A Series of Women Being Choked in Film // Emily Diamond
As part of our guest edited month, "My Dark Places," Emily Diamond paints and analyzes the frequency and potential meaning behind women being choked on film.
I was sitting in the theatre watching Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. A woman was being choked on screen for a minute and 30 seconds. During this scene, I had enough time to process how disturbed I was because of how long it was taking to kill the woman, how hard she was fighting, and how familiar this scene felt.
Can you remember the last movie you watched where a woman was being choked?
There are a couple of infamous scenes, like one in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. Tarantino had actress Diane Kruger actually choked during the filming for realism. When I got home from the theatre I began to look up other examples of women being choked in movies. I then decided to document these examples through paintings.
Asan artist, the best way for me to gradually process my own emotions and ideas can be through drawing and painting. My original goal when developing the series Women Being Choked in Film was to highlight the pattern of gender-specific abuse used in film. This pattern further evolved into the disturbing realization of how often it was antagonist women being choked by the lead male heroes.
Women who are choked during intimate partner violence are more likely to die than other victims of domestic abuse. In an article linking the risk factor of non-fatal strangulation to chances of homicide of women led by Nancy Glass, an associate director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, it was found that “Non-fatal strangulation was reported in 10% of abused controls, 45% of attempted homicides and 43% of homicides. Prior non-fatal strangulation was associated with greater than six-fold odds of becoming an attempted homicide, and over seven-fold odds of becoming a completed homicide.”
WhenI began this art project, I struggled. I knew there was something wrong with the pattern of how often women are choked in film.However, in the context of each movie the woman was either a victim or an antagonist. When they were victims, the film seemed to suggest it is bad to choke women. It felt wrong to critique a scene that was doing the same thing as me—highlighting the should-be-obvious statement that violence against women is bad. If the woman was a murderous villain, the movie seemed to suggest, then the choking was justified. It was a way to stop violence and to silence the antagonist. It almost seemed downright equal. I wanted to present victims of abuse in my artwork, but it felt too much like objectification or the examples I was finding did not fit the “pure”victim label.
SoI focused on that feeling of justification. When women are bad, why do filmmakers choose to choke them? Why not kick or punch or use weapons? The answer was so clear once I looked at Nancy Glass’ sresearch again: Choking is a gendered violence, most often a man dominating a woman.
Choking is also not spontaneous. It is deliberate and must be held for an extended period of time. It takes four minutes to asphyxiate someone to a point where resuscitation is no longer possible. Even if the woman is not choked to death, there are still risks of blood clot, stroke, and permanent brain damage.
So when the male hero chokes the female antagonist, it is a moment of domination and control. He becomes justified and his anger is righteous. The scenes I present through paint are these frozen moments. The faces are women we recognize, because we’ve seen their throats being crushed by the hands of a man over and over again. We see their face on TV in the aftermath of a domestic assault. We hear about their court transcript testimony, like that of Lucy DeCoutere in the Jian Ghomeshi trial. We know this story. We see it all the time. So why wouldn’t it be righteous?
In film, the picture is always moving, and so the medium allows the viewer to also move on. But by placing these moments in paint I have frozen them for you:
It is familiar.
You’ve seen this scene before.
This image will follow you in the next movie you watch when a woman is choked, and you will begin to build your own list of films in which women are being choked. And you will remember it again and again when you hear about it in real life, too.
This inability to continue—to yearn for a pause button or a different movie entirely—is akin to the struggles of women who have experienced abuse, unable to move on from their memories. The series of paintings aims to follow viewers into their media watching experience, calling attention to our society’s systematic desensitization, and critiquing the message that men have permission to choke women if they believe it is justified, and that we will somehow call it entertainment.
EmilyDiamond is an emerging artist and recent graduate from the University of Waterloo. Her artwork focuses on themes of the body, feminism, and media. She loves movies and all things horror related. To view more of her work, check out either her website emilydiamond.ca or her Instagram @nifewife.
