Trance Movie Review

Danny Boyle’s Trance is the type of film that gets so muddled in how to say something of merit that it forgets what it’s trying to say in the first place. After all, when you combine Mr. Boyle’s surrealistic directorial style with a story that features more twists than a vase of Red Vines, you would find it nigh on impossible not to leave audiences more befuddled than enlightened. 

After taking home the Oscar for Best Director in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, Mr. Boyle confined his exuberantly odd style to a very small film in 127 Hours. The film focuses on, surprisingly enough, the 127 hours that mountain climber Aron Ralston spent trapped under a rock before cutting his arm off and stumbling to rescue. For the director of Trainspotting, a highly acclaimed film that features the many daydream and nightmare sequences of heroin addicts, this was certainly a step down.

But, rest assured, Trance is filled with many a camera trick and surreal image. After all, half of it takes place inside one of the main character’s heads. Or at least, that’s what I believe was going on. Let’s start at the beginning. Well, at the first beginning of the film, that is. Yes, it is that confusing and the point is well worth belaboring. 

James McAvoy plays Simon, a sharp-dressed, but somewhat effete art auctioneer. Unfortunately, Simon is also a compulsive gambler. As a result, the film opens with Simon describing the auction house’s precautions to the audience and to a ring of criminals in a breathy, but elated voice. Together, Simon and the criminals conspire in order to snatch an artwork by Goya that just happens to be valued at twenty million dollars.  

Sadly, the heist goes wrong. After all, does a heist ever go perfectly according to plan? Not because of the Ukrainian ex-special forces security team or the many high tech security systems. No, those happen to be dispatched with some ease thanks to a baseball bat and a very large criminal. Instead, betrayal undermines the genius plan. For some odd reason, Simon steals from his own compatriots. Simon hides the artwork, but is hit on the head by one of the thieves in an unfortunate accident. As a result, he suffers amnesia and is unable to remember where the painting is hidden. 

Enter Rosario Dawson as Dr. Lamb, a trained hypnotherapist. And thus begins the central conceit of the film: using hypnotism to locate where the painting is in Simon’s head.  

After all, only Simon knows where this treasure is. And only Simon can tell us that secret...if he wishes to. From there, the plot descends into a dark swirl of dream sequences, gory violence and extremely revealing nudity. But is it worth all of the furious editing and crescendos of electronic dance music? Sadly, no. 

Trance tries to be far too clever for its own good and ends up falling flat on its face. Like your young and precocious nephew’s favorite joke, it quickly wears out its welcome and soon grows grating. Unfortunately for a movie that screams “plot twist” with every scene, your faithful reviewer quickly guessed the ending of the film in the first twenty minutes after a very poor line delivery by Ms. Dawson. A word of advice, Mr. Boyle: when both of your actors smile revealingly at the camera after what you are attempting to play off as a throwaway line, the jig is up. Even more unfortunately, the plot twist is not that meaningful. It feels strained, uninteresting, and preachy.  

After all, Trance is supposed to be an art heist movie that turns into a psychological thriller…and then suddenly after nearly an hour and ten minutes, it transmogrifies yet again into a film about female empowerment. Suddenly, these men are no longer violent criminals, but instead characters in a play about feminism. And not even a very good one at that. The actors do a passable job, but in this film their only real task is to alternate between angry rants and burning holes in the camera with passionate stares. Hardly the most nuanced of performances. Sadly, the impressive cast of McAvoy, Dawson and Cassel are wasted on such shallow characters lost in the topsy-turvy plot. 

Despite the script, the direction and cinematography is quite impressive. Although too bright, austere, and sterile for my taste, it fulfills its purpose. The viewer is unnerved as the camera swoops through oddly perfect sets meant to represent the interior of Simon’s mind. The visual clues to the plot are brilliant as symbolic packages melt into piles of bloody gauze and one particular character’s severed head delivers a soliloquy which would make anyone’s heart race.  

Unfortunately, all of these images are overwhelmed by a soundtrack that would much better fit a crowded dance hall in the wee hours of Saturday morning than a theater. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that one of the main characters lives over a night club. But, the music appears only when the characters are far away from this apartment. Odd.

