Against the Re-Performance of Trauma: A Refusal to Watch “Being Maria”

Monday, April 14, 2025

Some films should not exist.
Not because the subject is too hard, but because the structure is rotten.
Being Maria is one of those films.

Marketed as a tribute, as a necessary retelling, as a form of justice through art — it is, in truth, none of those things. It is a re-violation disguised as homage. A spectacle of trauma wrapped in ethical language. A film that dares to reenact what should never be staged again.

It was impossible to stay.
The nausea wasn’t symbolic.
It was somatic — full-bodied, visceral.
What they called “difficult to watch” was, in fact, unbearable because it was wrong.

This is not about censorship.
It is about refusal.
Refusal to turn trauma into a cinematic loop.
Refusal to see another body used to channel a story that should have been held, not replayed.

There is a growing trend in cinema today — films that claim to “give voice” to victims by restaging their pain with excruciating realism. Close-ups. Long takes. Brutal “acting.” What’s being praised as courage is often just aestheticized suffering.

Let’s be clear: re-performance is not recognition.
It is simulation.
And in the case of sexual violence, it is a second betrayal.

The camera does not heal. It captures.
And when it captures a reenacted assault — no matter how “necessary” the director claims it is — it re-inscribes the violence into the body of another actor, another vessel.
The industry claps.
The critics call it “important.”
But the body of the viewer, if still awake, knows better.
It flinches, contracts, revolts.
It says: this is not the way.

What does it mean to watch a trauma you already know?
It means nothing new is revealed.
It means the image is flattened.
It means the pain becomes consumable.

And for whom is this consumption made?
Not for survivors.
Not for healing.
But for a public hungry for catharsis, for “powerful performances,” for that strange mix of pity and adrenaline that trauma films deliver so efficiently.

“Being Maria” should never have been made.
Because it does not protect.
It does not respect.
It reenacts.

And reenactment is not justice.
It is a ritual of public cleansing — where the audience gets to feel virtuous for “facing hard truths,” without having to confront their complicity in a system that commodifies pain.

Real justice is silent.
Real justice is opaque.
Real justice does not require the body to be offered again.

This isn’t just a critique of one film.
It is a warning.
A call to rethink the ethics of visual storytelling.
A call to stop equating exposure with truth.

The most radical thing art can do is refuse to show.
To protect what cannot be seen.
To hold space instead of replaying violence.

Let this be said clearly:
Enough with the reenactments.
Enough with the retraumatizing “tributes.”
Enough with using cinema as an altar for pain.

Some things are not meant to be filmed.
Some wounds are not meant to become content.
And the body, if we truly listen to it, already knows.