Ciara Moloney
For Valentine’s Day, we’re looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
There is a moment in Jack Garfein’s psychological drama Something Wild (1961) where it threatens to turn into a rom-com. It’s been unrelentingly bleak up to that point:New York college student Mary Ann (Carroll Baker at her career-best) is brutally raped while walking in a local park. She doesn’t tell anyone – especially not her prim and proper mother – and washes away all evidence of her assault, even burning her clothes. She drops out of college, leaves home unannounced, and gets a job at a five-and-dime on the Lower East Side, where her co-workers find her off-putting and strange.
She is near-silent, unwilling or unable to articulate what she’s been through, what has been done to her. No one around her ever asks. Mary Ann’s life is both empty and overwhelming. It doesn’t make much to push her over the edge: her co-workers prank her, and she plans her suicide.
Then, just as she’s about to throw herself into the East River, Mike (Ralph Meeker) shows up. He stops her from killing herself. He’s the first character to notice that she’s metaphorically drowning, and he saves her from literally drowning, too. It’s a sudden spark of hope, and in a movie this grim, you grab onto that spark with both hands.
Mike takes Mary Ann back to his studio apartment and leaves her alone to sleep off the worst of it. When he comes back, he feeds her… not a decent meal, but certainly closer to one than she has had in a while. (When she sat in bed “sick” back home, her mother chastised her to eat more; how else could she expect to get well?) This is the moment Something Wild toys with becoming a dark, weird rom-com: when Mary Ann downs her glass of milk, Mike scrambles to his feet to refill it immediately. It’s really, sincerely sweet. For the first time, it seems like somebody sees Mary Ann, and he wants to take care of her as best he can even though he’s ill-prepared. Mary Ann’s suicide attempt was their offbeat meet-cute.
But that’s not how it plays out. Mike’s apparent care soon reveals a dark underbelly. He comes home drunk and tries to make a move on her, and she has to fight him off, blinding him in one eye. (He doesn’t remember it the next morning.) When Mary Ann, of course, wants to leave, he won’t let her. He locks her in. The apartment becomes her prison. “I saved your life,” Mike tells her, like she should be grateful. Like she’s in his debt, and he expects it to be repaid.
Something Wild, already so bleak in its first half, is horrific in its second. That spark of hope when Mike appeared is precisely what makes him so terrifying when he reveals his true motivations. What seemed like kindness was done with a weight of expectation – an expectation that ultimately pours out hot and broiling, as a demand. He’s not, like Mary Ann’s rapist in the park, an anonymous bad man; he’s recognisably human, and all the more ghastly for it. He’s the first person to see how Mary Ann is suffering, and he uses her very vulnerability and victimhood as the pretext to abuse her further. He saved her life, so she owes him her life in return.
In the end, Mary Ann “falls” in “love.” She successfully escapes the apartment, then she comes back. After a time skip, Mary Ann’s mother gets a letter from Mary Ann, and goes to the apartment to visit her. She introduces Mike as her husband. “To me” is her mother’s refrain. “How could you do this to me?” There is no room in her heart to take in her daughter’s trauma, if she could ever begin to speak it.
Something Wild is a rape-revenge movie without the revenge. It recognizes that the rape part of the formula is part of the constant, mundane horror of being a woman in the world, and the revenge part is a fantasy. Something Wild denies us the catharsis of revenge. It denies us any kind of relief. After seeing all that Mary Ann has endured, seeing her as Mike’s wife feels both devastating and inevitable. He would hardly settle for less. This score of the final scene is noticeable: in this film that plays out in so much stark, suffocating silence, the music seals the eerie unreality of Mike and Mary Ann’s happy family. (She’s pregnant.) In this film that’s so embedded in discomforting reality, when it comes to Mary Ann’s dutiful housewife routine, we’re in a movie.
In the New York Daily News, Wanda Hale wrote that the moral in Something Wild was, for women, “Don’t walk in the city’s parks alone after dark.” But in Something Wild rapists skulking around dark corners is just one face of the problem. The other, even more dreadful face is the boy who saves you from drowning and leaps to refill your glass of milk.
“Something Wild” is available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection.
