TW: The video on which this blog is based is very well done, but could be triggering for child sexual abuse and violence.
The lyrics of of Sia's Elastic Heart are compelling, but the video could tell a whole story without sound. Dancer Maddie Ziegler was around 12 in this amazing performance. She possesses an ageless girl-strength, even though she is in a cage that makes up her whole world, and really has no where else to go. Shia LaBoef, the grown male in the cage with her, gives us all of the power-based perpetrator's alternate states of being: fixated, stalking, aggressive, tender, rageful, soulless, deliberate, pitiful, grasping. In real life he has since been sued for severe physical and sexual abuse by his ex-girlfriend, the performer FKA twigs
Maddie takes my breath away. She opens the video with the alert, watchful concentration of any creature that needs to constantly defend itself. Her initial displays of strength are meant to warn off the predator - staring back, shaking, posturing, screaming - everything she can do to make herself look bigger and scarier than she is, everything you are supposed to do when faced with a grizzly bear. The cage is the pre-verbal state where one might scream and try to fight but cannot talk, cannot explain or won't be heard, which is why she clutches at her throat. There's no real person to talk to.
I admire this girl so deeply for her fight and resistance, as I too remember resisting sometimes. But since she never really escapes and there is nothing but a white void outside the cage, she inevitably becomes exhausted, and he's still there. He waits until she's asleep or he acts pained to draw close to her - a consummate enactment of grooming. Finally he becomes a zombie. Trying a different survival strategy, she attempts to remake him by gently pounding it out of him, remolding him, sucking his evil out with her breath like one might extract the poison from a snake bite and spit it out. She even tries to bring him out of the cage with her. He's never going to leave and never going to let her go either.
I have spent too many years of my life in that cage. My 6th grade math teacher groomed and sexualized me for the better part of a year - which included the exact circling, staring, stalking and entrapment that Shia LaBoef so knowingly portrays. Somehow this mathepedophile was convinced that I was his girlfriend and, by resisting, was treating him unjustly. The school's Headmaster was a scholarly abuse-facilitator, who despite being alerted to the abuse by an adult witness kept Mathepedophile on staff for another five years - until he quietly left to join a tutoring agency, where he could teach children one-on-one.
When my parents met with the headmaster about the abuse he tried to paint me as a nymphet, telling my parents "girls get crushes on their teachers," as he secretly pulled all of the girls out of the abuser's homeroom class. Of course all this accomplished was to rearrange the cage, and leave other students without warning. Those were five years lost to, at the very least, what the school has since termed in a report"boundary-crossing behavior" with other students. The "girls get crushes on their teachers" trope was far more than pseudo-Freudian-psychobabble (although it was that too). The phrase was used as part of a more sinister, common and studied ploy of psychological manipulation employed by perpetrators and enablers of sexual or domestic abuse when they are are confronted, called DARVO. In the words of researcher Dr. Jennifer Freyd:
DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim -- or the whistle blower -- into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of "falsely accused" and attacks the accuser's credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.
Institutional DARVO occurs when the DARVO is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity) as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a pernicious form of institutional betrayal.
By implying that the whole abuse accusation was a figment of a girl's sexualized fantasies, the headmaster was simply threatening my parents with the shame of having, or being, or being publicly portrayed as, a lustful girl-tween. He was telling them that he had the power to make that myth a public reality were they to push the issue. It didn't make any logical sense, since the person who originally made the allegation was an independent adult and not me, but DARVO never has to make sense. It only has to instill fear.
The refreshing thing about the Elastic Heart video is that Maddie's character is no nod to the myth of the "nymphet" - she's a real, strong, compassionate but trapped girl doing the best she can to save herself when the whole world seems to be a male-made haunted house.
Of course I don't know what Sia or anyone involved in the making of this video had in their minds; I have described the meaning that I take from it, which includes an amazing level of truth and emotion for a five-minute piece. The whole last minute is the girl soundlessly trying to escape his grasp, which may be agonizing to watch - but it is part of what what serial abuse and harassment is actually like. My experiences are not uncommon, so I think this is artwork that should speak to many. Being unheard in childhood meant I did not escape the cage in adulthood. That's why the words of the song captivate me as well; I do still want my life so bad, I'm doing everything I can, and no matter how sharp the predator's blades, I will fight to find a world of peace. I am proud of that girl.