Blink Twice If You’re In Danger
- leninarassool
- Mar 12, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 13, 2025
Zoe Kravitz’s debut film Blink Twice represents the many ways that women are expected to smile through a culture of sexual harassment.
‘Why would Zoe Kravitz write something like this?!’ I wonder after the first jagged memories of rape flash across the screen halfway through her debut release, Blink Twice. My second thought is ‘I better give [my good friend] a trigger warning’. I needn’t have worried. She’d already seen it and rated the film one of the best of 2024.
I, however, sat in that trigger for about 12-hours before a stream of consciousness began. 1) Was it a coincidence that Blink Twice debuted in the same month as Gisele Pelicot's trial, a woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and countless other men he’d recruited online over a nine-year period? 2) This feels like Roxanne Gay’s ‘Not That Bad’, a curation of essays detailing how women smile through sexual assault, rape and abuse. 3) That woman who told me that she had not reported a date rape while she was still living at home because she was more afraid of her father knowing she’d been on a date than any reaction to the rape itself, 4) The book ‘My Shack’ by survivor and good friend Lynn Kerchhoff who recounts a sexual violation at 10-years old by a family member and how she only disclosed two weeks later when she broke down at school. I often think about those two weeks, trying to pretend that everything is fine. 5) I May Destroy You by Michaela Coel: a British comedy-drama based on a real-life experience that began with flashes of being raped in a toilet at a bar, then trying to report an incident she could barely remember and eventually following her as she began investigating herself.
PUSSY ISLAND
Kravitz initially wanted to name the film Pussy Island, telling The Wall Street Journal that it ‘represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that’. It was only after public pushback that they renamed it Blink Twice. In an interview with Access Atlanta's Vicky Ro, Kravitz explained that ‘the movie is about power and power dynamics and what people will do to get it and what people will do when they have it’ and that she wanted to ‘highlight the absurdity of what women are asked to do by society.’
We saw this absurdity laid out in feature length detail when multiple and multi-year sexual assault allegations by young female employees against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein were published by the New York Times in 2017 – the same year that Kravitz started writing Pussy Island. We read about the absurdity of young women being invited to business meetings held in the hotel room of a powerful media executive, and were instead asked to do things like give him massages, undress and take showers with him while he masturbated. When they tried to report it, they were given non-disclosure agreements and monetary settlements to forget that it had ever happened.
6) In their book, She Said, detailing the 2017 New York Times investigation into Weinstein, journalists Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey report that it took them over six months to get just one woman on record about her experience with Weinstein. Even rich, powerful, established Hollywood actresses were afraid to break their silence.
Perhaps it’s not so absurd among rich, powerful executives. Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Kelly, Bill Cosby, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Kevin Spacey, Donald Trump and recently, author Neil Gaiman, are just a few of the rich, powerful men accused and/or convicted of sexual assault and rape in recent years.
Kravitz added that women are ‘constantly being asked to smile through our pain, we’re constantly being asked to forget and forgive, and we’re constantly being asked to pretend, and it’s exhausting, and I wanted to see what happens when we stop.’
More often than not, women are vilified, blamed or threatened back into our places. Perhaps the most glaring and obvious examples of this were some of the rich, powerful and famous actresses who disclosed histories of sexual assault during the online #MeToo movement and yet still refused to go on record against Weinstein. No one wanted to be first. If we were to gauge their experiences by the big screen and red carpet alone, however, we might say that they all looked as if they were ‘having a great time’, as Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, keeps repeating throughout the film.
😊FOR THE CAMERA
#SpoilerAlert In the film, there is a significant stretch between the moment the women remember their assaults and the moment they take action against the men. In between these two scenes, they smile, eat dinner and even flirt and dance, playing along in order to ensure their safety and avoid retaliation and backlash.
7) Research shows that one of the most dangerous times in a survivor’s life is when they are leaving and immediately after they have left an abusive partner, because this is when the abuse tends to escalate. The Saartjie Baartman Centre, a domestic violence shelter in Cape Town, South Africa, advises on their website: If it’s not possible to leave unnoticed, create a plausible reason for needing to go out, such as buying essential goods, helping a family member, or needing medical attention.
Zoom out beyond the TV screen and you will find at least two recent and public cases of sexual harassment asking women to justify their smiling – and smiley emojis – during the period they allege the sexual harassment took place.
In January this year, as part of the legal warfare between It Ends With Us co-stars, Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, Baldoni released ten minutes of behind-the-scenes footage of himself and Lively dancing during production. In her harassment complaint, Lively mentions this particular scene as a site of harassment, while Baldoni alleges that according to the footage – and her smile – they are having a great time.
Here in South Africa, we've been privy to a live-streamed Judicial Conduct Tribunal process in which a judge’s secretary was asked to clarify her responses to sexually explicit text messages from a 63-year old senior Judge President in the Eastern Cape. Records show that all conversations were initiated by the Judge President. The defence attorney zeroed in specifically on emoji responses by the complainant as evidence that she consented to the sexually explicit messaging and was receptive to the content.
In defending her responses and explaining why she had not been firmer in rejecting the Judge President’s advances, the judge’s secretary referenced the power dynamics between herself and the accused. She said, “We are talking about someone here that has powers, who can do anything at work. He’s someone to be afraid of, and he will do it in such a way that he makes you feel it when he is present.”
WE’RE HAVING A GREAT TIME
8) Larry Nassar, team doctor to the United States women’s national gymnastics team, used his position as a doctor to sexually assault hundreds of young, female athletes under the guise of performing legitimate medical examinations, sometimes with their parents in the same room. In a letter to Michigan judge Rosemarie Aquilina before sentencing, Nassar wrote that ‘those patients that are now speaking out were the same ones that praised and came back over and over’ and that ‘they feel I have broken their trust’ and ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.
9) At 15-years old, a few weeks after a stranger had forced his way into my home and sexually assaulted me, it was arranged for me to out with a few senior youth from our church. They did not know about the assault. I remember having a good time, feeling safe, relaxing a little, until one of the senior males zeroed in on me. I remember not wanting this, gently rejecting his advances, using every social and physical cue I knew, but his insistence, while not aggressive, was persistent and he would not back down. Eventually I smiled, closed my eyes, and let him kiss me. It seemed like the safest and easiest way out of the situation. I found out later that he was engaged to someone at the time.
10) I circle back to Pelicot. I google her again. One report says: ‘The 50 men on trial with her husband include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, many of whom lived around Mazan, a town of about 6,000 inhabitants. Gisele Pelicot said she had recognised only one of her alleged rapists, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and raped me,” she said.’
I imagine this man running into her at the bakery. ‘How have you been?’ he might ask. Smiling sweetly, ‘I’m having a great time,’ I imagine her replying.
END
Lenina Rassool is a journalist from Cape Town, South Africa. She has worked for mainstream publications such as Femina and Cosmopolitan Magazines and has spent the past five years producing and presenting The Womxn Show, a TV show on gender-based violence, funded by the Ford Foundation.
Bibliography: Links
6. https://youtu.be/CF-5Iqydbj4?si=PvvyWcwKXQ_2bSaG&t=261 (starts at 4:21)
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