The Anatomy of Vengeance – DocuWest International Film Festival, Denver, USA/ReelHeART, Toronto, Canada/Klarabiografen, Kulturhuset, Stockholm
‘There exists today in Sweden an underground movement. A movement for women who have had enough. These women have in varying degrees been betrayed, humiliated, abandoned and omitted. Privately and in their careers. Always by men. They carry a rage they have so far kept under a lid.’
We accidentally came in contact with an all-female, underground ’home party’ like movement, based on a Californian self-realization concept, Action Therapy.
In Sweden, Action Therapy has recently manifested itself in a number of remarkable varieties. One of us, Carina Reich, was invited to one of these ’home parties’, a session during which she and the other women were offered the possibility of giving electric shocks to a for this purpose hired male ’therapy functionary’, after having shared stories of emotional and mental pain caused by men.
After this, we decided to make a documentary about the movement, as we relate it to a general feeling of powerlessness and rage many women feel today. In the violent methods of Action Therapy we glimpsed a possibility of using it as a social mirror and thereby gaining a deeper an understanding of our contemporary society.
The background to the story is an on going debate about waves of net-hate against and intimidation of women in social media of today.
In the film you will witness interviews done with the female participants, the male ‘therapy functionaries’, Action Therapists who lead the sessions and the movement’s founders in the U.S.
All this will be interspersed with the clandestine filming material from the electric shock dinner ‘home party’ in addition to the special ‘safari’ our film crew were invited to, in which young men were chased with soft-air guns from pickup trucks in the woods.
The film also examines the movement’s more legitimate sites, represented by a Swedish coach and psychotherapist.
We have combined the footage within a wider discourse on the benefits or harm of ‘releasing pressure’ and getting even, especially in therapeutic forms. Watching how easy it seems for us all to express raw violence in a sophisticated setting like a ‘therapy session’, has deeply affected my innermost beliefs about humanity in general and womanhood in particular. Witness the shockingly quick transition from incredulity to joyful normalcy of the middle-aged women, administering electric shocks to an for the occasion hired younger male, all echoing of the classic victim-becoming-the-oppressor metaphor.
But – do acts of revenge accommodate any liberating and beneficial effects? Does ‘letting off steam’, an idea so ingrained in our popular culture, really work?