Best Reels: Cult Cuts | Justice Uninhibited - "Ms .45" and the Righteous Spree
Saturday, April 24th, 2021, marks the 40th anniversary of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45.
In Abel Ferrara’s second feature, the 1981 exploitation thriller Ms .45, events are set in motion when Zoë Tamerlis’ Thana is raped twice in one day. I’ll pause there, as that part of the summary itself is enough to elicit feelings of disquiet and discomfort. I’ll repeat it again, though, because it bears repeating: Thana is raped twice in one day. On her way home from work. In the first 10 minutes of Ferrara’s film. From the very start, Thana’s story is that she is a victim of sexual assault. But the story is still being written.
Ferrara doesn’t waste time in his film. He gets right down to the inciting and most horrific incidents—back-to-back rapes—because violence is senseless and brutal and random, and sometimes it comes when we least expect it. It leaves us bewildered and broken. On this day, though, it also leaves Thana with the strongest sense of resolve she has felt in awhile. Thana gets the upper hand on her second attacker, and incapacitates then kills him with two forceful blows to the head. What follows is her treatise against men—all men—exacted through the swift and remorseless violence dispensed from a .45 caliber pistol. This is her revenge. This is her justice. And this justice will expand beyond the scope of her initial attacks, because trauma is all encompassing. The justice must follow suit.
Ms .45 is frequently discussed alongside films such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Thriller – A Cruel Picture (1973) as a “rape-and-revenge” exploitation film – in other words, a film that exploits the subject matter of the rape-and-revenge cycle in order to propel its narrative. What’s notable about these two examples (the latter is an early entry into the sub-genre, and inspired Ferrara) is that their revenge cycles between female protagonist and original assaulters inform all three filmic acts. In Ms .45, however, vengeance—at least, the vengeance we are accustomed to—is achieved in the first ten minutes. Thana spends the rest of the film tracking down, luring in, stumbling upon, and eventually killing men who have nothing to do with Thana’s original rape. Pawns exterior to the playing field constructed by the film’s narrative.
Thus, subsequent acts in Ferrara’s film are almost akin to the slasher, in which a relentless, predatory force hunts down victims for motives the audience may perceive as monstrous, misguided, or murky. YouTuber The Cine Masochist draws parallels between Thana (named after the Greek god of death, Thanatos) and horror baddie Jason Voorhees, who stalks and kills mainly innocent teenagers because teenaged camp counselors were responsible for his original drowning in Crystal Lake. The implication here is that Thana is expressing a grudge against men, and that her murders, besides being exclusively men, are largely indiscriminate.
There is evidence to support this. In one scene, Thana spies a young and wholly innocent couple making out, then proceeds to stalk the young man home with intent to kill – only to be thwarted by his locking apartment doors. In this scene, Tamerlis adopts an essence of Voorhees, putting on a blank face and marching forward like a relentless killing machine, an automaton. Throughout his filmography, Ferrara has made no secret of the fact that he tends towards these sorts of characters. Preceding Ms .45 was Ferrara’s low-budget The Driller Killer (1979), a bonafide slasher film that features Ferrara himself as an unhinged painter with a fragile—“unadulterated,” as the film puts it—male ego who kills the homeless because he sees them as responsible for his ills in society. In his later films Bad Lieutenant (1992) and King of New York (1990), his protagonists, while not outright slashers, are loathsome and misanthropic, obsessed with furthering only themselves. And they certainly are murderous. But whereas these male characters’ venomous attitudes and violent tendencies are linked to the threats they merely perceive and the temperaments they have indoctrinated themselves with, Thana’s call to action is culled from from real abuse and trauma. Furthermore, characters such as Christopher Walken’s Frank White in The King of New York actually thrive in the crime-ridden streets of New York; Thana is desperately trying to swim upstream. Her threats are not merely the “few bad eggs” in society who lash out and attack her, her threats are the men she encounters every day.
Consider the short segment in the film before the rapes occur. In this scene, Thana leaves her job as a seamstress at the end of the day and walks home through New York City’s Garment District with her coworkers, only to be met by the seedy, sneering glares of a string of drooling men who ogle them and make crude comments. As Daniel Baldwin writing for Forbes states, “to these men, they are simply meat. They are a pleasure to be consumed, nothing more.” Baldwin also points out how this moment is bookended by a quick scene of Thana buying meat at a grocery store – no doubt Ferrara making things as clear as possible. Even the man closest to Thana, her boss (Albert Sinkys), uses his authority and his nurturing demeanour as a tactic of seduction and possession. Thana cannot thrive within this environment. This environment has gone mad.
Of course, we also learn in the film’s opening that Thana is mute. Muteness can be caused by a variety of factors—brain injuries, botched surgeries, nervous system diseases—but it is possible that Thana’s stems from the trauma of abuse at an earlier age. We know that Ferrara drew inspiration from Bo Arne Vibenius’ Thriller – A Cruel Picture, and so Thana is linked almost intrinsically to Madeleine, who in Vivenius’ film is made mute by the trauma of a sexual assault when very young. There is a savagery inherent to Thana’s life on the planet, a brutality that drills right down to the bone marrow. Wickedness has worked its way into the hearts of men in all corners of her existence and potentially all stages of her life. When the film’s second on-screen rape occurs, Thana’s course of action becomes clear.
Thana’s murder of her second abuser is a primal scream, a cathartic strike at the vile heart of man. Not humanity as a whole – at man. At men. Thana continues to murder after this first instance, and takes down, among others, a lecherous fashion photographer, a pimp who uses physical abuse against one of his sex workers, and a businessman who figures Thana a sex worker. Because the cold rage that Thana wields stems from her original attack, Ferrara suggests that these additional slayings are less random and more an ongoing slaying of the three-headed-Hydra that is man’s deep-rooted, almost omnipotent evil. When Thana subdues one wretched and toxic man, two more seemingly pop up in his place. She actually proceeds very logically. And while Thana does actively seek out some her victims, many make the first threatening moves against her, simply because she is a woman walking alone.
