She pandered
Peter Tonguette
At some point in the last decade, some time after the election of former President Donald Trump and before the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, mass media began encouraging us to think of women not as individual human beings, each with her own virtues, flaws, and quirks, but as an aggrieved collective: always right, always wronged, never to be doubted.
It is the “always” and “never” part of the equation that unwittingly insults. A few short years ago, even the most pedestrian Hollywood studio executive would have told you that women, no less than men, were capable of being both victims and perpetrators, truth-tellers and deceivers, depending on the requirements of a story. The makers of Fatal Attraction excused neither the offhand infidelity of Michael Douglas nor the insane possessiveness of Glenn Close. The film, whatever its artistic limitations, was credible in presenting what was once widely understood as the universality of human depravity. Barbara Stanwyck tempted Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity not to represent women as a mythic construct but just because that’s what happens in that plot.
In the old days, actresses relished playing complicated, ambiguous characters who could hold their own with men; the worst insult was to cast a woman as a dumbly nonspecific mother or a wife. Back then, women would rather be an unlikeable but nuanced character than a vague blob of positive representation.
Some of the most acclaimed movies of recent years, however, have featured talented actresses in parts scarcely better defined than the wives and mothers of yesteryear. Films such as Promising Young Woman, Luckiest Girl Alive, and She Said present their female protagonists not as living, breathing people but as mouthpieces for ideas scarcely more complex than a slogan. The idiosyncrasies of personal behavior, the inexplicable actions and inactions that are the stuff of all of our lives, are cast aside. These actresses transform themselves into standees who represent Women, plural and in capital letters.
In Promising Young Woman, Oscar-nominated Carey Mulligan stars as Cassie, who, posing as a lush, dupes caddish young men into coming close to exploiting her. Later, she targets specific men responsible for a friend’s sexual assault and its aftermath. Cassie’s retribution tour is entrapment at best, pure vigilantism at worst, but the film presents her as a badass avenger in the mold of Uma Thurman’s “The Bride” in Kill Bill. The premise could make for an entertaining Brian De Palma thriller, but in this modern version, Cassie is not an obsessed psychotic so much as an avatar of a concept of vengeance for broader social ills.
Sometimes, these films uncomfortably link genuine trauma with material success: Luckiest Girl Alive revolves around Ani (Mila Kunis), who, as a high school student, suffered the double horror of being the victim of a gang rape and later being erroneously accused of having a role in a school shooting. Ani is a completely unbelievable concoction: The film measures Ani’s recovery from her past through the prism of her progress as an up-and-coming journalist. She graduates from writing about sex for a women’s magazine to a spot on the New York Times Magazine to a guest on the Today show. (Only in movies like this do such formerly big-time legacy media outlets still have such currency.) “This is where I belong,” she says, trading her seemingly caring fiance for a desk in the New York Times building. This is not drama. It’s a careerist fantasy premised on the patently insulting notion that every woman is a victim seeking public attention and approbation.
The latest and saddest entrant in the genre is She Said, which, in pretending that the New York Times’s real-life MeToo reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, are journalistic heroes on the order of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, also imagines that Zoe Kazan and Mulligan (cast as Kantor and Twohey, respectively) are movie icons to rank with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (who starred as Woodward and Bernstein in Alan J. Pakula’s great film adaptation of All the President’s Men).
Audiences, who decided in great numbers to avoid this sanctimonious rehash of recent history, disagreed. What finally killed She Said, though, is not merely its outsize idea of its own importance but its insistence that the fictionalized Kantor and Twohey hover above criticism. In this, the film resembles many contemporary journalism movies. Recent movies such as Spotlight and The Post perpetuate the idea that the reason to become a reporter is to affect social change rather than — as was expressed in earlier masterpieces of the form, including The Front Page and Deadline U.S.A. — to drink, evade domestic responsibilities, and poke around interesting areas of town.
But She Said is a worse offender because it adds to this stew of self-righteousness the additional demand that we accept Kantor and Twohey as selfless, sullen missionaries on behalf of Women. This is the sort of movie in which the clunky line “We’re looking into problematic behavior towards women by Weinstein” is said with a straight face. The characters’ gloomy moodiness is offered as proof of their sainthood. The heroines here simply cannot be wrong, and we are meant to be filled with “You go, girl” pride when the camera lingers on Kazan and Mulligan’s pensive faces as they are about to publish.
We can only conclude that the heroes of this group of films, Cassie and Ani and the fictionalized Kantor and Twohey, aren’t intended as flesh-and-blood characters about whom we should make up our minds as their stories unfold. Instead, they are soulless ciphers for a movement never to be questioned.
It would be nice to think that art and entertainment become more enlightened over time, and the present wave of MeToo-inspired movies is certainly responsive to the prevailing cultural winds. But it’s wrong to equate pandering with depth. Nearly every actress who flourished during Hollywood’s Golden Age accessed a greater range of the human experience: Lauren Bacall gamely traded barbs with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not; Gene Tierney was a heartless, not ennobled murderess in Leave Her to Heaven; Jean Seberg moved romantic partners around like pieces on a chessboard in Bonjour Tristesse; Marilyn Monroe seduced; Janet Leigh shrieked; and Julie Christie charmed. In creating their characters, none of these actresses were beholden to stand in for their sex writ large. And any one of them would have made mincemeat out of those contemporary actresses whose purpose is to sanctify bearers of XX chromosomes as pure.
Call them cardboard cutouts of outrage or marionettes of rage, but never, ever think they have something deep or meaningful to say about the human condition. Nowhere in She Said or Promising Young Woman or a half-dozen other similar movies do we feel that we are in the company of actual women; we are in the presence of Women.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.