TW: This essay contains discussions of violence and rape.
When Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey released their comprehensive investigative findings on Harvey Weinstein in 2017, I was shocked. Not by his devastating acts of sexual violence, not by the chilling scale of his oppressive power, not by the widespread corporate complicity that allowed these crimes to fester—unfortunately, this reality felt true, lived-in, all too familiar. I was shocked that people cared. As the #MeToo movement flourished, conversations about sexual assault, about finally believing women, took center stage. Of course, it has never been—and still isn’t—that simple.
A few years ago, I watched two documentaries that explored the toxic cultural effects of sexual assault in very different ways. Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture (1976) and Nancy Schwartzman’s Roll Red Roll (2019) potently unpack the dynamics of womanhood and trauma. Both films introduce a multifaceted study into the ways in which women experience psychological and bodily imprisonment due to the threats of sexual violence. However, their technical and structural approaches significantly diverge: while Not a Pretty Picture largely centers on “proving” the existence of rape via personal testimony, Roll Red Roll ostensibly begins with this truth as an understood fact—yes, rape is real—and burrows into the systems of power set in place that allow it to manifest.
Crucially, however, both films share the same goal: to visually portray the devastating ramifications of patriarchal violence in a way that shocks and shakes the viewer from complacency.
Significantly, the narrative differences of these two films can largely be traced to the historical contexts within which they were made. As Christina Lane explains in Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break, Coolidge’s film, produced in 1976, “occurred at the historical moment in feminism when the term ‘rape’ was beginning to undergo definition and illumination.” As such, all involved in Not a Pretty Picture “were coming to terms with a social experience that had barely gained recognition, much less comprehension.” Consequently, Coolidge’s film attempts to clearly define a form of gendered violence that holds murky social connotations. She cannot immediately dismantle the patriarchal institution without first explaining the problem.
In contrast, Roll Red Roll exists in the critical timeframe after the #MeToo movement. As such, the very cultural interpretation of rape, the ways in which we respond to allegations of sexual assault and treat survivors, has undergone a radical transformation.
As Ashwini Tambe notes in “Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo,” the movement “has tilted public sympathy in favor of survivors by changing the default response to belief, rather than suspicion.”
In this way, Roll Red Roll consciously turns away from relying on personal testimony and instead sets a keen eye on dismantling the misogynistic system—rape culture—that catalyzes these acts of violence.
Both films, however, introduce a similar, yet heartbreaking, access point: the rape of a 16-year-old girl. Coolidge’s “docudrama,” a mélange of staged scenes, improvisations, and interviews, centers on processing her own rape as a young woman in 1962. In the very beginning of the film, Coolidge converses with Michele Manent, the actress “playing” the young version of Coolidge; it is revealed early on that both women are survivors of assault.
In this scene, Michele explains her reasoning for joining the film: “I thought I wanted to do it… to understand what had happened more deeply. Because I shut it up and closed it up and I don’t really know…what the consequences were.”
As she speaks, the camera frequently cuts to Coolidge, who nods her head, her expression one of deep identification. As Coolidge herself reveals, she was told that “rape [didn’t] exist” because the women who put themselves in unsafe situations deserved the consequences, no matter how violent. It is a powerful scene where both women, working together, seek to manage the emotional ramifications of their assaults. In this docudrama, personal testimony is a vital way to deconstruct the harmful messages women internalize about their own trauma.
While Coolidge often inserts herself into Not a Pretty Picture, participating as both director and scene partner, Schwartzman markedly maintains a narrative absence in Roll Red Roll. Yet, Alexandra Goddard, a key participant in the 2019 film, anchors the documentary in a manner similar to that of Coolidge. Like Coolidge, she functions as both a narrator and emotional proxy for the issues at hand. A true-crime blogger and previous resident of Steubenville, Goddard is one of the original few who investigated what, exactly, happened the night that 16-year-old Jane Doe was assaulted by scouring the public-facing social media accounts of the Steubenville football team. As she explains early on in the film, her own personal experiences in the town confirmed that it was not a “woman-friendly environment.”
Goddard then proceeded to publish her findings, which sparked a nationwide reckoning with a community that protected the football players at the expense of young women’s safety. In this way, Goddard and Coolidge operate in a similar fashion: they both reposition their previous experiences with powerlessness by wielding a formidable voice, one that speaks not only for themselves, but for other women who have been silenced. They do not ignore the silence—they explain it.