To be quite honest, the soundtrack is far from the strangest thing about this movie. That dubious honor falls to the incessant product placement. For some reason, Simon’s subconscious loves iPads. His memories are represented as embedded in iPads…no, I’m not making that up. Last I checked, Steve Jobs did not manage to cure amnesia.

Sadly, there isn’t an App for that. The ending also features an iPad very prominently in an attempt to force the audience to think about memory, choice and even love. It’s even stranger on screen, I promise you. Sadly, you will not have a conversation about the ambiguous conclusion as you walk out of the theater. Most likely, you will discuss the multiple scenes of full frontal nudity and the strange preoccupation of multiple characters on pubic hair. Of course that presumes that you and your companion or companions will be able to get past the intensely difficult nature of a discussion about pubic hair. In case you haven’t realized yet, this is not a family film and should you suggest it at the next holiday get together, you will likely never be invited back. 

Yes, pubic hair is a fairly significant plot point. All in all, Trance is a movie that’s far too quirky and queer to really deliver a message or an entertaining plot. But, at least it tries to be creative, which is more than can be said for most films that make it to the screen these days. I’ll give it a six out of ten and call it a day.

-- Thomas J.P. Harrington 

Does Dartmouth Have a Problem?

It feels like it happened months ago, but in fact it was just 13 days ago as of this writing that a group of Dartmouth students burst into the Dimensions show claiming that Dartmouth had a problem. While the protesters touched on issues like shoddy racist graffiti popping up biannually around campus, the most memorable shouts within their protest were claims regarding the College’s sexual assault rate. And so, the Monday after their protest, The Dartmouth Review decided to explore this issue in depth. 

The Dimensions protesters had three concrete claims regarding sexual assault contained within their chant. First, that Dartmouth has had fifteen reported sexual assaults in the past three years. Second, 95% of sexual assaults are not reported, and so the true number of assaults in the last three years is something on the order of 300. Third, they complained that, in the past decade, only three students have been expelled for sexual assault. 

To take on the last bit first, technically speaking, Dartmouth does not “expel” people. In a lovely case of euphemism gone wild, condemned students are “separated” from the College, calling to mind Soviet prisoners who were punished not with execution, but merely being shot in the head. In any case, the protesters were correct that only three students have been “separated” for sexual assault in the past decade. First, in the 2002-03 academic year, two men were separated after being found responsible for repeatedly overriding both physical resistance and verbal non-consent to have sex with a third student. The other case ending in separation involved a student who engaged in repeated “sexual misconduct,” including entering a student’s room while they slept, following explicit denials of consent. This low number of “separations” is consistent with a general unwillingness to “separate” students in Hanover for other crimes. There have been separations for major financial fraud, repeated severe substance abuse, and a handful of other matters, but in most years there are no separations whatsoever at Dartmouth and it remains a punishment applied only in particularly egregious cases. 

Counting only separations is a little misleading, however, as in addition to the three completed proceedings, four students voluntarily withdrew from the College prior to the completion of proceedings. Thus, the number of students leaving the college due to sexual assault claims is more than double what activists have claimed, though still probably lower than what they desire. 

Besides the three separations and the four withdrawals, there were twenty-six other Dartmouth undergraduates who faced college judicial hearings related to sexual misconduct, according to Committee on Standards’ own summary data. Of those twenty-six, eleven cases ended in the acquittal of the accused student due to insufficient evidence. According to COS, most of these cases dealt with disputes over the level of consent to certain acts and whether a reasonable person would have considered a partially inebriated student able to give consent. 

That leaves fifteen cases where students were found responsible for misconduct but punished with something less than expulsion. Three cases ended with only permanent College Probation; unsurprisingly these were somewhat less severe cases. For instance, in one of the cases a pair of students essentially engaged in sexual badgering, repeatedly asking another student for sex despite being told to leave. However, the harassment ended there and did not escalate. 

Twelve students faced suspensions. These cases were severe but still clearly fell in a different category than those cases ending in expulsion. Several cases involve students clearly too intoxicated to give consent, while others involve coerced sexual contact that, in the College’s lingo, fell short of intercourse. Despite occasional assumptions that suspensions amount to a “slap on the wrist” or a “six month vacation,” eight of the cases required suspensions of at least one years, and some required six or eight consecutive leave terms. It’s unclear how many students, if any, decided to transfer rather than serve out their lengthy suspensions. 

