1. Introduction. Film and the #MeToo Movement

The Me Too movement, also known on social media as #MeToo, is a contemporary female led social movement against sexual violence under all its forms. The movement took its first steps on MySpace as far back as 2006 after American Activist Tarana Burke decided to take matters into her own hands and attempt to provide support for victims of sexual abuse and assault who, like herself, were let down by the system (Burke). Nevertheless, it is when Alyssa Milano, a famous American actress notably known for her role in the Fantasy late nineteen-nineties and early two thousands Television Drama Charmed, tweeted in October 2017 about the Harvey Weinstein case, encouraging all women around the world to use the hashtag to talk about their own experiences with sexual predators and support others dealing with similar situations, that it went viral and entered the mainstream media bubble (Milano 2017).

As the hashtag grew in popularity within the film industry, it started to also extend to include other sectors and areas of life ranging from sports, business and music to street harassment and other daily occurrences. Nevertheless, because the purpose of this paper is to analyze the representation of women in a selected pool of films which talk about or are related to the Me Too movement, it will solely focus on the movement’s relation to the film industry. In order to highlight the interdependent relation between Hollywood and the Me Too movement, an analysis of the representation of women within the works selected will be juxtaposed to relevant information found on the events which unfolded in real life and inspired said representations as well as information on what transpires behind the scenes. With this in mind, the selected works chosen for this analysis are Jay Roach’s retelling of the Roger Ailes case in Bombshell (directed by Jay Roach and released in 2019), Kitty Green’s take on the systems surrounding Me Too stories within the film industry in The Assistant (Directed by Kitty Green and released in 2019) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (Directed by Quentin Tarantino and released in 2019). Additionally, close attention will be given to the kind of discourse being circulated through the kinds of representations of women being presented by post-Me Too Hollywood as well as the role that the writers/directors’ personal ideologies play in the creation of them. This will help determine under which type of cinema the selected movies fall under.

As for the theoretical framework selected for this paper, it is mainly composed of a combination of new historicist theory with the feminist perspective on film. Since new historicism, as a literary theory and approach, greatly relies on the juxtaposition of text and co-text, it allows for the study of the three movies in relation to both the writers’ socio-cultural background and the Me Too movement. The three new historicist principles and concepts which will inform this analysis are Michel Foucault’s Power-Knowledge-Discourse relation and pervasiveness, Louis Montrose’s referential relation between the text(s) and its co-text(s) and Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious.

Power, discourse and knowledge are recurrent themes within Michel Foucault’s works but one common idea when it comes to these concepts is how pervasive and unescapable they are. In his work entitled The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault argues that power can be repressive or normalizing and that the latter is more insidious and subtle (Foucault 1978, 5). He also discusses how normalizing forms of power mold behaviors and activities that people do into forms of discourses that are used to produce power (Foucault 1978). While in this particular book, the French philosopher focuses on the idea that sexuality is a social and historical construct, an idea which is prevalent in feminist discourse to this day, his arguments will be used in this paper as a basis for the classification of the movies into three categories. In other words, here, the film industry will be regarded as the normalizing form of power and the components associated with classic narrative cinema in relation to women will be regarded as the discourse being circulated to uphold said power structures in place. As such, the classical Hollywood narrative on gender will be referred to as the hegemonic discourse against which the films are tested while any other form of discourse, based on whether it only contains some or is only composed of subversive elements, will be classified under either negotiated or oppositional.

Louis Montrose’s idea will be used in a more straightforward way as this paper will juxtapose the primary texts selected, namely Bombshell, The Assistant and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, with various co-texts (Montrose, Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture 1989, 23), or what is often viewed as secondary texts, that connect to the text itself but also to the director and writer’s socio-cultural, historical and political background. In his famous essay on H. A. Veeser’s The New Historicism, Montrose highlights how literature is not, and cannot be, detached from its socio-political, cultural and economic context. Furthermore, he argues that the act of reading and writing Literature is, in itself, a socially and politically determined act as it is heavily influenced by both the reader and the writer’s surroundings, beliefs and values as well as the dominant ideas circulating within their social spheres (Montrose 1989, 23). To put it differently, the information compiled on the Me Too era, on the people involved in the making of the films and on the events which transpired behind the scenes will be used as tools to examine the narratives and representations pushed forward by the movies. It is also noteworthy that Montrose himself was interested in the issue of gender and wrote an article for now iconic new historicist journal Representations discussing the pervasiveness of gender in all aspects of life, its socially and historically constructed nature and the role played by these notions in various representations (Montrose 1991). Not only does this make his method compatible with the feminist literature which will be used in the analysis of the main texts, it also follows the same argumentative line earlier described through Foucault and that which will be explored below in relation to Jameson.

In the case of Fredric Jameson, the argumentative line found within the first chapter of his famous book entitled The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act will also be adopted for the purpose of this study. In his book, Jameson argues that everything that we say, do or write should be considered as a politically motivated act (Jameson 1981). This assumption will constitute the basis of the analysis of the primary texts as a result of the directors and writers’ goals, and therefore political agendas. This will contextualize and aid the dissection of the intra and extra diegetic elements found within their cinematographic works.

