Blink Twice - The Snake Who Ate Itself.
One could say, this wasn’t a serve at all.
TW: mentions of rape.
Upon meeting the film’s protagonist, Frida, Kravitz’s directorial vision opens itself up to you. Frida is a young woman with a struggling nail tech business, barely cracking a hundred followers on Instagram. She’s doom scrolling on the toilet, tapping mindlessly at the screen with her gecko printed thumb nail. She sees a post of Slater King, CEO of King Tech, apologising for an nondescript abuse of power. He’s going to therapy, so it’s completely fine. All’s forgotten.
Frida works for a catering company, that is conveniently catering a King Tech event. Her boss reprimands her for being late and tells her to smile. A little while after she and her roommate Jess put on beautiful dresses to blend into the crowd of wealthy white people and we get our first glimpse into Frida’s way of thinking. “My mother always told me that success is the best revenge.”
Throughout the film Frida lives true this hustle culture belief, working smart to place herself within the purview of Slater King. It works, of course, because this wouldn’t be a film if it didn’t. Slater is immediately obsessed with her, staring into her soul every two seconds. When it seems as though they’re about to part for the night, presumably for the rest of their lives as Jess says “another one for the memoir”, Slater runs back to Frida, awkwardly asking if she and Jess would like to join him and his group of friends— curiously made up of men he knows and women he’d only met recently — on his island.
This kind of film is doing its rounds these days, where outsider joins insider and inevitably confronts the hungry ego desire to be among the insiders. This Ripley-esque and Saltburnian concept has lived on for far longer of course, but Blink Twice adds to this genre the subversive tale of rape revenge.
Yhara Zayd begins her video “blink twice's ending did not work for me” with a ten minute exploration of the genre’s predecessors; The Story of Temple Drake is the first film she analyses, with an eponymous main character who’s considered ‘fast’, a term often used by adults to describe young black girls they deem too sexual. Temple Drake is framed to be morally reprehensible, and when she’s put into sex slavery, it’s presented as a natural consequence of what happens to ‘fast’ woman.
Yhara Zayd’s video was unsurprisingly succinct at denoting what failed in Blink Twice. I agree that the lack of sensationalised rape scenes were appreciated despite the film’s bleak ending. I can also see why the ending is disliked for its bleakness, it’s lack of proper justice, but that’s what I’m here to talk about; the kind of ending rape revenge story needs.
In some cases people do find the ending gratifying. Frida took control over her abuser and climbed the social ladder. It comes off as triumphant; during the last scene the score swells as Frida catches the man that raped her, all the while sitting next to her new husband, Slater King, who orchestrated the entire ordeal but now remembers nothing. Frida is in control. From what we see, at least.
Temple Drake was a white woman, but I’m looking at this from the lens of a black woman growing up in a society that labelled her from girlhood as a conduit of sexual violence.
When films centre the women getting revenge for what’s been done to them, there’s a subconscious air of girl-bossery. During a turning point in Blink Twice, where Frida and Sarah decide to finish off the rest of the men, I’m That Girl by Beyonce plays. The scene slows down, revels in the thought of their victory, their intent to fuck these men up, disrespectfully.
It’s a feel good moment, not in the romantic, serene sort of way but with a foresight into the punishing retribution that these kind of films have sought to evoke.
Throughout Yhara’s analysis, the issue that keeps presenting itself with rape revenge films is how these acts of revenge or even the rape itself, are framed. In some stories, like The Story of Temple Drake, the rape is the revenge. Against women unwilling to be tethered to the men in their lives, as an act of taming them.
Measuring victimhood is a popular discussion that comes up often when women are not perfect victims.
Women who use their trauma as a career, women who don’t speak up about abusers, women who do, to what extent a woman was abused, whether or not it was her fault. There is no space for breathing, no room for empathy. Frida likely does not care for victimhood at the end because victimhood does not care for her.
You don’t have to empathise with Frida, in fact, she is a horrible person. But how does one become a horrible person? How do we measure what’s been done to the victim and what the victim does to others?
Justice is never owed to women unless we take it ourselves which is why the rape revenge genre, though flawed, evolved into centring the lives of the women who were assaulted rather than their fathers or brothers seeking revenge. Frida says quite aptly, that even if they were to call the police, ask them to ‘come on guys, believe women!’ and report what all the men are doing, she is a woman. She is black, and she chose to step foot on that island.
Black women are often asked to have compassion whilst seeking justice, to empathise with their abusers. As we know, there is no perfect victim. Processing trauma is a privilege. Therapy is a privilege. Forgetting is a gift.
In a series of hazy flashbacks, we see that Frida has been on the island before. A year ago, puckering her lips in the eye of a camera, having a great time. It was confusing to see her going through the same thing again after knowing what would happen to her. But she didn’t know. She was drugged, she forgot, and she did it all over again.
Though the arguments on Frida’s decision to use the desideria on Slater have been called “girl power-esque”, it removes somewhat the perspective of a Black woman trying to survive and sometimes doing it at the detriment of themselves or those around them.
The only piece of Frida’s past we learn of is her mother’s words, seeing clearly that Frida lives by them. It’s difficult to assume here that she would do the right thing as though she ever cared about the right thing. She calls therapy bullshit, something we can assume isn’t readily available to her whilst Slater’s therapist comes to him on the island. She accepts an invite to an island with other people wanting to be seen in close proximity to a man with money and power. Frida drugs Slater with the same perfume she was drugged with. Everything she’s done from the beginning was for her own success.
Deliberate forgetfulness is a running theme. Choosing not to speak out or do anything to help like Lucas, choosing to stay silent when he sees the women being abused. though this is were the writers missed the mark, because he’s also a victim of being drugged by the men. Lucas was established as the next Slater King, but he wasn’t as willing to assault these women. He also didn’t do anything. He didn’t run, didn’t call the police. He was instead also drugged, and the cycle continued, though I’m not sure what the cycle was trying to present.
There were some parts of this movie that didn’t work for me. The Lucas subplot, Jess dying and being forgotten (though you could say that was the point). But overall I thought it was well done. I understood Frida even when I didn’t like her, which is more than we can say for most Black women.
Frida did not get a happy ending. Like many films where the internet prescribes endings like Midsommar or Pearl as a girl boss win, the ending is entirely opposite. The decision to continue a pattern, even for the sake of forgetting, does not take away what happened. Like the snake venom, there are always going to be painful reminders. What you’ve done now controls you.