At the same time, this striking mode of narration—one that destigmatizes silence—manifests differently in both documentaries. Throughout her personal film, Coolidge plays with the tenuous boundaries between reality and fiction. The fictionalized reenactments of her youth largely take place within the confines of her prep school, including the classroom hallways and dormitory, and only step outside these walls once: in a tense car ride with “Curly,” her future assailant, and his friends. The acting is noticeably campy; Michele recites her lines with a cheesy self-importance and Jim, the male actor, chews the scenery as the “bad boy.” As such, Coolidge’s direction ostensibly centers on a winking self-awareness that these moments, “this part,” are very much a reenactment—they know and we know that they are acting.
Intriguingly, the acting grows subtler, more human, once Michele and Jim enter the warehouse, which functions as the primary space for rehearsal and improvisation. It is in these moments leading up to the rape sequence that the acting shifts into something rawer, more vulnerable; they are no longer simply “performing” a scene, but integrating themselves, who they are, into the piece.
As Michele and Jim practice, Coolidge encourages both of them to relay their personal thoughts and experiences regarding sexual violence. At one point, Michele shares that her assailant, before attacking her, pressured her into a public kiss in front of their friends; Coolidge subsequently incorporates that moment into the “staged” scene. In this way, Coolidge’s past, her own assault, merges into that of Michele’s.
Thus, as Lane writes, while “Coolidge’s experiences blend with those of her character and the actress playing her, the notion of unmediated experience is altogether de-privileged.” There is a sense of psychological give-and-take, where the act of processing a personal, individual violence transforms into a communal catharsis.
As a result, Michele is not only Michele, the actress, but also “Martha,” the character—both she and her fictional counterpart have experienced sexual violence; what’s more, her character, “Martha,” turns into an amalgamation of many, not one: “Martha,” the fictional version of Coolidge, is a mirror image of both the real-life Coolidge and Michele herself. This “Martha” is, in the end, a stand-in for multiple experiences of rape. This “Martha” is, in the end, far from alone. She belongs to—and is a part of—many women. In this way, the primary ethos of the film centers on validation: it is a forceful validation of their experiences; it is a reclamation of what was erased by a toxic cultural dismissal of sexualized violence against women. Rape, as Martha stated from the beginning, is real—and this reality will not be silenced.
Tellingly, while Not a Pretty Picture focuses on deconstructing the painful silences of rape survivors, Roll Red Roll shines a light, instead, on the silences of those who choose not to intervene. The crux of Schwartzman’s documentary is not personal testimony, but a broader tracing of the destructive excesses of male privilege and its relationship with rape culture. Roll Red Roll explores the social mores that uphold patriarchal violence, charting the ways in which casual misogyny leads to greater acts of oppression. This representation of sexual trauma roots its existence in the cultural behaviors of American society.
As the film powerfully demonstrates, rape culture rhetoric does not exist in a cultural vacuum—its austere ideology, its focus on imposing a specific morality upon the entire country, continues to have significant consequences. It is explicitly about social complicity and the ways in which “doing nothing” is its own form of violence. As such, it is a different—yet equally affecting—method for carving out room for the complex psychological and bodily aftereffects of trauma.
To highlight how ignorance, apathy, and resentment can coalesce into a toxic patriarchal mindset, Schwartzman begins the film by interviewing a number of local residents in Steubenville. An employee at a bakery, a former football player, states that Jane Doe’s decision to enter a basement party with a crowd of boys implicated herself in “what happened next.” According to him, she “knew” what would happen if she joined them.
The employee quickly adds, “I take the R word serious. You know, I don’t play with that.” When he wrinkles his brow in disgust and refers to rape as “the R word,” his revulsion at the word—and not the act itself—reveals the shallow pretense of his “concern” for the truth. According to the tenets of rape culture, there is only one “right” way to have a female body—and those who transgress these rules “deserve” what happens as punishment.
It is a chilling illustration of the ways in which unfiltered misogyny strips women of their humanity and reduces them to “objects,” a void in which they do not matter. During Jane Doe’s assault, male witnesses, many of them on the same football team as the rapists, recorded video and snapped pictures of her unconscious body. They also texted and tweeted each other, openly referring to the attack. In one video, teammate Michael Nodianos laughingly says, “She is so raped right now.” Upon investigation, prosecutors had to sift through over 400,000 text messages and hundreds of tweets.
As Goddard states, “Just the complete lack of empathy, that was what was so frightening.”