It is important to acknowledge the fact that, since its coinage, New Historicism has been heavily criticized by feminist scholars due to its ambiguous position on gender. Indeed, the likes of Judith Newton accuses the latter of completely ignoring gender, refusing to take feminism seriously while appropriating assumptions which informed the movement long before they were used by new historicists. Carol Thomas Neely is another significant detractor who argues against the use of this theory as she believes that it tends, “to oppress women, repress sexuality, and subordinate gender issues” (Neely 7). Another interesting feminist take on the approach can be found in Myra Jehlen’s works which deplores the fact that new historicism, as an approach, collapses, “all levels of reality into one level of representation” (Walkowitz, Jehlen and Chevigny 36). Nonetheless, feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis’ works highlight how, while the method fails to deliver the necessary answers when it deals with women as, “the real historical beings who cannot as yet be defined outside of those discursive formations, but whose material existence is nonetheless certain”, it is, in her opinion, well abled to address women as, “a fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses dominant in Western cultures” (De Lauretis 5). Keeping in mind the fact that one of the main purposes of this paper is to analyze filmic representations of women and, based on the usefulness of, to refer back to Jehlen, making both the historical context and the primary texts collide into one equally as important level of representation, one could argue that the supplementation of new historicism with feminist film theory would solve the issue of the former’s lack of positioning in relation to gender.

Furthermore, it should also be noted that, while most new historicist works do indeed avoid the issue of gender in their analysis of literary texts, the ambiguity of the method in relation to literary theory as well as the diversity of what may make up a work’s historical context makes it malleable enough to be adaptable to its user’s own interests and subjective goals. This is proven truth by the fact that, in one of Montrose’s articles cited above, he uses the theory to deal with the, “gendering of the New World as feminine, and the sexualizing of its exploitation, conquest and settlement” (Montrose 1991, 2). As such, not only can new historicism be used to analyze gender related issues, it will allow for this analysis of the movies to be extended and linked to what goes on behind the scenes as well as the general American historical context.

Along with the use of these various concepts and assumptions, the emphasis put on the portrayal of women in American cinema makes of feminist film theory an important component for this discussion. Reference will be made to various feminist film theorists and scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, Ann Doane and Christine Gledhill throughout the analysis of the three films along with Feminist scholar Barbara Creed whose study of the stereotyping of lesbian bodies and theorization of the double will also be referred to when considering some of the personal additions made to the story of the FOX News women by Bombshell’s writer.

While Laura Mulvey’s essay has been criticized since its release, her conceptualization of the Gaze, problematization of spectatorship in cinema as well as categorization of images of women within it into three “looks” (Mulvey 1999) all offer a useful framework for the analysis of female representation. Claire Johnston’s discussion of the canonization of the male auteur in cinema as well as feminist counter-cinema (Johnston 1999) will also play an important role in understanding the dynamics at work within Hollywood. As for Ann Doane’s explanation of the patriarchal modes of representation (Doane 1999) found within classic Hollywood narratives, it will be referred to when discussing the misconduct of male directors within the industry. Finally, Christine Gledhill will inform the discussion in relation to the negotiations made to make mainstream film more digestible for the audience while maintaining some aspect of the classic dominant narrative when it comes to female representation (Gledhill 2000).

2. Bombshell: Roger Ailes’s Fall Take Two

Before diving into the analysis of Roach’s Bombshell, it should be kept in mind that, in addition to the plot, characters and ideologies, the movie’s historical accuracy will also be questioned. The main objective of this sub-section is to determine which kind of political agendas and narratives are imbedded into the motion picture and, most importantly, whether the latter’s reception from a post-Me Too audience is influenced by it.

As a starting point, it is interesting to analyze the film’s title and poster since both represent the first portals through which viewers come in contact and experience the latter. The word ‘Bombshell’ could be understood in two completely different ways depending on which definition of it is taken into consideration. The Oxford dictionary defines the word as, “1. an event or a piece of news which is unexpected and usually unpleasant” and “2. a very attractive woman” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries). As it can be observed from the way in which the three female characters’ faces are put together in the poster, they represent the same type of woman, the white woman with proportionate and, most importantly, conventionally attractive Caucasian features: thin, light skinned, blonde hair, blue eyes, arched brows, narrow nose, high cheekbones and strong jawline.

From this description, one may interpret this to be an evidently male maze tainted casting since, in a way, it aligns with what Mulvey highlights in her now famous paper entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in terms of the use of women as images designed to be looked at by “the bearer of the look” (Mulvey 1999, 808), however, what the movie trying to recreate and denounce is a highly normative work environment in which one’s looks is what gets them ahead. Furthermore, it has been known that FOX News, as a highly and openly conservative television network, tries to maintain a brand image which would appeal to its viewers who, according to statistics, are primarily 50 to 64 year-old white middle class republicans (Public Opinion Strategies 2019). This lack of diversity in features represented in the casting can therefore be explain by the fact that the characters are supposed to closely mirror real women whose features form Roger Ailes’, whose sexual abuse of female employees is captured in this movie, ideal type and potential victims, i.e., the stereotypical ‘blonde bombshell’.

It is in that sense that, by solely juxtaposing the poster with the film’s title, one could assume that the second definition of the word seems to be the most relevant to its content. Nevertheless, by taking a closer look at the smaller portion of the textual elements found within said poster, one can read, “Based on a real scandal”. While the word ‘scandal’ can be defined in many ways, nowadays, it is often associated to the ‘Yellow Press’, a term which refers to, “the type of journalism that relies on sensationalism and lurid exaggeration to attract readers” (Collins Dictionary), and understood as, “reports about actions or events that cause shock and disapproval” (Cambridge Dictionary). This makes the first definition of ‘Bombshell’ relevant since the events which unfolded inside the FOX News offices, once again a notoriously conservative News channel, and which involved a then well-known and respected media muggle allude to the fact that when this scandal was revealed to the public it did indeed act and feel like a bombshell but was also received as one within and outside of the News industry.