This is Thana’s vendetta. Her justice is swift and merciless, but in the context of Ferrara’s film, it is also undeniably exhilarating, refreshing , and righteous. For one, Ferrara chooses to make Thana the sole individual responsible for her retribution. There are no men who step in to to do Thana’s avenging. This sets Ms .45 apart from other rape-and-revenge exploitation flicks, because many of these films exploit an attack on a woman as a plot device to elevate men to being heroes in place of women. In Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture, Sarah Projansky says these kinds of films—Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974), for example—“[relegate] the women to minor ‘props’ in the narrative.” Thana is far more than a prop in her story – she is at the helm.
Perhaps even more interesting than the absence of male intervention, is the complete absence of the police in the film’s narrative. Throughout Ms .45, Thana spends time butchering her second rapist, wrapping his severed limbs in plastic, and disposing of these pieces around the city (notice: men are now the meat to be packaged and consumed). This, on top of her string of other murders, would no-doubt draw the attention of the press and the police. We see Thana’s grisly business mentioned in a newspaper, but at no point in Ferrara’s film do we see the police apprehending, intervening, or even investigating Thana. Police are entirely absent from the film’s focus, and this allows Thana’s justice to go uninhibited. It also removes a primarily male, potentially corrupt perspective on the path that Thana takes, and makes the justice purely her own (a breath of fresh air, especially in today’s climate that is becoming more acutely aware of the deception and atrocity capable by law enforcement).
Our expectations are uprooted further by how Thana uses her muteness. The decision to make Thana mute, I think, is more than Ferrara adding character quirk or impediment, it is Ferrara making literal society’s view of women: as individuals without voices, bodies to be seen and not heard. Most would also see the condition as a handicap, but Thana wields it as a double-edged sword – unable to speak herself, but also able to silence the voices of the harmful men she encounters. This isn’t to say that we don’t hear men talk in this movie (many, such as the fashion photographer, are happy to prattle on about themselves while Thana remains silent); no, what Thana’s muteness really severs is man’s chance of initiating a dialogue, of talking his way out of danger. When Thana takes to the streets, hers is a shoot-first-ask-questions-later-type of vigilante justice, where men aren’t afforded a single inch—not so much as a plea for help or a bargain—before the blast of the .45 calibre is delivered. “Not all men” arguments be damned.
Of course, there are times when Thana’s wordless diatribe against men has her treading the line between vigilante street warrior and misanthropic serial killer. I refer again to the scene in which Thana pursues the young couple, but also the film’s climax, when innocent men are picked off en masse at a Halloween party Thana attends. By this point, Thana, now sporting her red lipstick and nun outfit, looking like an angel of carnage, has achieved her final form, and will seemingly mow down anything with a dick. “Ferrara’s vision is one of extremes – what cures total helplessness is absolute power,” says Kelly MacNamara, writing for VICE. This, if anything, is the conclusion that Ferrara’s film seems to draw. In granting Thana this absolute power, though, Ms .45 side steps the trappings of the “serious” pictures that explore the grey areas of crooked systems, and instead highlights justice that eschews the machinations of the systems to begin with. Absolute power is Thana’s downfall, and rightly so, but what’s remarkable here is that this power was obtained at all.
When Thana goes postal at the Halloween party, it is her feminist co-worker, Laurie (Darlene Stuto), who doles out the justice in response. Earlier in the story, it should also be noted that the only individual truly suspicious of Thana’s activities is her nosy neighbor, Mrs. Nasone. There is no counterpart to question Thana’s crimes, no hardened-but-sympathetic detective trying to understand but also undermine Thana’s philosophy. And so, there are no over-arching statements made on gender dynamics. This is perhaps why Ferrara claims “[we] weren’t influenced by feminism, we were influenced by women,” in Brad Stevens’ book Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision. Ferrara lets his female protagonist breathe in a way not usually seen, whether in rape-and-revenge films or beyond: he lets her proceed uninhibited. The justice, as a result, is also uninhibited. Of course, this is pure fabrication and fantasy—the justice we know is marred down by bureaucracy and due process—but Ms .45 is nonetheless a thrilling, if uncomfortable, commentary on women’s fight for better treatment in society. There is no “due process” when a man makes a decision to violate a woman’s body. The “due processes” that follow a rape hardly ever seem to fit the crime. This film asks, why give men any due process at all?
There is liberation in this kind of extreme cinema, one that spoke to American women coming out of the Cold War-era of hyper-masculine reflexes and about to experience the Reagan-era of masculine insensitivity. It speaks to us as this film approaches its twentieth anniversary, too, as women still fight for the right to an abortion, and convicted rapists still hold power. A tenacious machismo grips our societies tighter than it ever has in recent memory, and this leaves us feeling disillusioned and raw, scared for our lives. Thana can’t even get naked to shower in the comforts of her own apartment without having flashbacks of her assaults. But there is an anger that emerges, too, out of these feelings of disillusionment and helplessness – anger that triggers something animalistic and volatile. This something wants to lash out, and sometimes it wants to lash out in a way that breaks morals, laws, and ethics. Film has always spoken to this impulse, and in its more provocative moments, it has explored how this impulse manifests itself, for better or for worse. There is a better and a worse that results from the trail of male corpses that Thana leaves behind. One gets the feeling that the media would focus only on the worst, but we know better.