Beyond #MeToo: The Therapeutic Action of (Female) Agency and Après-Coup in The Tale1

ABSTRACT This essay considers Jennifer Fox’s largely autobiographical feature film The Tale from the vantage point of the #MeToo movement, which coincided with and contextualized its release. Fox’s fidelity to an actual story she wrote at age 13 enlists the viewer in deconstructing the binaries of unambiguous victim/perpetrator, victim/survivor, truth–fiction, memory–desire; omnipotence–agency; coercion–consent; then–now; psyche–soma; fantasy–reality; and patriarchal privilege–women’s voices. The film reveals the intersubjective dimension of truth as a contestation between desire and destruction of knowing (oneself, the other). It refuses any dichotomy between childhood fantasy and traumatic seduction, insisting on the perplexing reality and persistent effects of their ensnarement. Most powerfully, the film bears witness to the power and therapeutic action of (female) agency, and attests to the après-coup or afterwardsness of truth, as we witness the protagonist—between a voice of now and a voice of then—imaginatively rewrite her experience of the past in the present.