*/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier
by Alex Jackson Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it's going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from "gratuitous," is the film's entire raison d'être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley's "Hounddog," and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture "a pedophile's dream," and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we're here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering "the goods." Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates out during and after the rape.
As the film progresses, we begin to see–through a lot of heavy-handed and increasingly tedious phallic imagery involving snakes–that Kampmeier has been anti-sex and pro-rape all along. She dramatizes that age-old justification for sexual aggression: the bitch was asking for it. The bitch in this case, of course, being a twelve-year-old girl. Kampmeier sees rape as nothing short of baptismal–through her violation, Fanning learns to hate sex and regains her innocence; by the end of the film, she's cuddling a puppy while watching her family of Tennessee Williams rejects fool around with snakes and get bitten because they weren't raped as children. Fanning is counselled by a kindly Uncle Tom figure who tells her that snakes are animals to be respected and teaches her to sing "Hounddog" the way it was meant to be sung: like a spiritual without any of the sexual overtones that that damn white boy Elvis brought to it. Previously, she sang the song to unwittingly arouse her rapist into action; by the end of the film, she sings it to salve her torment. Kampmeier idealizes her black characters by making them completely asexual and suggests that rape provides a means by which women may experience the oppression that gives the Negroes their magical wisdom. Good gravy, have you had enough yet?! If only Sean Hannity and William Donahue were to actually watch and attempt to understand the film they are condemning, they would really have something to complain about.
