I saw The Gits at the Clinton over the weekend, a documentary about the Seattle band whose frontwoman, Mia Zapata, was raped and murdered in 1993 while on her way home from a bar. It's only playing until Thursday, and, even though I am going to bitch about it in a minute, overall I really recommend it. Here is the trailer:

Unsurprisingly, the movie is really difficult to watch. There were only about ten people in the audience when I saw it, and judging from the sniffles, most of them (us) were in tears by the end. Amy pretty well nails it in her review, but I can't resist throwing my two cents in, which I will post after the jump.

My biggest problem with the film (aside from the too-frequent use of the same audio over live video from different shows) is that it devotes too much screen time to establishing what a great person Mia was, and too little to exploring the ramifications of her rape and murder. It's not necessary to establish that the woman was a saint in order to convey that her death was a tragedy--but filmmaker Kerri O'Kane loads the doc with testimonials from irrelevant-seeming college friends, pictures of Mia as a kid, and tear-jerking interviews with Mia's father. Yes, it was a horrible thing that happened to an apparently pretty great person; yes, Mia's dad seems like the sweetest guy ever and I love how much he loves his daughter; yes, I cried at the ending. Making me cry is pretty easy, though.

The Gits turns Mia Zapata into a saint; maybe I'm a little too eager for her to be a symbol, but I just don't think the documentary did an adequate job contextualizing Mia's murder. The year after Zapata died I bought my first Bikini Kill record, and it was around that time that I learned about her death: Not because she was an amazing person, but because she was a member of a certain scene, embracing (or rejecting, more precisely) certain ideas about how women can and should define themselves, and she got raped and killed anyway. Yet aside from one woman mentioning that the police asked her not to tell people that Mia was raped, and an interesting conversation about how it became difficult for friends to trust one another after her death, the R word rarely comes up in the film.

While it's cool that Joan Jett did a benefit to help pay a private investigator to find Zapata's killer, that effort was ultimately unsuccessful, and Jett's presence in The Gits is touching but ultimately kind of irrelevant. Meanwhile Home Alive, a self-defense/anti-violence nonprofit formed after Mia's death, is far more important (and still kicking) but gets less screen time. It's certainly affecting to hear how members of Zapata's immediate scene remember her, but I was left wishing for more on the impact of Zapata's death on the broader punk rock and riot grrrl communities.