Remember the patriarchy
In the feminist revenge plot of 'Blink Twice,' memory is the most powerful weapon women wield against a culture of forgetting
Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice begins as a commentary on men drunk on power and women drunk on forgetting. Two young women, friends Frida and Jess, are lured to a rich white man’s private island, along with a couple of other women Frida and Jess don’t know, plus a bunch of dudes.
Slater King, the owner of said island, is just as douchey as his name suggests. He’s a tech billionaire with a shady past, but he’s taken a liking to Frida, who is gaga for him. Once the group arrives on the island, the vibes are a combination of Nine Perfect Strangers’ psychedelic wellness retreat, Midsommer’s cultish mystery, and Saltburn’s dark money.
Phones are confiscated, the women are given matching outfits, and while viewers already know things will not turn out well, Frida and Jess are inebriated enough that they don’t really care.
Right away the women forget, most crucially, the power dynamics at play that suggest they are unsafe.
But soon, Frida and Jess find dirt under their fingernails. They notice bruising on their bodies and can’t seem to remember why they have memories of running away at night. Meanwhile, the men are smiling, insisting everyone is having fun. The vibes are definitely off.
(As you can probably gather by now, this piece will include mention of violence against women and spoilers, but both the film and this analysis, I hope you’ll agree, are worth it if you can stomach it.)
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Naomi Ackie, who plays Frida, says this is a “kind of vibe” women know all about, because women are always “feeling in danger and having to smile through it.” They are always asking, Ackie says: “Was that weird? Did I just smile through something that was actually traumatic?”
So the film is, on the one hand, a story about gaslighting writ large. But as memories return to the women and they uncover what the men have been doing to them—that is, committing sexual and physical violence while drugging the women so they don’t remember— the film transforms into a gory feminist revenge plot.
I was reminded immediately of another film in this genre, Promising Young Woman. Carmen Maria Machado opens her brilliant analysis of Promising Young Woman by pointing out the many euphemisms that are used for “rape” in Emerald Fennell’s explosive 2021 rape-revenge film. “We don’t need the word itself, of course, to see what’s going on,” Machado writes.
Promising Young Woman centers on a woman named Cassie (a la Cassandra, the truth-teller), who gets herself drunk until men see her as vulnerable enough to assault. When they try, and they always do, she awakens clear-eyed to hold them accountable—and she does it all to avenge the rape of her friend, Nina, who was assaulted when the girls were in school together.
As Machado points out, the men in the film all view Cassie as “a crazy fucking bitch, a psycho.” But actually, Machado writes, Cassie “has the clarity and prophecy of her priestess namesake; it’s not her fault that no one is listening.” She is not just evening the score, but pointing out the absurdity and violence of the men’s actions.
The women in Blink Twice briefly consider whether they are crazy. Are they losing it? When Jess disappears, Frida tries to wake herself up from what has to be nightmare. She and Jess contemplate how they would escape if they were in danger. But even if they could get out, who would believe them? The women know they would be blamed, called crazy and stupid— they should have known better than to visit a remote island with these powerful men!
This recognition of the failure of the law to protect women, Machado writes, drawing on Sarah Projansky’s book Watching Rape, is characteristic of the classic women’s revenge plot, such as those in earlier films that depict wronged women forging bonds in the wake of the violence of men like Thelma and Louise.
Eventually, Frida (a name that means peace) finds clarity in remembering. and leads an uprising against the men. It is blunt and gory and quite simply not for the faint of heart. The film opens with a trigger warning, and for good reason. The sexual violence and torture of the women, however, is only shown in brief flashes, and mostly what we see is the men’s faces as they do what we can only imagine.
Even so, as I hid behind my own hands, I recalled a dinner conversation I had with friends the night earlier, during which we discussed how all our pearl-clutching at the 90s “freak offs”/Hollywood sex trafficking can make the violence against women that occurs every day around us seem aberrant or rare, even though it’s actually quite common.
