Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "In the Movies" is an unflinching examination of gendered violence, complicity, and the ways in which trauma is both portrayed and absorbed in collective consciousness. The poem draws a direct parallel between wartime sexual violence and childhood games, illuminating how systems of power and dominance are deeply ingrained from an early age. The repetition of the phrase "In the movies" highlights the role of storytelling in shaping perceptions of violence—both normalizing and aestheticizing it—while also questioning how women, especially, are expected to survive and move forward.

The poem’s opening statement—"When a man rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won, there’s always somebody else holding her down, another man, so the men do it together, or one after the other"—establishes the poem’s brutal subject matter with stark directness. The specificity of "because he’s a soldier and his army’s won" frames rape not as an individual crime but as an act of war, a systematic expression of power and victory. The phrase "so the men do it together" is chilling, shifting the focus from the individual perpetrator to a communal act, implicating an entire group in the violence.

Howe then makes an unsettling transition, comparing this dynamic to the childhood game of PIG: "in the way my brothers shot hoops on the driveway with their friends while we girls watched." This parallel between a seemingly innocent basketball game and the gang rape scenario underscores the social conditioning of male bonding through competition, repetition, and performance. The game itself relies on imitation—one boy must replicate the exact shot of the previous boy, just as soldiers mimic and enable one another’s violence. The girls, meanwhile, "watched." This detail is significant; it reflects not just passive observation but an enforced role—women as spectators to male power, unable to intervene, yet deeply affected.

The poem then shifts into an abstract meditation: "I’ve been thinking about the sorrow of men, and how it’s different from the sorrow of women, although I don’t know how—" This interruption, placed at the heart of the poem, offers a moment of reflection that is neither an excuse nor a justification but a genuine question. Howe acknowledges that pain is not exclusive to women, but she also suggests that men and women experience and process suffering differently. The question remains unanswered, suspended between the poem’s violent depictions.

Returning to the cinematic portrayal of rape, Howe emphasizes the way films frame this violence as an ordeal the woman "lives on" from. The image of the husband—"crawling across the dirt and grass to reach his wife who’s speaking gibberish now"—further dramatizes the aftermath. The phrase "speaking gibberish now" suggests trauma’s power to strip language and coherence, a brutal silencing. Yet, in the movies, women endure. The raped woman reappears years later, "answering a man’s questions in the drawing room, a crescent scar just above her lace collar." The scar, both literal and symbolic, is a neatly contained mark of suffering, the kind that fits within the expectations of narrative closure. She remains "dignified and serene," embodying the culturally idealized version of a woman who has suffered but is still presentable, still functional within society.

Howe questions this narrative: "How can a woman love a man?" This line, brief and stark, stands out as the poem’s emotional core. It disrupts the cinematic illusion, questioning how love can persist when it exists in a world where men are capable of such brutality, where male bonding is linked to both violence and competition, and where women are often the ones left to bear the consequences.

The poem closes with a return to its opening assertion: "In the movies, a man rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won, and he wants to celebrate—all those nights in the dark and the mud—and there’s always someone else holding her down, another soldier, or a friend, so the men seem to do it together." The repetition intensifies the poem’s critique, emphasizing how this violent script plays out again and again. The casual phrase "he wants to celebrate" highlights the grotesque normalization of rape as a spoil of war, while the insistence on "someone else holding her down" reinforces the communal aspect of violence—how rape is rarely the act of a lone perpetrator but often facilitated, encouraged, or enabled by others.

"In the Movies" is a powerful critique of both real-world violence and its representation in art. Howe exposes the ways in which cinematic depictions of rape can sanitize, aestheticize, and ultimately normalize such acts. By juxtaposing war crimes with a childhood basketball game, she highlights the disturbing continuity of male competition, performance, and domination. The poem refuses to offer easy conclusions; instead, it forces the reader to confront difficult questions about complicity, gendered suffering, and the unsettling persistence of these narratives.

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