"Descent"

Better late than never (don't worry I don't expect full credit, and I wouldn't be shocked if you didn't accept this at all, but encase you do I will consider you a kind and benevolent leader :D).

Last week the Norman Women's Collective watched the movie "Descent" starring Rosario Dawson and Chad Faust. The plot of the movie is that a college girl is raped by a guy she has met at a party and then goes on a date with. After the rape (which she doesn't tell anyone about) she stays in her college town rather than going home for the summer and starts hanging out with the wrong crowd (as an after school special might say). In this crowd she feels as if she gains some power by experimenting with drugs and promiscous sex on her own terms, which aren't really her own because they are greatly influenced by a local DJ who leads this den of debauchery. When the summer comes to a close the new Maya (Rosario Dawson's character, and our protaganist) becomes a teaching assistant in a class which her rapist is taking. After calling the student out on cheating during the mid-term he proposes that she did so only to hang out with him again. She uses this opportunity to invite him to her appartment and enact her revenge by having the club DJ rape the rapist.

The honesty of the film is not only in the plot, but in the way it is depicted. There are few fancy or unrealisitc settings and even the characters looks as if they dressed themselves, we aren't watching the rich and famous play; this could very easily be any one of us. It was interesting talking to the girls in the Collective about this because we all thought that this would have turned out so differently had she had a support system. Maya doesn't go to a counsellor she doesn't tell her mother, she didn't even tell her best friend. She descends inside of her own mind, where the observer is left with the conclusion that she is depressed and feeling a certain amount of guilt. The insult of the injury is even worse in that Maya's first instinct was to walk away from Jared (her rapist) when he approaches her at the party and before her violates her she lets him in on intimate details of her childhood and the pain she felt losing her boyfriend before coming to school.

The final scene is the most poigniant in that Maya's character cries watching Jared be hurt. There is no consolation in her vengence.