While just over three sex offense cases go before COS each year, this total is well below the overall number of sex offenses that are reported at Dartmouth each year. Safety and Security’s crime logs found fifteen sexual assaults between the years 2009 and 2011 (this presumably is the same source RealTalk cited in their protest). The College’s 2012 Clery Report, a summary of campus crime mandated by federal law, shows even more as it incorporates claims brought to entities besides Safety and Security. According to the Clery Report, Dartmouth had fifteen forcible sex offenses (a category combining rape and forcible fondling) in 2011 alone, preceded by twenty-two in 2010 and ten in 2009 for a total of forty-seven reported forcible sex offenses in the past three years. 

If we want to claim that “Dartmouth has a problem,” it’s helpful to compare these statistics with similar colleges. Harvard, with 6,500 undergraduates in Cambridge, had twentysix reported forcible sexual offenses in 2011, very close to Dartmouth’s number when accounting for its larger size. With the rest of the Ivies, however, Dartmouth fared quite poorly. In comparison, Yale had eighteen such offenses in 2011, but that was a significant spike from ten and seven in the previous two years. Brown, on the other hand, had a mere seven reported offenses in 2011, despite having several thousand more students and being located on the relatively mean streets of Providence, Rhode Island. Columbia and Cornell had just four offenses each in 2011 despite being very large. 

So Dartmouth looks pretty bad matched with the other Ivies, then (besides Harvard, that is). Surely, however, we must be better than some other class of schools. How about the sexually repressed kids at those Catholic universities? Nope! Notre Dame had just nineteen offenses from 2009-11 for its eight thousand undergrads, and Georgetown had twenty-one with about the same student count. Franciscan University, a small college of 2,000 in the recently infamous town of Steubenville, Ohio, has had only two reported sex offenses in the past three years! Well, what about the unwashed, unprivileged masses crowding large state schools? UNH’s Clery Report lists forty results in the last 3 years, less than Dartmouth’s forty-seven, and UNH has twice as many undergrads! How about Ohio State, with 42,000 undergrads packed into a school with tons of elite athletes? A scant sixty-one forcible sex offenses over three years, just 50% more assaults with ten times the population. 

On the plus side, Dartmouth did not finish in dead last in my admittedly non-rigorous search. Amherst College had an identical count of fifteen reported forcible sexual offenses in 2011, but Amherst only has 1,800 undergrads. 

Based purely on looking at reports, then, it looks like Dartmouth does indeed have a problem, relative both to other schools and to the population at large as well. If this data can be accepted at face value, Dartmouth is genuinely in need of improvement. However, there’s a major complicating factor that is the source of heavy doubt and disagreement: Report rates. Rape is frequently said to be a heavily underreported crime, if not the most underreported crime. According to the protesters and many others, 95% of sexual assaults at college are not reported to the authorities. This is a major claim and if true drastically alters our understanding of Dartmouth’s sexual assault rate. The fifteen assaults officially recorded in S&S’s crime logs would balloon to 300. 

The prime piece of evidence for the 95% claim is a report by the Department of Justice released in 2000, entitled “The Sexual Victimization of College Women.” The report draws upon a survey of over 4,000 women who were attending colleges and universities in the year 1996. Said survey was quite exhaustive in just about every way one could hope. It was randomized to take women from universities all across the country, rather than from just one or a handful. The response rate was over 85%, keeping non-response bias to a minimum. The questions were relatively well-designed, leaving as little as possible to interpretation or vagueness. In a deft touch, they even told survey respondents to limit their responses to the beginning of the 1996 school year and later, thus avoiding the effects of memory decay. 

The results of this robust survey were grim. 1.7 percent of college women claimed to have suffered, in the previous school year alone, experiences that the researchers classified as “completed rapes.” Several more were victims of attempted rapes or lesser sexual coercion.  

