Hollywood tyrants betray the public.
The media still haven’t taken responsibility for their role generating panic and psychological distress in the populace; due to the media’s hysteria about Covid, race, and gender, even our movies foment anxiety. If there was a single most anxiety-producing scene in a movie last year, it was the moment in She Said when Carey Mulligan, as New York Times reporter Megan Twohey, sneers at a boorish male flirt and emasculates him. Emboldened by her job title, Mulligan/Twohey roars with self-righteous, foul-mouthed vehemence.
It’s the most divisive example of cultural manipulation since the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces where the upper-class hipster hero gave grief to a working-class waitress — a detestable display of “rebellion” at its ugliest and most privileged. Establishment media revere that scene of leftist Hollywood narcissism, deeming it “iconic.” Yet the counterpart in She Said, conceived to ignite audiences, never caught fire. Perhaps because it revealed how media talking heads put themselves above the public. It was (to use the W.C. Fields phrase) “too blatant.”
Carey “Crybaby” Mulligan (known for An Education and Promising Young Woman) always reproaches men. Her standard vituperation exposed She Said’s hatefulness. Instead of specifically reenacting an employer–employee encounter, which would be relevant to the film’s point, the scene gins up the eternal war of the sexes, merely to corroborate media misandry.
Not even Damien Chazelle’s loony Babylon was so offensive. I choose She Said — directed by Maria Schrader, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and executive produced by Brad Pitt — as Worst Film of 2022 for its triple dose of dishonesty, arrogance, and ineptitude. The dramatized paean to Times writers Twohey and Jodi Kantor (played by Mulligan and Zoe Kazan), who brought down movie mogul Harvey Weinstein for alleged sexual offenses, botched the notion of intrepid, committed, activist-journalists: Its tedious story could appeal only to the rabid feminists and hiked-up narcissists of the media class. (In 2016, a conservative pundit quipped, “The only feminists are journalists.”) She Said idolizes professionals committed to the destruction of civility, culture, justice, and sex.
Few moviegoers opted for She Said’s anti-American, anti-sex zeal, thereby avoiding confrontation with what most people now recognize as the fake-news media. My initial distrust came from the “typage” that She Said uses, confusing female courage with the questionable honesty of women who belatedly “spoke out” against Weinstein. Worse, the film expanded to a class-action story of group protagonists, a specious representation of the “believe all women” canard.
Twohey and Kantor didn’t seem to know how industries operate, only that women are victims. Through flashbacks of innocent youth and contemporary portrayals of mature regret (Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, the film’s aces), She Said begged for special sympathy — pity.
This brazen, emotional tactic is not what most people want from movies, but Schrader, Lenkiewicz, and Pitt broke the rules of dramatic empathy; their goal was propaganda. Incapable of compelling, challenging drama (Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone), Schrader and Lenkiewicz settled for predetermined guilt and innocence. That’s how our so-called hold-them-accountable media outlets have corrupted themselves.
She Said depends on lame emotionality while also absolving the media of its impact on public consciousness — supporting the elite-professional-class position on business, politics, and male–female relations is the only option. Those of us appalled that the front page of the Times has turned into Pravda are unlikely to root for Twohey-Kantor’s crusade.
She Said never takes us inside Hollywood practices — how agents intercede to negotiate an actor’s employment terms. Instead, personal, transactional, careerist behavior is elided, replaced by nightmare scenarios that contradict the age-old, consensual, casting-couch tradition.
Film producer and former Variety editor Peter Bart went outside the highly politicized trade media to IndieWire to complain about She Said’s clumsy narrative structure. Bart challenged the sentimentality that neglected Weinstein’s side of the media witch hunt and failed to provide a full, hiss-boo characterization of the villain. But he forgot that She Said was never intended to be art portraying a bad guy’s human side. A professional of Bart’s experience surely knows that Millennial Hollywood has turned into a partisan machine that dismisses equal justice the same way the Pelosi Congress has denied the J6 prisoners their due process.
As lame, weepy, and presumptuous as She Said is, its predictableness is actually tyrannical. The filmmakers figured that moviegoers would submit to the force of its biases, as with traditional media’s other outwardly political calumnies. So what if our social, cultural, and political experience is ruined by gaslighting?
In She Said the media no longer accurately report facts about contemporary issues or their own practices. Consider the TV-trite casting of Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as Times executives — an appeal to the same bureaucratic fantasies in such network programs as All Rise, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Veep, and The West Wing, all of which encourage viewer docility through the normalization of the power elite.
Pitt and friends disregard the New York Times’ political fetishization — the same partisanship you can see on any Sunday-morning chat show. Clarkson’s editrix Rebecca Corbett patronizes her cub reporters; she’s a mother-hen type evoking former Times exec Jill Abramson, who boasted about carrying an Obama doll in her purse. Braugher’s typage implausibly represents executive editor Dean Baquet’s biracial Creole power position, as if Braugher, the dark-skinned impersonator, could actually rise through the Gray Lady’s long-time white-collar, white-male echelon; it falsifies how upward mobility works in the privileged professions (an aberration of what Harvey Weinstein himself identified as “the Obama Effect”).
No wonder the public resisted She Said; it deprived us of seeing long-denied justice prevail; that used to be the hallmark of social-justice filmmaking. She Said could have been an enlightening screwball comedy, like He Said, She Said, the ’90s lark about internecine relations among journalists. (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins played politically opposed reporters who fall in love. Mulligan and Kazan fall in love with white-girl vengeance.) So She Said deserved to flop.
Trust your soul-saving instincts against the pernicious intentions of a self-serving industry. When a movie is designed to make you wave placards or pump your fist, it diminishes the moral purpose of cathartic movie art. Could even Antifa maniacs enjoy such an inane argument? Schrader, Lenkiewicz, and Pitt pushed feminist partisanship to the point of no-fun. She Said is the worst film of the year because its biases are exactly the same as those of the news media that fail us.
Editor’s Note: A prior version of this piece incorrectly identified the journalist played by Zoe Kazan.