Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Daredevil Girl Survives Fall
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.15.2009
"Decide. Go ahead. Do it." She's terrified, shaking. She's begging for it to end. She's not a daredevil girl and it's not a leap. She just wants it over, one way or the other, and she's stopped caring which. She made arrangements. "Decide."
Esteban stares her down, and takes the gun, pulling her hair. She nods to herself. This might be love; their love began with a spanking. Maybe she's scared him into loving her again. He forces her to the table, with her hair; she reaches back for a kiss, putting his face next to his, and he pulls her away again, forcing her down. "Okay," she says, getting it. Getting it, she thinks. Their love was always rough. This is how it goes. She doesn't mind, she's never minded that. She's always liked it. She's back on top.
He holds her down against the table and fucks her, hard. It's not good, it doesn't feel good, but that was never the point either. To feel something, that was the point. She felt something for him, and he loved her. "Aqui," he says: here. She nods, getting into it. Yeah: There. Right there, like that. On top.
The rest she can't hear or understand. We know what he's saying, because we have the benefit of the subtitles, but for all she knows it's just sex talk -- his dick, her cunt -- just talking about how attractive she is. But that's not what he's saying. "Here," he's saying, "You don't do what you want. Here," he says, "You do what I say." She's into it, as he fucks her way too hard. Show me: show me what I need to see. Her affect goes dead. She thinks she's on top; there's something coming toward the top, though, that tells her something else.
He speaks in English: "You don't dictate the terms of this arrangement. Okay?" Here becomes everywhere, and she realizes, too late, that she should have fought, should have forced him to kill her. He is on top. He was on top and she didn't even know it; she thought it was control and pain and a reconnecting, a re-linking, okay, to something that once made her happy, and powerful, and the safest woman in all of NAFTA, but that wasn't what it was at all. She has been raped. It wasn't a fall, and it wasn't a leap either. It was a robbery, and it was the truth.
And when he looked down, her back didn't have anything tattooed on it, because he didn't need to imagine anything at all. He was on top, and he knew it. And all the facts about men and women, their power and the way it cancels out, the way she's on top or he is, sometimes one then the other, sometimes neither, sometimes both: they stopped mattering. She thought it was a tunnel, if you will: she thought if she could dig down underneath his machismo and his essential heartlessness, if she climbed inside the cage with that tiger and said, "I am a woman, and I am the mother of our son. Your only son, after two daughters. I carry life and I create life, and it is mine to do with as I will. Make the decision, because I am not owned."