Beautiful Bombshells
In 2016, Roger Ailes, the repellent former Nixon apparatchik and long-standing CEO of Fox News known also for being the channel’s chief architect of its strident mediocrity became even less fragrant than usual when the open secret of his sexual harassment went from being an open secret to merely being open.
The network’s former anchor Gretchen Carlson successfully sued him, alleging that he had made sexual advances towards her and other women at Fox; their careers would be furthered (or terminated) by him according to his seedy whim. Six other women backed Carlson up in her courageous lawsuit, and Ailes’ own boss, Rupert Murdoch (the 76-year-old media mogul whose lawyers are still alive), fired the old man, who died a year later.
This grisly potboiler of misogyny and reactionary politics has already been made into a Showtime miniseries called The Loudest Voice, with Naomi Watts as Carlson and Russell Crowe as Ailes and now it is a film directed by Jay Roach and written by Charles Randolph, with Nicole Kidman as Carlson and John Lithgow heavily prosthetic up as her bloated old sex-criminal boss.
Charlize Theron plays Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly who enraged the Fox News fanbase by challenging Trump on his anti-women attitudes before the election which was indeed a brave thing to do and Margot Robbie is Kayla Pospisil, a fictional composite of all the younger women who were abused: she is the “Christian influencer” on Instagram who thinks she can get ahead at Fox, and submits almost dreamily to what is required.
It is an odd film in some ways: enlightening in parts but also enervatingly acted elsewhere; punching below its weight here or there; fudging whether or not its heroines are compromised by having been loyal Fox staffers.
There is no doubt that Ailes is the villain here, although Murdoch (still alive, still lawyered up, still with power in the media world) comes close to being presented as the good guy who finally intervenes to ensure a happy ending and appears in cameo played by Malcolm McDowell. Despite its title, the Carlson/Ailes trial was not a bombshell on the scale of the Harvey Weinstein revelations a year later: perhaps because Ailes’ accuser was not a feminist and had for years embraced the aggressively boorish and sexist culture of Fox News.
As for Kelly, this film does some narrative sleight of hand to suggest that she teamed up with Carlson when it seems that all she did was limit her support to reporting her own harassment from Ailes during an internal investigation.
Where ‘Bombshell’ works is demonstrating how a predatory and malign abuse of power plays out in the workplace through bullying. The film refuses to separate sexual harassment from bullying; both are shown as different points on a continuum of coercive behavior.
It presents an awful scenario, in which a young female journalist is taken for a drink by her male boss who crudely demands sex as a condition of career advancement, and it demonstrates that the natural instinct of this horrified woman is to forgive him, to pretend it didn’t happen, even to apologies: “I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that our relationship could be anything but professional … ”
Carlson and Kelly are victims of male bullying, and there’s a truly toe curling moment when Carlson already demoted to an afternoon slot for complaining about on air bantz from her grisly co-hosts has to present a “no make-up” show. Ailes crassly blunders into the studio and shouts at her in front of everyone, saying that no one wants to see a middle-aged woman sweating. All she can manage by way of reply is: “Thank you for the advice!” and Kidman seethes with fury.
Theron’s performance as Kelly seemed slightly studied and mannered to me, but again it powerfully conveys the same power dynamic. When men like these feel no longer attracted by or able to patronise women in their professional environment, they bully them instead demean them.
And revoltingly Ailes let Donald Trump do just this via Twitter with regard to Kelly, partly because Trump was a ratings star but also because Ailes secretly shared the future president’s contempt for her. The movie’s unacknowledged irony is that here was a president who detonated his own bombshell of cynical misogyny; we are still picking our way through the fallout.
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