The Internet Movie Database (more commonly known as IMDb) provides the following description of Bombshell: “A group of women take on Fox News head Roger Ailes and the toxic atmosphere he presided over at the network” (IMDb). In reality, the movie portrays much more then that as it delves into the power dynamics that play a role in silencing victims of sexual abuse and harassment as well as the mechanics which helped them break away from that position. Although it does have its flaws and its fair share of historically inaccurate and/or dramatized moments, the movie succeeds, at least according to the testimonies of the real life victims who have commented on it after watching it, in capturing the intensity and tension building during some of the encounters between the women and Ailes, in “putting people in [their] shoes” (Bakhtiar 2020, 5:51-5:53), and highlighting the pattern-like manner in which these criminal offences unfolded over decades in a relatively short period of time –the film being less than an hour and forty five minutes.

Taking these arguments into consideration, although it may play a role in the audience’s reception of the film due to the fact that the three women all embody the dominant culture’s aesthetic standards, the visual representation of women is not purely designed for the spectator’s voyeuristic phantasy as it tends to be the case, according to Mulvey, when it comes to classical narratives (Mulvey 1999, 811). This interestingly makes the representation of women in this movie, at least from a visual standpoint, one that could be read, according to Christine Gledhill’s observations on the negotiation which occurs within mainstream cinema (Gledhill 2000), as one that would fall somewhere between what Stuart Hall would refer to as the preferred reading and the oppositional one (Hall 1973). Bombshell may therefore be considered to feature some aspects of what can be referred to as “negotiated cinema” (Cristian 2008, 96).

Nonetheless, Megyn Kelly herself points out some of the fabricated events which play out in the movie citing the following:

"They suggest that I had ran my debate questions for Trump by the Murdochs… that’s a fantasy, I never ran it by Ailes, the Murdochs or anyone other than my debate team. […] The notion that Roger liked the Donald Trump woman question [be]cause it created controversy and a TV moment […] and there surely were no protests of me at the GOP convention […] Oh yeah and our [Juliet Huddy] scene never happened! […] The notion that Irena Briganti did not plant hit pieces on talent is a fantasy" (Kelly 2020, 3:59-4:45).

While some elements of this list may seem to some like trivial details that would not take away from the overall message of the film, it is this very fact which makes taking a closer look at the historical inaccuracies and artistic liberties taken by both the writer and the director, both of whom are male, of the movie valuable. What is at stake here is not what adaptation studies would refer to as the Fidelity principle but the implications that come with every modification, addition or omission as, “the political perspective [is] not … some supplementary method, … an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today […] but rather …the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 2002, 1). With that in mind, it is alluded by the way in which both director Jay Roach and screenwriter Charles Randolph talk about FOX News, making others identify with Megyn Kelly (Randolph, Charles Randolph (‘Bombshell’ writer) on identifying with Megyn Kelly, Fox News achors | GOLD DERBY 2019) and about embarking on this project (Lindsay 2019) as well as the diction used to do so that they mostly identify with Democratic values. This is confirmed by the fact that Randolph expresses in a Writers Roundtable interview that, “[he] prefer[s] to write people who [he] do[es] not agree with” (Randolph, ‘Bombshell’ Writer Charles Randolph on The Women & Men Around Roger Ailes | Close Up 2019, 2:03-2:05). Despite Randolph claiming that Bombshell’s primary aim is to, “show how this issue transcends our sort of partisan biases” (Randolph, The Downfall Of Fox News’ Roger Ailes Comes To The Big Screen 2019), these left-wing values seem to seep into the construction of his screenplay and characterization.

Indeed, if one takes a look at the list of artistic liberties taken by the film, one can observe a Feminist desire to present all women in it, regardless of their political beliefs and own problematic past, as worthy of the audience’s empathy. The additional scene between Kelly and Huddy’s (Randolph, Bomshell 2019, 1:17:16-1:19:30) main function is to unlock the vulnerable and compassionate side of the lawyer to the viewer through the representation of women bonding. Prior to 2017, Megyn Kelly was often associated with and described as being stiff, rigid and serious (Rutenberg 2015), three adjectives which would not make a story’s main character relatable and sympathetic for cinematographic audiences. Moreover, making the main woman of the story, the primary narrator, the target of a protest does not only elevate the stakes for breaking her silence and build tension, it makes it seem as though the entire world is turning against her implicitly guiding the audience towards the sympathetic position which Randolph aims for them to be in. Furthermore, according to Kelly and other women present in that conversation, Irena Briganti, “a hundred percent would hit talent and did many times” (Kelly 2020, 4:57-4:59) and, “anything bad you hear about Fox News people, it’s probably by her” (Huddy 2020, 5:02-5:06). All these modifications made to the events and characters depicted suggest that there is a conscious effort being made by the writer and director to make all female characters appear to be more morally acceptable, and therefore suitable, for a Liberal audience.

