The Bad Girl: Part II

            For a reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I was disappointed with the ending. It seemed like the bad girl settled for a temporary solution as a last resort before she died. I also feel like there wasn’t enough background about Ricardo’s writing to include it in the bad girl’s closing lines.

Something else that struck me as odd was the manner in which both Ricardo and the bad girl acknowledge the sadomasochistic relationship that exists between them. In the literature and cinema we’ve looked at so far, the masochist doesn’t directly address the fact that he or she is a masochist. For example, Conchita was well aware of the sadistic games she was playing, but Mathieu wasn’t consciously aware that he was agreeing to be in a sadomasochistic relationship. He understood that she was fickle and cruel, but I don’t think he realized that he liked it. He didn’t recognize this cruelty as the cause of his undying desire. Ricardo, however, openly acknowledges his masochistic nature and even idealizes it, telling the bad girl, “We’re the perfect pair: the sadist and the masochist.” (p. 185)

            The bad girl doesn’t always play the part of the sadist, however. When she meets Fukuda, she undergoes a complete role reversal. She was horribly sadistic to all of her men, until Fukuda. For whatever reason, he tamed her and she became extremely masochistic only for him. She also shows subtle signs of her inner masochist in the scene where Ricardo comes home and he slaps her. Her response is, “You’re finally learning how to treat a woman.” She then proceeds to have passionate, and extremely painful sex with him. This seems like a strange response, not only for her but also for anyone.

The way she convinces herself and everyone around her of the Lagos rape cover story indicates that she might have a history of repressing memories. The bad girl changes identities so quickly, it’s hard to keep track of her. She may be running from a past that continues to haunt her and seep into every identity she creates for herself. Perhaps as a child she was abused or suffered some sort of trauma and her instinctual reaction was to repress the memory. After years of doing this, she conditioned herself into a pattern of finding a new identity as a means of keeping her safe and repressing old memories.  Each new identity offered the opportunity to forget anything she felt threatened by, guilty for, or caused her to feel negative emotions. She could start over with a new slate as a new person and the only one who knew her in all her forms was Ricardo.