallucinating, and she sees Gerald revived. Hallucinatory Gerald forces her to recite a joke he had made at a Christmas party, which posed the question, “What is a woman?” And then hallucinatory Gerald forces her to deliver the punchline: “A life support system for a cunt.” Dehumanization. I think that’s one of the most misogynist lines I’ve ever heard in a film, but it does serve the all-important purpose of conveying the underlying mentality of a rapist and sexual abuser of women. Women. Are. Not. People.

As the hours pass, Jess continues to hallucinate. She meets a reproachful version of herself. She relives the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her own father, years prior. Meanwhile, outside of her hallucinations and visions, she hears a stray dog eating the corpse of her dead husband (they left the door to the yard open). Things are looking very grim for Jess.

But suddenly, in her reliving of her childhood abuse, she remembers slashing open her hand on a drinking glass. She remembers the blood making her hand wet. Back in the reality of her imprisonment on the bed, she manages to reach a glass Gerald had left on a shelf above her head; she shatters it, picks up the pieces, and uses one piece to slash her own skin and partially deglove her own hand, so that she can slip it—wet and bloody—out of the handcuff. It is an astonishingly painful scene to watch, and the filmmakers are absolutely brutal in making us witness all of it. But it works: Jess makes it, she escapes the cuffs and saves her own life.

The rest of the film is an issues movie about how Jess goes on to start a foundation to help abused children.

I love that, but wish it had also ended with Jess starting a foundation to help victims of marital sexual abuse.

Marital sexual abuse is one of the more poorly researched and poorly understood manifestations of sexual abuse or of intimate partner violence. Part of the reason is the extremely recent emergence of the legal category of “marital rape.”

Until the landmark case People vs. Liberta in December of 1984, it was technically impossible for a man to rape his own wife, according to Federal Law. The belief was that, by marrying a man, a woman permanently gave away her right to say no to intercourse. This was called a “marital exemption,” and it meant that no husband could be convicted of raping or sodomizing his wife. 1984. The details of the case that prompted this new judicial decision are so upsetting that I hesitate to recount them in full here, but I will say that it took a spectacularly brutal, violent, dehumanizing, and sadistic act of combined rape and sodomy to get the Court to think differently about a man’s “right” to sex from his own wife. Moreover, Denise Liberta, the victim in this case, was already separated from her husband at the time. Just not technically divorced yet. She also had been granted an order of protection against her husband. That made it easier for the judge to see the unfairness of her situation, the criminality of her husband. I shudder to think what the outcome of the case would have been had Denise Liberta not already filed a restraining order and had her husband vacate the marital residence.

When I think about this case, I remind myself that I was five years old at the time of the decision. In my lifetime, it became illegal for a husband to force intercourse on his wife. 1984.

Gerald’s Game was originally published in 1992, 8 years after the Liberta decision. Rape in marriage had become illegal only very recently. And the film totally clocks that. Indeed, part of what I admire about the film’s rendition of the novel is how obviously confused both Jess and Gerald are about where, exactly, to draw the line. Jess feels that Gerald is trying to rape her; she clearly experiences it that way, thinks about it that way. But she’s hesitant to call it that, calling it instead, a “rape fantasy.” Gerald seems even more unclear on the limits of his “right” to Jess’s body. He clearly thinks she owes him something that she doesn’t think she owes him. He clearly thinks that he is well within his rights to bind her, to force her to “try” games to “spice things up” that he can clearly see she is not excited about. At all. He clearly thinks her consent can be miles (and miles and miles) short of enthusiastic, and can still qualify as consent. He clearly thinks that, even after she’s said no, if he tries to rape her “sweetly,” it’s somehow ok for him to proceed to violate her. With her bound against her will, obviously traumatized, and visibly afraid. He’s pissed off and shocked when she bites his lip to protect herself.

Part of what’s going on here is that there is a generational difference between Jess and Gerald. She’s probably 30; she would have been, then, 22 when Liberta was decided and marital rape became an actionable crime. He’s probably…55? So he’d have been 47 when Liberta was decided. He’d have spent most of his adult life living in a world where a man technically could not rape his own wife. I’m not saying that excuses him—in my view, Gerald more than deserves to become dog food in the end. I’m pointing out that in American legal culture until 1984, wives’ bodies belonged to their husbands sexually. Husbands could not commit rape, even if they forced themselves on their wives sadistically and repeatedly.

A life support system for a cunt.

I hate that line. I hate it like poison. I hate it because it sticks in my mind. I hate it because it describes the underlying belief in all but the last 40 years of American legal history about sexually abused married women. Gerald’s Game is one of the most powerful and fearless examinations of marital rape in American film. And I will add to that how much I appreciate how careful the film is not to fetishize Jess’s situation. Nothing about her interactions with Gerald is sexy. Nothing about her being imprisoned by the bed thereafter is sexy. The whole film shows what sexual abuse really is, even when it’s happening in the context of a marriage: horror.

[If you or someone you know is suffering from sexual abuse or IPV more generally, here are some places you can contact for help. Please feel free to add more organizations in the comments:

Safe Horizon: www.safehorizon.org

National Domestic Violence Hotline: www.thehotline.org

Sanctuary for Families (based in NYC): www.sanctuaryforfamilies.org

Family Justice Centers (based in NYC): https://www.nyc.gov/site/ocdv/programs/family-justice-centers.page]