Another significant addition to the story which was not mentioned by Kelly is the incorporation of fictional character Kayla Pospisil into the movie. Kayla, who is played by Margot Robbie, is said to have been designed to, “be our emotional center” (Randolph as cited in Hullender 2019). Taking into consideration the fabricated nature of this character, a few problematic issues come to mind which arise specifically from the screenplay and its writer’s lack of understanding of the other gender’s experiences rather than from an attempt to adapt real life stories and events. While some questionable scenes can be rationalized as a screen projection of the toxicity of the sexualizing and discriminatory environment that the film tries to capture, some other scenaristic choices are more polemical and should be discussed.
One problematic aspect of Kayla’s characterization is that it can easily be argued that the young ‘evangelist millenial’’s short, ambiguous and unexplained relationship with Jess Carr, played by Kate McKinnon, serves no narrative purpose other than appealing to the Male Gaze and allow the movie to gain ‘inclusivity points’ by depicting a homosexual relationship. If one omits the one unquestionably lesbian relationship scenes from the picture, no impact would be noticable as both characters already have enough of a close platonic bond for Kayla to get to the conclusions and place in which her character needs to be for her final scene and monologue. The addition of this almost purposeless one night stand with Jess is reminiscent of one of Barbara Creed’s description of the stereotyping of Lesbian bodies: The Narcissistic Lesbian. Creed argues that this stereotype heavily relies on the idea of the ‘double’ which presupposes that lesbian women are supposedly attracted to other women due to their likeness (Creed 1995, 100). While Creed argues in her chapter that this stereotype’s ‘danger’ from a male’s perspective is the latter’s exclusion and auto-eroticism (Creed 1995, 100), it could be debated that this category is, out of three stereotypes explored by the Feminist scholar, the most centered around the male gaze and male sexual fantasies. Contemporary filmic representations of lesbian couples, much like it is the case in Bombshell, tend to display two, equally conventionally attractive women, according to a male perspective, sexually interacting with one another for little to no purpose outside of voyeurism and fetishization.

Another questionable addition to the script is a scene in which, after learning about the fact that Megyn Kelly’s character was also sexually harassed by Ailes at the beginning of her career, fictional Kayla blames Kelly for not speaking up sooner implying that the latter was complicit in what happened to her (Randolph, Bombshell 2019, 1:20:34-1:22:42). This scene is emotionally powerful, dramatic and allows for Kayla’s character to display the array of contradicting feelings and thoughts that come with taking the first steps towards the grieving and acceptance process, ranging from sadness to anger, which makes for good cinema, yet, it does not take into consideration an important component of films which are based on real events and, most importantly, on real people. When talking about this particular scene, Megyn Kelly says the following:

"Well, it’s funny because I look at the Me Too movement and at no point in my view did victim number seventeen blame her harassment on victims one through sixteen […] and so part of me… I saw that scene, I’m like …that was written by a man ….
But Doug asked me ‘would you take that scene out of the movie if you could?’ and I said no because the truth is that I’ve looked back on my own life, my own … every moment from that moment forward and I do wish I had done more …Even though I was powerless, even though it would have been a suicidal move for me career wise, what if I had just said screw it you know? I’ll go back to practicing law, I don’t need to have a career in this industry. What if I had thrown myself in the fire back then… maybe that wouldn’t have happened to you" (Kelly 2020, 23:42-24:45).

What Kelly’s commentary highlights is how hurtful and damaging it can be for the real women whose stories are being put on the big screen to sit through scenes which involve the writer taking creative liberties and including them in situations which can be interpreted as victim shaming and blaming for keeping quiet. Here, it is important to keep in mind that this pattern of blaming the female victim for the acts of the male perpetrator is extremely common within the dominant hegemonic narrative. The guilt that is triggered, not only in Megyn Kelly but also in any woman who went through a similar experience, by this historically inaccurate addition to the screenplay raises questions as to where the line between a writer/director’s artistic license should start and where it should end as, had Kelly and her peers not been alive at the time of their stories’ being retold or had they refused to comment on it, the same exact scene could have been merely taken as a representation of an alternative mode of coping with one’s own trauma –projecting blame onto others–, rather than an attack on the women who, for a long time were silenced by a complex mix of fear, ambition, denial, shame, guilt and social pressure.

While it is certainly flawed in its handling of many aspects of survivor stories’ representation on screen, especially when it comes to its handling of victim blaming, Bombshell does present a Post-Me Too audience with an emotional and complex account of what it is like to be in the shoes of victims of Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment. As mentioned above, the Me Too movement has cemented itself into the public’s consciousness through the Harvey Weinstein case, making its main spokespeople and faces those of democratic, feminist actresses. What Bombshell successfully does is breaking down the partisan division that can be heavily felt in contemporary America, allowing both members of the Republican and Democratic party to empathize with the victims equally regardless of political biases and regardless of those women’s public personas. This representation of this Me Too story and the women who suffered at the hands of Ailes opens the door to not only the inclusion of different parts and facets of the mainly Left-leaning entertainment industry but also all victims of sexual abuse and harassment regardless of their backgrounds into the filmic narrative surrounding the Me Too movement. As such, it could be argued that this co-existence of elements taken from the traditional and hegemonic visual narratives when it comes to women and other, more oppositional elements and discourses make of Bombshell a work which could be classified under the category of negotiated cinema.

3. Muzzled: Silence as a Double-Edged Sword in The Assistant

The Assistant is a Drama film written, directed, produced and edited by Australian filmmaker Kitty Green. Contrary to the way in which Bombshell’s poster is composed to preserve a sense of ambiguity in relation to which definition of the word will be reflected in the content of the movie, The Assistant’s poster clearly alludes to the kind of story it is trying to tell. In the latter, main actress Julia Garner can be seen looking through a pile of papers while multiple women’s blurred modeling face shots appear in the background. This sets the tone as to which kind of perspective will be explored through this filmic representation: one that sees women going in and out of an office but continues to look through someone else’s papers and blurs out their questionable behaviors.