These stats, if true, would be utterly flabbergasting relative to conventional measurements. 2% of college women being raped every year would translate to a rape rate of 1,000 per 100,000 people. Given that there are 20.3 million college students in the United States, that would come out to 203,000 students being raped every single year. According to the FBI’s National Crime Victimization Survey, on the other hand, America had less than 90,000 sexual assaults, total, in 2011, and even RAINN, an independent anti-sexual assault organization, estimates that only 207,774 rapes or sexual assaults occur each year. Clearly, somebody’s numbers are way off. 

The reason the DOJ report could estimate a rape rate so much higher than conventional totals is linked with the other bombshell of the report, cited by the RealTalk protesters: According to the study, 95% of “completed rape” victims never report the incident to authorities. This is a dramatic claim; by comparison, the FBI estimates that about half of rapes are reported, and even another DOJ study in 2006 upped the report rate to 12%.  

There are other reasons to feel doubtful of the DOJ survey’s numbers. One reason is simply time. The survey itself concerned events in 1996 and 1997, and in the sixteen years since then rape rates have fallen significantly and there has been a great deal of campaigning to encourage the reporting of sexual assault on campus. As a result, the report rate may have risen. That would explain the 2006 study’s increased number. While the increase seems small, it makes a big difference; if Dartmouth’s report rate were 12% then the fifteen assaults reported to S&S from 2009 to 2011 would extrapolate to 125 total assaults instead of 300. Still a tragedy, but fairly different numbers. 

Reading closely into the 2000 study finds other interesting data nuggets regarding the low report rate. Women were given a large array of reasons they could offer for why they chose not to make a report. Many women decided not to make reports for very unfortunate reasons, such as a fear of reprisal or a fear of bothering the police. 

The most commonly stated reason for not reporting, cited by a full 65% of respondents who were listed as victims of “completed rapes,” was that they “did not think it was serious enough to report.” Nearly half also did not consider what had happened to them to be rape, despite the surveyor’s classification. There are several reasons this could be so. Some of it may stem from an unwillingness to identify a boyfriend, family member, or friend as a rapist, or from a belief that rape is committed by strangers. However, it’s also very possible that many of the incidents were indeed not that severe in some way or another, and the survey overreached in classifying certain acts as rape when the average person does not. Also worthy of consideration is the factor of punishment. Rape is a major crime that leads to years in prison and a slot on the sex offender registries, and it is conceivable that some women may have refused to report because, even if they felt wronged, they did not believe the assault warranted destroying the attacker’s life. In other words, the more seriously we treat rape, the higher people may raise their personal threshold for what rape is. This is all speculation, however, and to make any strong assumptions would be hubristic. 

This matter of punishments, though, brings us back to a major complaint of the protesters, the fact that only three students have faced expulsion for sexual assault in recent history. Some, such as the group Dartmouth Change, have advocated mandatory expulsion for all students found guilty of sexual assault. Of course, such mandatory expulsions can be more troubling than they appear at first glance, since college sexual assault hearings are far from the criminal courts that most people associate with rape hearings.  

Legal professionals have a minimal role and nobody would mistake the proceedings for constitutional due process. Perhaps most troubling is the evidence standard. A normal criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In collegiate hearings, even the more rigorous proceedings will require a charge only meet the standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” which is supposed to represent about 75% proof (how one assigns a percent value to evidence has never been particularly clear). However, many activists favor the use of a “preponderance of evidence” standard, where a simple majority of evidence is sufficient to declare guilt. This is the standard Dartmouth already uses.  

The argument has been made that the preponderance standard is necessary because the use of a stricter standard implies that the accuser’s word is not equal to the word of the accused. Relying on preponderance, so it goes, puts the two sides on equal footing. This may be the case, but what it ignores is that the consequences of a COS hearing are far from equal for the two sides.  

We require proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal trials because the punishment of citizens by the state is an awesome power that should only be applied in places of relative certainty. Similarly, expulsion from college is a severe, life-altering event with effects comparable to a brief prison stint. If we mix mandatory expulsions with the preponderance standard of evidence, it is inevitable that we will end up expelling more than one innocent student.  

This is part of the reason why sexual assault is often punished with suspensions instead. When the threshold for guilt is lower, punishments must be less severe to compensate. Dartmouth can have a higher conviction rate, or it can have expulsions, but to try having both would be destructive. 