As revealed in social media, the boys—both perpetrators and bystanders—regarded the violent rape as nothing more than a joke. One teammate later guffaws, “You don’t need any foreplay with a dead girl.” This is why Goddard’s published findings—explicit proof—prove damning. She explains, “This is the first time that rape culture was put in their face.”
While often difficult to watch, these conversations have a clear goal: to introduce the very rationalizations and objections that many women—including survivors like Jane Doe, Coolidge, and Michele—repeatedly heard after their assaults. The film presents these possible counterarguments in order to confront and dismantle them.
As a result, Schwartzman introduces a striking societal contrast: in Steubenville, boys experience the town far differently than the girls do—in ways that ultimately prove haunting. When Schwartzmen speaks with the football team, the boys state that growing up in Steubenville is “awesome.” One of them adds, “It’s like a brotherhood forever.” As the film illustrates, this sense of “brotherhood” can reach toxic levels. When speaking with football coach Reno Saccoccia, investigative reporter Rachel Dissell shares some of the players’ horrifying language. Yet, she observes, “[he] didn’t really seem to understand the gravity of the statements that some of the players were making.”
When Detective JP Rigaud rigorously questions Saccoccia, the coach attempts to downplay the actions of the perpetrators, asserting their “innocence.” Rigaud interjects, “They would not have been arrested if there wasn’t strong evidence to say that they raped her.”
Rigaud then proceeds to break down the many manifestations of rape, defining a situation where an unconscious person is physically penetrated.
The coach, visibly confused, asks, “So can’t they use another word for rape?”
In this scene, a moment almost cartoonish in its level of indifference, Rigaud patiently explains the concept of consent to Saccoccia. Here, “playing dumb” or feigning “outrage” on behalf of the male assailants works as another manifestation of rape culture; it is a way to elide responsibility for the violence inflicted against women. By confronting Saccoccia—and those who think like him—the film strips away obscure social language and openly critiques the varied manifestations of toxic masculinity.
As Schwartzmen demonstrates, many women do not have “awesome” memories of Steubenville. When “Occupy Steubenville” protests overtake the town, female residents step forward to share their stories of assault. The film organizes their searing accounts one-by-one and then slowly overlaps the audio, building into a forceful aural experience that emphasizes the horrifying number of women who have survived sexualized violence. At the same time, it functions as a moment of lingering catharsis, a slow buildup and then release of tension.
As one anonymous survivor explains, “Until you get your story out there, until you can release that, until you get rid of that shame, you know, that’s when the mask comes off.”
During this moment, these powerful personal testimonies work in a way similar to those of Coolidge and Michele in Not a Pretty Picture. Here, both films discerningly navigate the fraught waters of trauma, offering space for women to pinpoint and articulate their feelings about gendered violence.
This forceful act of self-reflexivity, briefly expressed in Roll Red Roll and fully embraced in Not a Pretty Picture, works as a political storytelling tool—one that also contains deep roots in fiction.
As Christa Schönfelder writes, “trauma novels…, which explore self-narration and self-representation in the face of trauma within fictional…structures, allow authors to experiment with self-reflexivity in ways that non-fictional trauma writing may not permit, thus enabling writers to explore different perspectives on writing trauma and writing the self.”
While Schönfelder refers to fictional “trauma novels,” her reasoning ostensibly aligns with that of Coolidge. By creating a “docudrama,” Coolidge is able to transcend multiple genres; she traverses a “fictional structure” in order to tackle the complicated tightrope act of “writing trauma and writing the self” from a “non-fictional” experience. This allows for a highly resonant, poignant self-reflexivity that breaks down how and why and what Coolidge’s rape meant to her.
Consequently, while Schwartzman perhaps finds herself tethered to the “rules” of nonfiction storytelling in Roll Red Roll, which subscribes to a narrative that is riveting yet often conventional in its framework, Coolidge’s decision to create a fictional and nonfictional collage proves creatively freeing. During her film’s tense “rape sequence,” an extended reenactment that follows “Martha” and “Curly” in the bedroom, the camera often cuts to Coolidge to capture her reaction. The camera zooms in on her face, capturing the tics and fluctuations of her expression. Viewers play the part of attentive observers and they are able to witness the deep, unspoken emotion in her face.
Eventually, Coolidge halts the scene and ruefully adds, “I can’t watch this anymore, to tell you the truth.”
