If you know what I Spit on Your Grave is, you may understand why this one-sheet design initially struck me as one of the more breathtakingly offensive pieces of graphic art in the history of film marketing, conflating sex appeal and victimhood in a single appalling image. (In short: it's a remake of an artless 1978 rape-revenge film starring Buster Keaton's grand-niece.) When I first stumbled across it on the web, I found it to be in tremendously poor taste, and I don't squirm that easily.
I was surprised to realize later that it clearly takes the most notorious poster promoting the original film as a model. I never found the earlier image especially problematic -- beyond its obvious decision to dehumanize the woman by cutting her off at the head -- which makes me wonder what it is about the new one that I found so grossly unwholesome. I can only conclude that it's the obvious expertise of the image-making that gets me -- the woman's body turned demurely away from the camera, her sculpted ass ready for a swimsuit issue, and rendered in high-contrast tones that resemble a line drawing or charcoal sketch set against a professional white background as crisp as the inside of an Apple Store. (The remake's poster might be even more striking if the designer had found a way to incorporate the original tag line: "No jury in America would ever convict her," instead of relying on a call-out to "Day of the Woman," the first film's original title, to suggest the vigilante-justice angle.)
It's also about the 21st century context. This image is like some movie marketer's raised middle finger to all the hand-wringing concern and moralizing that followed the original film's release, including Ebert's famous pan. It's now 30 years on and the world has become leaps and bounds more sensitive to issues of rape and recovery, not to mention highly sexualized violence in general, and yet we have made the same film and now we will market it essentially the same way. And I have to admit, the strategy is cynical, but effective. Now I'm suddenly curious about the fucking movie.
