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On principle, I don’t reblog scenes from this film usually, because I don’t want to join the people carrying on about how sexy a rapist he is, but these two frames are amazing, and his performance here is incredibly good. His face fascinates me from an acting standpoint — I mean, how does he even do this? In the first frame, he’s still coming down from his orgasm and imagines that she was with him in it — that she really wanted him, and that her “no” didn’t really mean “no.” Seconds later, in the second frame, he has realised what he’s done, that she wasn’t with him, that she didn’t want it, and the devastation on his face is so clear. What is it that he does to achieve this? In part, it’s his mouth — that it’s turned up in the first frame and slack in the second, but it’s something intangible and unsayable about his eyes, too. He’s really SO GOOD.
This is a terrible film in a lot of ways, but he achieves a feat in it that so few actors can accomplish, and that’s the feat of taking a film that is, in so many ways, badly written, directed and acted and giving it an emotional cohesion that without him, it would never have. It is a great flaw in this film that in a scene where a woman is brutally raped by a man who is twice her size and weight, and then raped again while he looks on, the sympathy you feel is for him. The writing, the performance of the other actors and the directing are all so much weaker and less complex than this performance.
It makes me think about all the talk we have on the interwebs about “rape culture”, and how, like everything else about patriarchal oppression, “rape culture” oppresses and distorts men as much as it does women. How could this man think she wanted him? And, why does it feel so wrong to sympathise with him? Why do we let these things be black and white questions, when really there is such a bewildering constellation of personal and cultural factors that shape scenes like these?
Anyway. I usually keep Straw Dogs off my blog purely on principle, but Alexander Skarsgard’s performance in it was truly incredible. It’s so cheap to carry on about how sexy it was. There’s so much more to say about it.
(Source: skarsgardpenis)
Alex looked absolutely gorgeous in the movie.
Alexander Skarsgård as Charlie | Staw Dogs (2011)
