Twentynine Palms (2003)

Twentynine Palms is a fairly typical Dumont film for the first hour and thirty-five minutes. I wasn't really into this one, since the central couple just fights, and the woman is actually a crazy person and insanely jealous. There is a horrific act of violence at the 1:45 mark that then precipitates a much, much worse act of violence. I can't say I totally understood what happened here.

The rape in the film is interesting for two reasons. One is that it is perpetrated by the usual band of white hillbillies with which we are familiar from Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy. The other is that the soundscape of the rape is identical to the soundscape of the fairly explicit sex scenes in the rest of the film. Twentynine Palms leads me to ask, though, why is the rape of a man always the end of the world? I find this narrative formulation exhausting. The only solution most people can imagine for surviving a rape is to kill oneself or to kill someone else. I do wish filmmakers would try to imagine otherwise.