rakontur

2/18/01

Hype prevails at Sundance, but Raw Deal is a film that lived up to what I had heard, which namely, was that it was one of the most graphically sexual films ever made. It’s also one of the most powerful doc’s I’ve ever seen. The screening I attended started at 11:30 PM, followed by a Q&A that emptied out into the hallway, where the director and producers discussed it for another half hour or more. Of some documentaries, there is a final consensus, but with Raw Deal, it challenges the audience, and I think people find themselves (and others) not thinking what you’d think. In recent years, video has become something of a legal holy grail, but Raw Deal shows that it, like anything, can be manipulated and interpreted by both sides of a dispute, proving nothing. Director Billy Corben achieves this by doing what the Florida court did, showing us the footage so we can form our own opinions, even as all those involved tell us what they think we should see.

The video footage of the cut shown at Sundance verges on hard-core porn, with penises and vaginas fully visible, all within a drunken frat party atmosphere, with frat boys saying things like “we’re going to rape a white trash whore.” This is sensitive material, and one can feel a bit dirty seeing it, if not for the awareness that Alachua County not only didn’t keep this under wraps, they released this video for public viewing (acting under Florida’s “Sunshine Law”), which became something of a sex industry sensation (the video has been sold on the Internet). This is a rape case we’re talking about. How would you feel if someone you knew said they were raped and then the tapes were publicly available?

There’s another side, however, and that’s that the video, as edited by the frat members before they gave it to the police, shows Ms. King as being a consentual sex partner… maybe. The reason the questions of “consent” and “rape” are so difficult to ascertain is that the video is used by the fraternity members’ lawyers as a weapon against Ms. King, and the argument (that she displayed a great deal of encouraging sexual behavior to the boys) is a powerful one. That raises another concept that rape cases face far too often; that idea that women ask to be raped by their behavior. You’re not going to find answers in Raw Deal… just more and more questions, but by positioning the facts to us so frankly, the audience gets to consider the issues personally, without one side overwhelming the other.

Going in, I thought I would leave Raw Deal with an idea of what happened in 1999. Afterwards, I definitely knew more about the case, but I still was stumped, and I am to this day. Was it rape? Was it consensual? How would I have voted on a jury (which, by the way, never happened, since the charges were dropped)? Frankly, I have no idea. And maybe that’s yet another thing that’s so effective, and scary, about Raw Deal, in that it shows how difficult it is for a jury to make a decision (effectively, the audience is a jury in this case). Now, having said that, I do think that some people will have very definite opinions of consent vs. rape, but they might not be what you would expect. For example, Lisa Gier King appeared recently on ABC’s The View, and the female hosts, who had seen the film, basically tore into her for her behavior in the video. One might think women would, as a broad group, take Gier’s side, but I don’t think that’s true. As much as you would think otherwise, I don’t think this is a male/female issue, but rather, a very personal one that depends upon each of our own experiences and opinions… and we can also be swayed easily as new facts surface. For showing how fragile the line between “guilt” and “innocence” can lie, this is a valuable, important film.