“Revenge is what justice looks like when the systems that once promised justice are no longer working,” Emma Copley Eisenberg has written. “The revenge story I want is about a woman who hasn’t been raped or beaten or killed but who rather has been disrespected subtly and discreetly over a period of many years.”
I want more of those stories, too. And Blink Twice doesn’t seem like that story because the violence is so overt and so extreme. And yet,in some ways, it is.
Machado notes how blame is shared among all the male characters in Promising Young Woman, even those who don’t actually perpetrate the violence, and a similar thread appears in Blink Twice. There’s even a brief exchange about how the worst kind of man is the innocent bystander, the one who does nothing, a moment that reminds us that the issues in the film are not extremes, but everyday.
In the end, no men are spared the wrath of the women. Frida recruits another woman she didn’t like at first, and they discuss explicitly the power of women banding together to defeat their oppressors.
This feminine solidarity, however, has limits. As the young women lured to the island begin to recall the abuse they’ve experienced, an older woman who works for kingpin King (played by the great Geena Davis, perhaps a nod to the genre’s history) refuses to rebel. She benefits from having the King’s gaze upon her, so she doesn’t want to remember what he’s done. “Forgetting is a gift, hon,” she says.
The rest of the women, however, prevail, understanding that remembering is their best defense— a galvanizing force, and a mode of resistance to a culture of violence that only works when the women’s memories fade.
The women of Blink Twice fear the systemic indifference and disbelief that Manne shows can exacerbate trauma. They fear that they’ve gone crazy. But the film more than hints at the broader stakes of recalling traumatic memory in a culture of violence that relies on such collective forgetting.
King— obviously an overtly patriarchal figure not only in name but in deeds done— claims he’s interested in the erasure of traumatic memory as a kind of perverted therapy. He has seen how the inability to overcome trauma has derailed the lives of those around him.
Obviously, he also finds the suppression of memory to be a convenient tool of power.
The film’s most powerful scene, in fact, is a coda to the public apology that opens it. Slater King begins the film publicly repenting for his past behavior, and after a veritable horror show of abuse, he issues another apology in the chaos of the women’s revenge. This time, however, he mocks the useless, hollow nature of the act.
He promises to take therapy and a leave of absence from his company, repenting in a performative speech— the kind we’ve heard from powerful men so many times before. In a crazed crescendo of “I’m sorry”s, he mocks, tantrums, resents, rages, and, for a brief moment, appears to acknowledge the unforgiveability of what he’s done.
Forgiveness isn’t real, he says, there’s no such thing. So what’s the use? “There’s just forgetting,” he says.
It’s a commentary on the way men who have wronged women publicly demand what Manne calls himpathy. But the film also draws attention to the way these men request the erasure of our collective memory. Who needs empathy or even forgiveness, after all, when you have forgetting?
Promising Young Woman ends with the heroine, Cassie, avenging her friend’s abuse by sacrificing herself to punish the abuser. Some critics complained this ending was evidence of the genre’s inability to portray women as complex characters. To me, however, the ending symbolizes what women will sacrifice in order to momentarily live in a world in which men get their due.
As Machado writes of the rape-revenge film, “It’s not optimistic or cathartic or satisfying; it’s a way to ask a question.”
And the question Blink Twice poses is how women seek redress for wrongs that are repeatedly, deliberately erased.
Frida, the heroine of Blink Twice, lives and she lets Slater King, the ringleader, live too (the other men, not so much). But that’s because Frida enacts an even harsher punishment on King. She forces him live a life characterized by constant confusion and invalidation, doping him with the same drug he used to erase the women’s memories.
The final scenes show him in utter confusion, moment to moment, about who he is and how he got there. The greatest revenge, in other words, is not carceral or capital punishment. It is not even to force the King to remember and to face what he has done.
Rather, retribution comes for Frida in remembering everything that has happened and, more importantly, in inflicting on King the worst pain of patriarchy— the endless confusion of having one’s reality constantly disassembled, just as it begins to cohere.
“inflicting on King the worst pain of patriarchy— the endless confusion of having one’s reality constantly disassembled, just as it begins to cohere.”
Such a good last line! And relatable.