The movie covers the events of a singular day in the life of what is assumed to be a successful film producer’s assistant from the moment she wakes up until the end of her shift very late at night. Interestingly enough, although the movie follows the assistant’s day, she is not given much of a voice as Kitty Green keeps the dialogues to a minimum for most of the movie. This lack of reliance on dialogue is reminiscent of what oppositional feminist film tries to do by, instead of having a, “heavier investment in seeing than in hearing” (Irigaray as cited in Stam 2000, 218), choosing to redirect the attention to sound, voice, tones and music. This emphasis on sound and tonalities is very much present in Green’s work which allows for the questioning of how silence can be interpreted in two ways when in relation to abuse: oppression and compliance.
In an interview with film critic Simran Hans, the Australian filmmaker explains how her initial project, which started before the Weinstein case came to light and went viral as part of the Me Too movement, had started off as one that revolves around sexual misconduct within American college campuses instead of the film industry (Green, BFI at Home: The Assistant Q&A with Director Kitty Green, 08/05/2020 20:00 BST 2020, 4:25-4:45). When discussing the cinematographic components of the movie, it is important to keep in mind that, prior to her narrative debut with The Assistant, Green had worked on a number of documentaries (IMDb) which may explain her oppositional take on the representation of women and Me Too stories. Instead of having the main character express her emotions verbally, the environment is given more of a central role and, essentially, more sonic space than the latter.

Indeed, in this movie, the sounds of the copy machine, of milk being poured onto a bowl of cereals, of the water fountain, of a phone ringing and voices heard from afar by the assistant as well as their volume and tone take over the narration. Very quickly, the audience is entangled in a routine that at first may appear normal but soon, and as a result of the environmental sounds mentioned above being ever so slightly amplified, becomes aery to the point of almost feeling like an oppressive force looming over the main character but also over the spectators themselves. By making our protagonist/narrator’s focus shift from her tasks and work –during which all exterior sounds are muffled like when she is on the phone with the producer’s wife– to the myriad of external sounds found within a busy office such as her colleague’s keyboard typing, her boss’s angry voice being heard through the closed door and the conversations she is not included in, her lack of voice-based agency and her inability to speak up on her concerns and, consequently, on what she perceives as a potential danger for others can be really felt by the audience.
In fact, the only scene in which dialogue is used as a central narrative tool is cut into excerpts that are scattered throughout the movie. That scene shows the protagonist’s conversation with the man in charge of the Human Resources Department. In this scene, the assistant is shown to be unable to articulate her thoughts properly due to the fear of the ramifications that would come as a result of speaking up. This comes as a result of her position within the company being indirectly threatened by the manager in charge of the HR department when she tries to explain what she saw without presenting physical and tangible evidence (Garner and Matthew, The Assistant 2019). Essentially, what the character and audience both learn from this rare instance in which she verbalizes her thoughts is that, if she ever wants to ‘make it’ further within this industry, she needs to comply with the culture of silence that comes with it. With regard to this scene, the filmmaker states that, “it’s a twelve-page scene and the rest of the film has barely any dialogue” because, ”[she] wanted to make it clear that HR departments are there to protect the company and not the employees” (Green, BFI at Home: The Assistant Q&A with Director Kitty Green, 08/05/2020 20:00 BST 2020, 11:40-11:53). In addition to that, Green explains that her other goal for incorporating dialogue into that scene is the following:

"I needed to have kind of an example of gaslighting … so many women spoke about being gaslit by their workplaces or their HR departments into thinking things were okay or kind of leaving that office being more confused as when they walked in or kind of doubting their own reasons for being there" (Green, BFI at Home: The Assistant Q&A with Director Kitty Green, 08/05/2020 20:00 BST 2020, 11:54-12:18)

What can be inferred from this quote is that the driving force behind Green’s choice to stick to a minimum when it comes to dialogues outside of the HR scene is her desire to turn silence in itself into a statement for how such behaviors are allowed to go on for so long. This political drive and eagerness to rewrite the narrative when it comes to the representation of women who, like the protagonist in this story, are forced to remain silent is what makes of Green’s The Assistant an example of what Claire Johnston describes as ‘counter-cinema’ (Johnston 1999, 36) and could also be referred to as ‘oppositional cinema’. While the objective is to put the spectator in the woman’s shoes and therefore identify with her, it also aims to educate them to the presence of strong power dynamics that should be considered before labelling someone working or who used to work for a predator prior to them being exposed as such as “enablers” (Green, BFI at Home: The Assistant Q&A with Director Kitty Green, 08/05/2020 20:00 BST 2020) . Through her representation of her female main character, the filmmaker shows how difficult it is to even come to terms and use one’s voice to oppose the abuse one suffers themselves let alone speak up for others when part of systems which shield abusers and predators rather than their victims and survivors.

This focus on sound and the absence of dialogue is not the only ways in which The Assistant seems to be aiming to be a Feminist, oppositional work. In fact, Green’s choices made in relation to the assistant’s characterization also play a role in painting the type of alternative picture that she wants to draw. For the entire duration of the movie, the main character’s name is not uttered as a way to address her; it is only when the credits roll at the end of the movie that the audience discovers that the assistant they have been shadowing for approximately eighty-five minutes is called Jane (IMDb). While this may not be seen as important enough to point out, the very fact that Jane’s name is never used to refer to her reflects the toxicity of a system in which one is not acknowledged as an individual. Furthermore, it is interesting to take into consideration the fact that ‘Jane Doe’ is often used as a placeholder and defined as, “a woman who is a party to legal proceedings and whose true name is unknown or withheld” (Merriam Webster Dictionary). This definition contextualizes both the lack of mention of the name and the very choice of it since it suggests this lack of identity and agency found within the actions, utterances and behaviors, or lack thereof, of the character itself. Jane is simultaneously one woman out of the thousands working at the bottom of the film industry but also every woman who has been stuck in that powerless position at the bottom of the ladder due to the presence of a ‘glass ceiling’ (Loden 2017) which is maintained through the banalization of abuse. Having her be a nameless representative of virtually anyone who has been put in a similar position also allows the viewer to utilize her as sort of empty shoes onto which they can potentially step into, helping them identify with a generally female perspective according to the binaries of femininity and masculinity present within classical narratives no matter their own position outside of the seat they occupy at the movie theater.

