Anne and I were watching the new movie Bombshell in our living room last night. In one disturbing scene, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) asked Kayla (Margot Robbie) to hike her skirt high enough to show her underwear.
Anne and I had different reactions.
Anne was quite unsettled. Angry maybe. Maybe not at first, but my being dispassionate seemed to call the tempest from the storm. I saw the scene as an example of how horrible one person can be to another. Terrible, yes, and criminal. People who do horrible things should be held to account. She saw it as an encapsulation of the power dynamic between men and women.
So we started to talk over the movie.
The I said/she said is not remarkable. Maybe a little, but it’s not the point. I just want to say what I think and make it make sense beyond the drama.
As background, I think that people are just that, people; individuals who live life with a glancing nod to culture and god. We each flit along our littered path, trying our best to ignore the noise and dodge the rough patches. Day after day after tedious day. For a god-awful long time.
Along the way, we create maps of what comes next by remembering formative moments and layering in the hear-told experiences of our brethren. Those shared experiences make our own feel ever more real.
To be clear, one can not have the experience of another. Even if two people trudge through the same moment together, they will almost certainly emerge with unique takes. If two people are not in the same moment, media fortuitously closes the gap. Stories from the New York Times congeal with Jane Austin, Bombshell and every meeting of my book club ever to produce a sanitized indictment that everyone is true.
Unfortunately, nearly every recounting of others’ moments are highly produced, elevated messages designed to support and smoothly merge into the narrative that the audience already has running through her head.
This is not that message.
This message asserts that the vicarious affirmations that permeate and animate social truths across the spectrum are vapid and self-serving, serving only to assemble adherents into self-identified collections of us and them. Fuck them.
The reality is, people make personal decisions, thousands of decisions daily. Some decisions matter. Most are meaningless. Nearly none of those decisions are forced, but every one adds to one’s experience. Hindsight, and the need to appeal to an audience, elevates an experience to a story.
Roger Ailes abused his position and destroyed the trust of people around him. The careful calculus of those who wanted access to what he controlled enabled, and even defended, this behavior.