Are you there, God? It’s me, Manish
Are you there, God? It’s me, Manish. I’ve just seen Towelhead, the most disturbing piece of film since the rape scenes from Irréversible and Bandit Queen. It shows a 13-year-old being raped. It shows Aaron Eckhart’s hand bloody from her broken hymen. It shows her crimson tampon. It shows a used condom. It shows the menstrual spots on her panties in a low-angle shot while she’s sitting on the toilet. This isn’t a movie, it’s a beating.
I’m sitting in a fetal position in the shower. It shows the child in her underwear. It shows her nearly topless. It has two different males giving her a Brazilian. It shows Aaron Eckhart sweating between her legs. I’m rocking. Whimpering. Feel dirty, so dirty.
It’s exploitative. It’s virtually child pr0n. It’s a game of ‘who wants to get into Jasira’s vag next.’ It’s written by the guy who did American Beauty, so yeah, more sex with children. It’s your every nightmare of raising a girl child. I’m scrubbing and scrubbing, but this scum won’t come off.
And the kicker? Summer Bishil, who was 18 at the time of filming, is half Indian.
As a child, she lived in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, but spoke only English. “I didn’t really know I was Indian until I was in my teen years. I thought I was Saudi Arabian. I thought I was Arab,” she says, noting that her father went off every day to work in traditional Arab garb. After Sept. 11, she and her brother and sister and her American mother moved to a Mormon community near San Diego and she attended a regular public high school for a week.
“I hated it,” Bishil says. “I was called a whore on the first day of school, and somebody said they thought my dad funded terrorism. I just knew that nobody was ever going to want to be my friend there. I had panic attacks the first year of my life here.” [LAT]
Are you there, God? I will never again complain about being dragged to The Vagina Monologues or Sex and the City.
on Monday, September 29th, 2008, 2:00 pm in Film › 
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ok. i’m signing out for the next 36 hrs or so until there’s another post. this is sick shit man. i know it happens but it isnt entertainment and i dont care to be thus illuminated. gah
There are some movies for which you wish you could wash your brain with bleach in hopes of forgetting it. This seems to be one of them. NPR had a review comparing this movie with the new Dakota Fanning one. It was an analysis of who does the issue of child rape better. WTF is wrong with people?
PS: I wish there were more Judy Blume elements in this movie!
Thank you for writing about this. I had an invitation to go see this last night and am glad that I couldn’t make it. Sigh.
Maybe I have a different perspective since I’ve read the book that it’s based on. It’s edgy, it makes the reader uncomfortable and it makes you question the ethics of what’s right and wrong. But that’s sort of what the book explores. From reading the book, certain instances, I wouldn’t necessarily classify as “rape” per se because the protagonist seemed almost willing - but it is definitely statutory rape (under the law).
I’ve yet to see the movie - so I don’t know if it deviates from the plot line.
Am not surprised that they recruited an Indian girl to play an Arab, though. The cynic in me thinks that most people here wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway.
I believe it is called “The Woodsman” with Kevin Bacon and he plays a child molester and goes to a park and ask’s little girls to sit on his lap.
Nothing out creeps that.
Somebody had mentioned this book to me a couple weeks ago, and I looked it up on Google Books, which had an extensive preview available for reading.
It read like bad porn fiction.
I had to stop every few paragraphs and brace myself before continuing — and I had to continue because of that trainwreck effect, you know what I mean? As a former Vagina Monologist, Yoni Ki Baat karne wali sex positive Third World feminist, womanist, [insert whatever other adjective there is to describe someone who is down with unconventional sexuality in minority women] I wanted to kill myself. No, I wanted to kill whoever wrote this garbage, this pornographic Afterschool Special. Y’all roll your eyes at mangoes and henna and Gogol bringing home the vhite ghurl, but I have never read such a blatantly pandering piece of shit as this. Thing is, I can forgive (or at least ignore) mangoes and henna and interracial dating stereotypes. But Towelhead wasn’t pandering to the social demographic inclined towards Orientalism, it was pandering to the psychological demographic inclined towards the archetypal rape scene.
I was horrified to find out that it had been made into a movie, and I will spare myself the 1 hour and 56 minutes of hell.
Sick!
Hello?!? The “willing protagonist” is 13.
I read a book this summer and didn’t like it. Not because of the ickyness factor, but because I thought it was poorly written. The author brings up so many issues (bad parenting, racism, sexism, first-time sex, depression, child molestation, etc) that I couldn’t focus. I was shocked to learn that there was a film made.
Yay!
So glad to know that there are other people who did not like the book! I read the book quite some time ago and it left me absolutely COLD. There was not ONE redeemable character in the book.
Manish: You are far braver than I .I cannot imagine sitting through a movie based on this story.
tamasha, it can be tough. But start slow, and someday you might grow to like it.