Here, it is important to point out how, although the movie itself focuses on a woman working in such a position, it does not suggest that it is only women who are positioned in that spot since, while complicit in some of the micro-aggressions that Jane has to go through every day, her male co-workers are also portrayed as being frightened by the faceless mogul. In that sense, the portrayal of Jane as weak and fragile does not come from an attempt to maintain what Mary Ann Doane refers to as the patriarchal codes of representation (Doane 1999) but as a tool used to highlight the psychological impact of an abusive system and environment on an individual no matter the gender but especially if one happens to be a woman. Based on this interesting take on naming, Jane is not only being gradually erased from the narrative by her loudness of the environment itself, she is also made to drown by the self-inflicted censorship that comes as a result of working in such an environment for a while. It is this very blurred line between compliance and oppression that is presented by Green through her representation of the women who have been silenced by the system and which should be reflected on in relation to the instant labeling of workers in such abusive working environments as complicit in the sexual abuse of women.

This feminist approach to content is strengthened by the filmmaker’s employment of specific cinematographic technics which aid the spectator once again identify with Jane’s position. Green explains that she kept the shots that did not focus on Jane, “wide cause it was her point of view” and that she, “really wanted to stick with this idea that the audience only gets to know what Jane knows” (Green, “The Assistant” Writer-Director Kitty Green Has A Conversation About The Drama Film 2020). Keeping the shot wide therefore does not only allow Green to create distance between other characters and the audience, it also allows them to understand the difficulty of collecting and processing the pieces of information unfolding from afar. This sense of being simultaneously detached and kept on the outside and being overwhelmingly close to the type of misconduct the movie denounces is amplified by how sound is composed throughout the movie. As mentioned above, the sounds that make up Jane’s daily life such as the sound of paper, the ringing of her phone or even the threatening tone in her employer’s voice heard through said telephone all appear to be louder than average. These usual background noises are made to be in the auditory foreground. Furthermore, what is even more unusual when it comes to contemporary movie making is how little space is allocated to one of Hollywood’s most used extradiegetic element: Music. In an interview, Julia Garner explains how, “She [Kitty Green] wanted a quiet film because the subject is so loud” (Garner, Making The Assistant with Julia Garner and Kitty Green | Film Q&A 2020, 4:06-4:11). This is noteworthy as it shows how much thought was put into crafting the auditory identity of the movie in a way that would present the subject of sexual and mental abuse within the industry, and workplaces in a more general sense, in an oppositional way that would go against the contemporary standards of film making.

The representation of women in The Assistant is therefore crafted to denounce issues related to mental and sexual abuse within the film industry without being specific enough to be about a particular person but specific enough that it highlights a pattern within it. In a way, the focus and main narrative of the movie is not necessarily Jane’s story but, “the idea that abuse is sort of utterly ordinary” (Green, “The Assistant” Writer-Director Kitty Green Has A Conversation About The Drama Film 2020, 17:12-17:17). It is therefore through her use of silence and her oppositional take on Me Too stories of the sexual abuse of women but also the mental abuse and system that keeps the witnesses of such behaviors silent that Kitty Green’s The Assistant can be classified as part of the feminist oppositional cinema.

4. The Object of Tarantino’s Gaze: Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood

Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s latest, and arguably second to last film, cinematographic addition to what the director often discusses as his ten canon movies project. The movie follows the story of a fictional, “faded television actor and his stunt double striv[ing] to achieve fame in the final years of Hollywood’s Golden Age in 1969 Los Angeles” (IMDb) while using the tragic Manson family murders as a backdrop. Before diving into the analysis of Tarantino’s controversial history and his representation of women within the movie, it is important to once again consider a specific extradiegetic factor, namely the poster of the movie.

The movie’s official poster is presented as a collage of images from various scenes extracted from the movie and drawn in a realistic fashion. Because of this realistic rendering of the colored drawings and the sheer size of the three bigger busts that stand out, it is very easy to identify Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie who, in addition to being one of the most imposing figures in terms of size, also appears a second time –this time depicted from the head to the knees– within the poster dancing as a group of people walks towards her. Much like it is the case for Bombshell and The Assistant, one may argue that the poster does not play a role in how the film should be perceived as it might be deceiving. Yet, posters participate to the building of an audience’s expectations, play an important role in setting the tone for the movie’s overall design and visual identity and often reflects narrative and stylistic elements found within the latter. This is illustrated by the fact that the almost comic book-like aesthetic of the poster imitates the retro classic Hollywood aura that Tarantino wants this contemporary movie set at the end of Hollywood’s golden age to have.