Dartmouth has a sexual assault problem. How severe, it is hard to tell. A solution must be found, but mass expulsions is not it. 

--Blake Neff

[Print] Alumni Organization on Sexual Assault

Recently, The Dartmouth Review had the opportunity to speak with Susy Struble, the organizing member of DartmouthChange. A member of the Class of 1993 and a concerned alumna, she recently cofounded the organization with the goal of understanding the extent of the sexual assault problem on Dartmouth’s campus and working with alumni, administrators, and current students to reduce its severity.   

The Dartmouth Review (TDR): Please tell us a bit about yourself, your experience at Dartmouth, and how you came to be involved with Dartmouthchange.

Susy Struble: Well, I’m a 1993 graduate of the College. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and it was just an enormous deal for me to come from a public school in a tiny, Midwestern farm town and go to Dartmouth College. It meant a lot to my family and it meant a lot to me. While I was there, I had an amazing experience and I deeply love the place. I was involved in the Greek System, and loved that. I definitely got involved in issues surrounding sexual assault [and I] was an early organizer with a group called Greeks Against Rape, which tried to facilitate open discussions in the sororities and fraternities and between sororities and fraternities about the problems of sexual assault and harassment and general relationships between the sexes. That was all during my junior and senior year, so that was about my level of my involvement when I was at the College. Since then, I’ve moved out West. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area right now and I’m a pretty active alumna, and when I became aware of the College’s ongoing problems with sexual assault, it was an obvious place for me to try to make a difference.

 TDR: What were the origins of DartmouthChange and what made you decide to wade into the campus debate about sexual assault?

Struble: The genesis for DartmouthChange was certainly my experience on campus, and that of too many of my brothers and sisters as well. [I really ended up] getting involved after 20 years of being away from the campus after reading the Rolling Stone article that came out. Wherever the truth of all that actually lies, it just put a bug in my ear that things maybe haven’t changed so much on campus in the last 20 years. I can think back to the late 80’s early 90s [and] we were Neanderthals back then certainly, and I thought we cannot possibly be the same as we were then. So I started asking around and [trying] to find out what’s actually going on around campus to see if there’s anything we can do. In thinking about it, I don’t know that there’s ever been a real concerted effort to try to get all of the different constituencies of campus – alumni, faculty, students, employees, greater Hanover community members, and parents – together to have a dialogue and work to reduce the divisiveness of this problem. 

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[Print] Tour Guide Misguidance

The adventure of touring college campuses as a high school student offers a welcome relief from an otherwise hectic, nerve-racking, and impersonal college admissions process. One can pore over a Princeton Review guidebook for hours on end, but for many prospective students, the determining influence in college selection may well be a campus visit. 

Few colleges boast campuses as impressive as Dartmouth’s. When I first stepped on to The Green late in my junior year of high school, by then a seasoned veteran of college tours, I came to a tremendous realization: this is what a college should look like. At the conclusion of my tour, I had determined that Dartmouth also felt like a college should. By November of my senior year, I had long since resolved to make Dartmouth my college, and I was fortunate enough to see my aspirations reach fruition. 

No single factor was more crucial in my decision making process than that fateful campus visit, and when I had the opportunity to apply for a position as a tour guide last year, I relished the prospect of similarly influencing prospective students. This is why, as a proud Dartmouth student and tour guide, I am profoundly worried by the persistent efforts of the College leadership and Admissions Office to ruin that experience for the next generation of prospective Dartmouth students.

A few weeks ago, I returned from an off term in New York to find that a “mandatory refresher session” from the Admissions Office was required of all guides. At this session, a series of changes to the regular tour route were announced. Most were innocuous (the Hop and surrounding buildings are now to be referred to as the “Arts District,” in case anyone was wondering). However, one change to the route seemed particularly calculated and “mandatory:” tour guides are henceforth NOT to bring their groups to Webster Avenue.