Coolidge then sits down with Michele and, together, they discuss what all of this—this act of “self-narrating” an inflicted violence—means to them. The moment proves visceral: they talk immediately after the reenactment and Michele physically looks as if she has returned from battle: her hair is mussed, shirt wrinkled, and her mascara is streaked across her eyelids, smeared from tears and sweat. And yet, she does not seem empty, absent, but instead speaks with quiet confidence.
Michele tells Coolidge, “I was very angry when the few people involved afterwards started trying to make me feel like I invited this man into me and that I was a culprit and that I was a part of this whole plot…” Now, she is able to explain the sense of outrage and injustice that she originally felt.
Over and over, Coolidge attempts to shatter the expectations of a clear-cut story or morality tale; she is not interested in imposing a heavy-handed “narrative line” upon her film. Rather, she revels in the disparate images of memory and trauma, seeking to produce a work that embraces the chaotic act of remembering and the stories we tell ourselves over and over again.
Schönfelder refers to trauma as “a history of repeated gaps and ruptures, with cyclical periods of attention and neglect, of fascination and rejection.”
Accordingly, Coolidge’s film manifests “trauma” through both its technical and narrative structures. In terms of editing, Not a Pretty Picture repeatedly jumps timelines, as well as the ambiguous borders between fictionalized reenactment and real-life conversation. The staged scenes of the prep school and car ride are interrupted by cuts to the stripped warehouse set, where Michele, Jim, and Martha, no longer simply actors and director, talk frankly about sexual assault. The “repeated gaps and ruptures” of trauma are reflected in these structural jolts and disruptions.
In contrast, Schwartzman assembles Roll Red Roll as if presenting a legal case in a courtroom: she introduces eyewitnesses, key experts, and a virtual paper trail. Her narrative is clear-cut, accessible, easy to follow. This stark divergence in narrative composition perhaps arises from each director’s varied goals: Coolidge, in a way, wants to teach herself about what happened; Schwartzman wants to teach others.
This difference is made even more explicit in the resources made available on Roll Red Roll’s website, which includes a detailed discussion guide that dives into the “Role of Men Challenging Sexual Assault.” The website also offers an interdisciplinary high school lesson plan, catered to tenth graders and above, that specifically “explores the importance of bystander intervention in preventing sexual violence and transforming rape culture.” This lesson plan condemns any inclination to refrain from getting involved. In fact, it applauds the positive outcomes of the #MeToo movement, noting that its “power stems from individuals choosing to name and hold accountable those who perpetrate sexual harassment and violence.”
Rather than sanitize raw or unnerving experiences, Schwartzman emphasizes that it is crucial to mentally engage with cultural dissonance—and step forward in the face of injustice.
Overall, both films illustrate how the collective fear that women feel simply for existing leaves psychic marks—the normalized internalization of future trauma bears upon how girls and women choose to live their lives. Near the end of Not a Pretty Picture, Coolidge voices her own painful insecurities, the emotional consequences derived from her rape. She explains her fear of men and relationships, her fear of intimacy.
She vocalizes the haunting last words of the film: “I’m really afraid.”
As the film highlights, there is a reason for female anger. It is not irrational or silly. It is painful and it is real. Similarly, Roll Red Roll ends with Goddard’s reflections. In a powerful reveal, she shares the story of her own assault. By further contextualizing her investment in Jane Doe’s case, Goddard can ostensibly rework her own trauma—particularly in regards to the lack of justice she received—via the case of Jane Doe. Like Coolidge, perhaps she can rewrite her own story.
Both Not a Pretty Picture and Roll Red Roll consciously work to avoid exploiting or simplifying the experience of sexual assault.
In her director’s statement, Schwartzman, like Coolidge and like Goddard, notes that she “went to a high school not unlike Steubenville High School.”
Already, she knows. She knows what it means to feel unsafe as a woman while boys receive valorization. In this way, both documentaries originate from female filmmakers who, based very much on their identities, attempt to dismantle the silences that can leave this painful “knowing” stagnant; they create an active space, calling into question and holding accountable the harsh truths of gendered violence. As these films show, the ability to perpetrate evil is not rooted in “monsters”—it endures in the mundane ways we dismiss the heavy ramifications of rape, in the viewer, and we must always remain cognizant of this reality.
If you or someone you know is experiencing violence and needs help or support, there are national and state-based agencies that can assist you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call 1 800 RESPECT (1 800 737 732).
Click here to access RAINN’s National Resources for Sexual Assault Survivors.