With this in mind, it is important to discuss the elephant in the room which rises from comparing elements found in the poster and their central position within it with the actual role they play in the movie. This anomaly is embodied in Margot Robbie’s imposing presence as part of the poster as well as the promotion of the film in contrast to her role as Sharon Tate within it. Indeed, while Robbie appears to be given just as much space in the poster as the protagonists played by her male co-stars, DiCaprio and Pitt, the actress barely gets any spoken screen time making her character feel almost like an afterthought and a stereotypical representation of Tate as an angelic, innocent, child-like and almost ethereal figure. What is more, much like Kitty Green does in The Assistant, Tarantino adopts in his representation of Tate the ‘show-don’t-tell’ model. Yet, it is important to note that, while Green uses this model to focus on the environmental sonic and visual composition of the source of Jane’s mental distress therefore adding layers to the narrative, Tarantino’s use of it appears to focus on emphasizing the aesthetic presence of Tate rather than attempting to tell her story in an alternative manner. What results of the lack of dialogue and of the focus on visuals felt in most of the shots in which Robbie appears in is the impression that her character only exists to satisfy the need for aesthetic entertainment, or in the words of Mulvey ‘the voyeuristic visual pleasure’ (Mulvey 1999, 811), one would expect to derive from the classical Hollywood narrative mode. In that sense, Robbie seems to be used for her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1999, 809) rather than for her acting skills as, not only does the famous actress barely get any lines, her character could be completely redacted from the movie without this fact altering the plot of the film in any way.

When questioned by a female reporter on this lack of dialogue when it comes to Robbie’s part in the film, which had received a standing ovation following its screening at the Cannes Festival prior to the questions and answers session, Tarantino simply answers with the following statement: “Well, I just reject your hypotheses” (Tarantino 2019, 33:36-33:40). Before the silence that followed his statement becomes too uncomfortable to bear, Robbie jumps into the conversation to defend her character by arguing that her performance is meant to highlight the “loss of innocence” within Hollywood and that the lack of dialogue allowed her to spend time with the character and getting to know her on a more personal level (Robbie 2019, 33:42-34:56). While it can definitely be interpreted as a wordless homage to the star whose life had been robbed that summer of 1969 if one solely takes into consideration the filmmaker’s representation of Tate within this particular movie, however, it is when juxtaposed with patterns of female representation and behaviors found within his other works as well as within actresses’ interviews that the problematic aspect of his works is really brought to light.
It is without a doubt that this controversy around the representation of Sharon Tate is not a new addition to debates surrounding the director’s works; in fact, his sexualization and objectification of women has been at the center of many controversies throughout his career. Quentin Tarantino may be known within the Hollywood circle for his tough directing style, his affirmed narrative and stylistic choices and his exaggerated use of violence within his entire filmography but he is also known for using his power as a director and producer to indulge in his fetishism for dirty female feet and for the way that he treats women on and off screen. It is important to note that, while Tarantino himself was never directly accused of sexual abuse, the latter has been associated with powerful men in Hollywood who were, one of which being Harvey Weinstein himself who Tarantino used to work with fairly often.¹ In fact, the director’s affiliation with Weinstein is not the only controversial story related to him as actress and model Uma Thurman has revealed in an article written for the New York Times on the abuse she suffered at the hands of Weinstein that she had almost died in a car accident during the shooting of Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Thurman 2018).

In said piece, the actress blames the production company and Harvey Weinstein for trying to conceal what had transpired in 2004, it was ultimately Tarantino’s decision to ignore Thurman’s concerns, demands for a stunt double to drive the car and to neglect to properly inspect the road before filming. While Tarantino expressed regrets concerning his compliance in the accident that nearly killed Thurman, in that same interview for Deadline, he goes on to justify other claims related to him spitting and choking the actress by claiming that it had being part of the filming and directing process (Tarantino, Quentin Tarantino Explains Everything: Uma Thurman, The ‘Kill Bill’ Crash & Harvey Weinstein 2018). What the director fails to acknowledge here is how this normalization, justification and compliance with abusive behavior is what keeps the oppressive systems of power in place in the first place. In that sense, Tarantino plays a larger role than the one he is willing to admit to and question in this interview.

Another important component that needs to be discussed in relation to the representation of women in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is the Tarantino’s signature sexualization of women within it. Throughout the movie, Margaret Qualley’s character unironically named and credited as “Pussycat” is a hitchhiker who crosses paths with Booth, the stunt double played by Pitt, and leads him to Spahn Ranch where a group of “hippies” –the Manson ‘family’– lives. “Pussycat” is presented as an attractive, quirky yet hotheaded women wearing booty shorts and a colorful top. She makes use of her appearance to appeal to Booth and make him drive her to the location of the ranch by leaning over his car window and biting her lip in a sexual manner. In this same scene, as she leans forward and closer to Pitt as they exchange words back and forth, the latter’s camera work shifts from being shot over Pitt’s shoulder to one that is shot over and puts Qualley’s buttocks in the foreground for thirty seconds (Qualley and Pitt 2019, 1:23:01-1:23:31). The necessity of including these shorts is put into question by the fact that the exchange between the two characters is void of meaning and could have been cut to one line. This once again shows how female characters in this movie are presented as objects for the male voyeur to gaze at.

Furthermore, it can be argued that this sexualization of women by Tarantino is not only included in the movie to appeal to the male spectator but also to the camera (Mulvey 1999) and, consequently, to the man behind the camera himself. As mentioned prior, Quentin Tarantino is famously associated with foot fetishism and Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is no exception. As the scene mentioned above between Pussycat and Booth progresses and the latter allows her to get into his car, Qualley’s character adjusts into her seat and pushes her feet into the windshield; from the moment she does so, Qualley’s feet do not leave the frame no matter which character is speaking or who the camera focuses on (Qualley and Pitt 2019, 1:24:06-1:24:39).