On this new tour, guides will squeeze a discussion of Dartmouth’s Greek Life into the tail end of the tour, in Collis, as part of a larger discussion of campus extra-curricular options. Apparently, our Admissions Office has reshaped its tour route in the hope that prospective students and their families will overlook a certain Rolling Stone article if they don’t see Fraternity Row itself: out of sight, out of mind! Pretending, for a moment, that this thinly veiled attempt to defer attention from Dartmouth’s Greek scene is actually a well-intentioned attempt to design a more appealing tour, if I were a prospective student, I would wonder why my tour guide was off-handedly mentioning the very heart of Dartmouth’s social life between explanations of Collis Miniversity and Thursday Night Salsa. 

The fact remains: Greek Life is not just another extracurricular option. This is not to detract from the many extra-curricular activities Dartmouth offers, which are fantastic selling points. Rather, Greek Life is an option that well over half of eligible students choose to partake in; it presents a diverse and multi-faceted group of organizations for students to choose from, and it is the principal source of social life at Dartmouth. In the event prospective students fail to notice their bucolic surroundings, it is worth noting that Dartmouth is not a city school; students cannot choose among bars, comedy clubs, significant music venues, and live theatre on a nightly basis. Naturally, alternative social spaces exist on campus. But for a majority of Dartmouth students, nightlife and Greek Life are synonymous. 

The decision to omit a larger discussion of Greek Life from tours will appear to prospective students, at best, a clumsy attempt to divert attention from recent P.R. setbacks. The truly frustrating result of this revision to the campus tour, however, is that it denies guides the opportunity to highlight the truly unique and positive aspects of Dartmouth’s Greek scene. 

Critics of Greek Life loudly cite its misogynistic character, its exclusive nature, and a host of other complaints. These problems are not unique to Dartmouth’s fraternities. Rather, Dartmouth’s Greek scene is uncommonly inclusive. 

At any other school with a Greek system, a freshman male would be barred from entering a fraternity party unless he knew several brothers, or was accompanied by a number of female friends deemed suitable by the brothers of the fraternity. At Dartmouth, a student ID guarantees entry to any Greek party on campus. My friends at other schools largely rushed fraternities at the onset of freshman fall; they all live in their fraternity houses, eat their meals in their fraternities’ kitchens, and consequently develop a narrow circle of friends. At Dartmouth, these problems are absent. 

What is particularly irksome, as a tour guide, is the utter lack of autonomy afforded by the Admissions Office. Memorable tour guides are effective tour guides, and effective tour guides rarely regurgitate carefully tailored scripts. 

Apparently, the Admissions Office would rather its guides err on the side of mediocrity than be entrusted with the common sense not to mention binge drinking and Andrew Lohse’s “kiddie pools full of vomit” to their tour groups. When discussing Greek Life, guides are ordered to “stay on script” and not to “prolong the discussion” beyond the 180 words the Admissions Office deems appropriate for a comprehensive discussion of Dartmouth’s Greek system. I have managed in the past to complete my tours without terrifying any parents or mentioning my own affiliation. After Andrew Lohse’s Rolling Stone muckraking article, tour guides were even summoned to an emergency session on how to handle any questions about hazing or drinking at Dartmouth. These new measures by the Admissions Office are wholly unnecessary, contrived, and indicative of a worrying trend in the decisions of Dartmouth’s incompetent leadership. 

At risk of beating a dead horse, I would be remiss not to mention the Admission Office’s ludicrous decision to remodel the Dimensions show. In an explanatory email, an Admissions Office representative wrote to all tour guides: “This year, we are designing a welcome program that invites our admitted student visitors to see/hear how Dartmouth students are realizing their passions in significant ways.” What the Admissions Office neglects to realize is that students’ passions are realized at universities across America. A prospective student interested purely in academic prestige, extra-curricular achievement, and impressive student bodies would choose Harvard, Princeton, or Yale over our humble College. Our Dimensions show, our social life, and our quirky traditions are not insignificant afterthoughts for the Admissions Office to conceal from prospective students; they are the life and soul of the school, and the reason Dartmouth commands such fierce loyalty from its students and alumni. Hiding these aspects is incredibly shortsighted. Our system is not broken, yet the Admissions Office and administration seek to fix it. Why? Because it’s easy. It’s easy to sweep something under the rug instead of dealing with it honestly and forthrightly. It’s easy to avoid difficult subjects. But it’s not the right move, it’s just easy. 

--Jake Rascoff