The movie To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is, along with a few subplots, a story about a black man who is accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s. Most of the white people in the town are ready to lynch him, being sure that he is guilty. By virtue of some rather fortuitous evidence, that the black man does not have full use of his left hand, it is clear that the white woman lied about being raped. The town is so prejudiced, however, that he is convicted anyway.
In the movie Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976), nine black teenagers are accused of raping two white girls. Once again we are in Alabama in the 1930s. Once again there is a lot of prejudice in the town and a presumption that the African American youths are guilty. Once again, it is pretty clear that the white girls are lying. The boys are convicted anyway.
At the time these movies were made, the typical reaction of the audience was to deplore this racial prejudice, especially in what was regarded as the ultimate outrage in the Jim Crow South, the rape of a white woman by a black man. This obsession was made especially clear in the movie Birth of a Nation (1915), the racist classic that justified the formation of the Ku Klux Klan as the only way to keep black men from molesting white women.
Interestingly enough, there is one thing that these three movies have in common. No such rape ever takes place. It is threatened in Birth of a Nation, and the rapes are spurious in To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, but in neither case is there a rape. The reason why this is so in the latter two movies is obvious, because the point was to create sympathy for African Americans, who are often treated unfairly. In the case of Birth of a Nation, however, an actual rape would have been too horrible to contemplate.
For completely diverse motives then, movies in which a black man actually rapes a white woman are rare, a couple of exceptions being Deep in My Heart (1999) and The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck (1988), movies you have probably never even heard of, let alone seen. In most cases, there is only the accusation of rape, which turns out not to be true. And the way in which the accusation turns out not to be true in To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys is that the white women lied.
I must confess that when I saw these movies when they first were made, I accepted the idea that the women lied as not only being plausible, but perhaps more importantly, as in no way being inconsistent with the progressive attitude of the movies. In other words, such things go on in the world, but that does not guarantee their being depicted in a movie. To take the example already alluded to, that of black men raping white women, while such things do occur in real life, they are almost nonexistent in the movies. And with the exception of Birth of a Nation, the reason is a desire on the part of the movie industry to portray African Americans in a positive light. But that same industry, the same producers in fact, had not the slightest qualm about making the women be the villains as part of their progressive agenda. Their conscience was undoubtedly as clear on this score as mine was when I watched these movies with approval. The fact that women do sometimes lie about being raped is not an explanation, for what is real and what we want to see in a movie are two different things.
Over the years there has been a gradual awareness of the prejudice against women when it comes to rape. A lot of men used to think (and some still do) that rape is not a big deal (who can forget the old advice to “just relax and enjoy it”?). Some rapes are dismissed as not being “legitimate” or as not being “rape-rape.” In other cases, women are said to have brought it on themselves by dressing provocatively or by egging men on. And finally, some are thought to be vindictive, seeking revenge for having been scorned.
Slowly, social consciousness is finally coming around to a more progressive attitude about rape, one that takes women seriously when they make this charge. The recent events concerning Rolling Stone magazine are a sickening blow to anyone in support of this trend, but we can hope that it will only be a temporary setback. If it turns out that “Jackie” lied, that is reality, over which we have no choice.
Where we do have a choice is in deciding what to put in a movie. Given the climate today, it seems to me unlikely that a major motion picture will soon be produced that involves a woman falsely accusing a man of rape. In particular, I have to wonder if To Kill a Mockingbird could be made today. Hollywood is always looking for a movie to remake, especially if the original was a big hit. And since the original was filmed in black and white, some might regard a remake as justified in that this time we can film it in color. But I don’t think so. I suspect that a movie in which a woman lies about being raped might be as unacceptable today as a movie about a black man raping a white woman.
It is ironic that the movie we once embraced for its progressive denunciation of racism, we might now have to regard as flawed for the misogynistic way it played off a prejudice against women who claim to have been raped.