While fetishism is an acceptable part of sexuality when all parties involved are consenting to being involved in it, when confronted with the fact that her feet are “prominently featured in the movie” (Kimmel 2019, 0:53-0:56) by Jimmy Kimmel, Qualley appears uncomfortable and fidgety and responds with, “they are very prominent unfortunately” (Qualley, Margaret Qualley on Brad Pitt & Hairy Armpits 2019, 0:57-0:59). After this exchange and being questioned about her use of the word “unfortunately”, the young actress explains her insecurity with showing her feet on camera but also, and most importantly, she tries to find a way out of it by suggesting for a stunt double to do it in her behalf but that her reluctance did not change Tarantino’s mind, on the contrary, she expresses how it became a “challenge” (Qualley, Margaret Qualley on Brad Pitt & Hairy Armpits 2019, 1:16-1:44). Despite the tone of the conversation being lighthearted afterwards, what this interview highlights is how much actresses are pressured into coming to terms with, accept and go along with make director who, like Tarantino, have the status and power necessary to present their own sexual gratification as simply the price to pay to be featured in what will surely turn into a classic.

It is safe to say that Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood reflects Tarantino’s own behaviors and patterns of sexualization when it comes to women on and off set. What this analysis shows is that the movie upholds standard hegemonic discourses when it comes to its treatment of its female characters and, in that sense, that it is a movie made by a man for men. Moreover, it could be argued that the canonization and deification of the male director within the film industry (Johnston 1999, 34) for many decades now made it so that people with a strong name and reputation within the latter such as Tarantino can present their audiences with violent, sexualized and non-sensical representations of women while still being praised and defended for it. Ultimately, as exemplified by Margot Robbie’s justification of Tarantino’s lack of care for his female characters on his behalf and Margaret Qualley’s uncomfortable yet joking tone when discussing being coerced into shooting a feet scene, it is the status and gender based unequal distribution of power between male directors and female actresses that lead the kind of problematic representations of women within Hollywood to remain the dominant discourse within the industry. As suggested by Foucault, power does not have to be maintained through violence yet, in many cases, it seems as though violence is silenced through power.

5. Conclusion

From the analysis of these three movies, it can be argued that the latter varied greatly in terms of ideologies, narratives and, consequently, modes of representations being used and communicated to the audience. The analysis of these modes of representation of women and the three movies’ classification under the oppositional, negotiated and classical cinematographic categories prove that the kind of discourse being circulated is indeed closely linked to the director and writer’s attitude towards women. While Bombshell embraced some aspects of the classic hegemonic Hollywood narratives when it comes to its representation of women and the Me Too movement alike, it also included some elements which made it lean towards the negotiated cinema category. The Assistant, as a result of Green’s history with working on documentaries as well as the uncommon, almost aery audio-visual identity given to her movie, the latter is able to comfortably be classified as an oppositional cinematographic work. As for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, by juxtaposing the director’s representation of the two most prominent female characters in the movie with various actresses’ experience with Tarantino behind the scenes, it is undeniable that the film represents the hegemonic, patriarchal and sexualizing side of the industry. This approach to the analysis of the primary texts was made necessary by the fact that all three of the movies were released in 2019 subsequently to #MeToo going viral as a response to the Weinstein scandal. This fact allowed for the hypothesis that the three cinematographic works differ in their representation of women due to the fact that they might have had differing socio-cultural and historical contexts to be cast aside.

Consequently, it is evident that the writers and directors’ approach to the representation of women and of Me Too stories testify to the Foucauldian relation between gender, discourse and power. Indeed, Green is a Feminist woman who embarked on her independently produced project already aiming to denounce the structures of power at work in the silencing of victims of abuse, making the driving force behind her incorporation of oppositional ideologies and narratives all three of the components mentioned above. While Randolph positions himself as part of the left and as a defender of women’s rights fulfilling the discourse aspect of the issue at hand, as pointed out by Megyn Kelly herself, he misses a few important nuances in the representation of the Me Too movement because he lacks the lived experience which helps crystalize them. In that sense, despite having power in the form of status within Hollywood and the right ideological stances to be able to incorporate oppositional elements into his filmic representation, he still falls into the hegemonic discourse at times, making his movie a work of negotiated cinema, due to the fact that he was never involved in a similar situation himself first hand. Finally, Tarantino, much like Randolph, also lacks the lived experience that comes with being a woman, but what makes him lean further into the patriarchal representations of women in cinema is the fact that, contrary to Randolph, the male director’s ideology is muffled by his use of power to fulfill his own voyeuristic phantasies. It is in that sense that the analysis of Bombshell, The Assistant and Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood does not only highlight different approaches to female representation in Hollywood within the same year, it also speaks of how historical and cultural turning points, such as The Me Too movement, can inform cinema but also be drowned out by the power structures within it.

As such, the movies’ identical historical background is what makes the juxtaposition of the content of the movies with the directors’ own beliefs and lives imperative for the understanding of the kinds of representations being broadcasted and promoted. Ultimately, what could be inferred from the variety in these findings is the fact that the issue with Hollywood’s depiction of women is not necessarily a result of the discourse being circulated within a given historical context but the protection and deification of directors who, much like Tarantino, have been known to have displayed questionable behaviors towards women but are able to use their status within the industry to directly and indirectly silence their peers. It is in that sense that Hollywood still needs feminist movements such as #MeToo, despite the latter’s flaws, to highlight harmful patterns of behaviors behind the scenes towards women and that Me Too needs Hollywood and oppositional cinema to spread its message, making both of them interdependent.

Works cited

Notes

¹ All of the movies which Tarantino directed himself were produced or co-produced by Weinstein either through his former company Miramax or through the Weinstein company itself. ↩