Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019)

[domino harvey]

Well, you’re not supposed to antagonize any board members, mods or not, but okay...

[swo17]

A fantastic and unifying sentiment - sexual abuse is fine as long as it happens to women on the other team.

Everything is partisan now. Even sexual abuse. #MeToo is also now a culture flame war.

What (and I say the following advisedly) the fuck is wrong with you that this is what you interpreted from my post? (I assume that you're responding to the posts above.)

Let's be clear: Nasir's post was a valid assertion of an opinion that you are free to disagree with. Your response was an ad hominem attack that has no place on our forum

[whaleallright]

It was a willful misrepresentation of my remarks in ascribing to me an "opinion" that I neither believed nor expressed. If my wording is outside the bounds of what's acceptable here, so be it; I chose this wording, which I ordinarily wouldn't use, because I've never been so offended by a bit of bad faith here. Nasir's post only failed to rise to the "ad hominem" threshold because he(?) coyly refused to directly quote or engage with my post, in the famliar "Some people are saying..." fashion.

[hearthesilence]

I'm not supposed to antagonize you because you're a moderator (even though you routinely and opportunistically propose the most uncharitable interpretations of other posters' remarks), but there is a vast difference between finding it difficult to extend the same amount of sympathy to different victims and being "fine" with sexual abuse —or arguing that the victims "deserved it"— as the posters above allege. You are, I would hope, smarter than to believe (though not to make) this false equivalency.

"Political beliefs and choice of workplace" is an odd way to say that Kelly, especially, made a fortune for years guiding her audience of millions to loathsome views of immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, and other abused populations. She and her colleagues at Fox News were aong the primary shapers of the constituency that eventually elected Donald Trump. And I highly doubt she even believed half the things she said on air. In fact, I'm not sure we should be talking about "belief" with these people at all. As with many right-wing media personalities, it's a grift—and many, like Kelly, have already moved on to the next one.

When Kelly began speaking out against Ailes, O'Reilly and Fox, it also helped empower their other victims and shut down those who defended Ailes et al, but at the same time it was hard to forget all the times she attacked others who were victimized and were further disempowered to defend themselves as well. This is the same woman who spent one broadcast of her program attacking an African-American girl who was slammed and pinned to the ground by a police officer because it was her fault for being too loud at a pool party.

[Nasir007]

A fantastic and unifying sentiment - sexual abuse is fine as long as it happens to women on the other team.

Everything is partisan now. Even sexual abuse. #MeToo is also now a culture flame war.

What (and I say the following advisedly) the fuck is wrong with you that this is what you interpreted from my post? (I assume that you're responding to the posts above.)

"but it is impossible for me to work up practically any sympathy for them"

That your sympathy is conditional is the fuck that is wrong. For most people that is not the case. ALL victims of sexual abuse deserve sympathy and respect. No exceptions. It is a trauma I would not wish upon anyone.

[whaleallright]

The suggestion that our experience of sympathy is not always "conditional" to some extent is absurd, and in any event lacking sympathy was not what you accused me of—which was that I approved of sexual abuse and indeed (you now write) "wished" it upon certain people. To this, Domino previously added the notion that I was suggesting that Kelly et al "deserved" their abuse. I neither wrote nor implied anything of the sort.

A somewhat extreme analogy might be to the atrocity footage of Muammar Gaddafi being lynched in Libya during the civil war there. Watching it, I felt sympathy (or was it empathy?) for him as a victim of mob violence, knowing how terrified he must have been in his final moments, and recognizing the atrocity of mob violence. But was the intensity of that sympathy, both in the moment and on reflection, not influenced by knowing that Gadaffi sat atop a regime that murdered many of its citizens? (I'm not saying Kelly is a mass murderer, though I have no doubt her former colleagues at Fox News would find a way to applaud Donald Trump for the sort of "purges" that Gaddafi made a routine part of his rule.) This seems a fairly straightforward acknowledgment that our own emotional reactions, and the moral precepts that both follow from and influence them, are not (and probably shouldn't be held to be) democratic, much less rational or fully predictable. This has nothing to do with me approving of sexual abuse or for that matter, lynching.

I admit I'm more than a little troubled by the idea of Kelly monetizing her status as victim, absent a reckoning with the legacy of her work at Fox News — a legacy that includes the Trump administration, now likely complicit in the deaths of untold thousands of Americans thanks to their predictably incompetent and self-serving reponse to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Not to mention the migrants who have suffered in ICE custody, the many victims of the cruel embargo against Iran, etc.)

As for the other half: you are welcome to the opinion that Megyn Kelly is worthy of "respect."

[therewillbeblus]

The questions seems to be: Does any amount of net harm perpetrated diminish one's worth in an objective sense, rather than simply a (very fair) subjective one? We all have our values, but is it problematic if we dub someone a definitively "horrible" person based on our own moral barometer founded in subjective life experiences and social contexts? aox's post was welcome because there is tension between unblending the self from our own narrow perspectives weighted by those values to achieve empathy, and how to allow that humanistic validation to coexist with moral judgment without critiquing either of those conflicting parts of ours or considering them to be mutually exclusive. I have similar personal moral assessments, but aren't we able to be compassionate towards these women as human beings, as well as struggle to be compassionate towards them as agents of change that we associate with extreme harm? That may be hard, but the alternative is to define a human being by their actions in wholeness, and while that is up to each person to assess worth, it should not be objective.

I eat meat. There are vegans who exist who may think that the actions I am committing are crimes, and just as bad as human-to-human marginalization. Am I a horrible person, because I've continued to eat meat repetitively, ignoring my moral part that tells me eating meat is not in line with my philosophical beliefs of contributing to the demise of sentient beings? Or have some of the good things I've done allow me to be more complex than that? Now, it's not about comparing and creating a logical equation of good vs. bad, which one can't measure not to mention those are binary terms I reject, but I have issued harm that I cannot make up for with net good, and vice versa, and there are people out there who have the right to subjectively dislike me, but that doesn't reduce my objective worth. For if each person was in charge of creating objective morality, it wouldn't work, and the only alternative is to dub oneself God's judge, which carries with it its own set of problems.

There is no doubt Kelly initiated messages that I believe were harmful, and there is a hypocrisy there that makes this a challenging process to work passed the muck to reach some minute semblance of empathy, but perhaps that's the point. However, validating our own value assessments is just as important, and just because we can take a humanistic lens to this, as I believe whaleallright started to engage in by acknowledging these women did not deserve the harm they received, and I don't believe necessarily meant any "horrible people" comment as objective even if it could have been interpreted that way, this does not diminish the struggle we have to wrestle with to just leave that there and allow them dignity in the face of all their actions. Similarly, Nasir is taking a less filtered humanistic position, which I can more subscribe to on a personal level matching my own angle here, but even that comes with the caveat of being easier for me to unblend from those rigid values - so any judgment made against other posters for not being able to access the same levels of unconditional sympathy invalidates their own strong individual moral pulls that make this a challenging process. If we treat this like a mirror to sit with our own judgments and moral values, and the grey area that exists between the facades of objective right and wrong, that will be far more worthwhile than reducing a person down and placing them in the 'bad' box, be that person Kelly or a poster here. I think we can all agree that subjective assessments of right and wrong exist and are necessary for a whole lot of reasons, and this is a great place to explore those and an interesting film to initiate that self-analysis, but coming to blows over members telling other members what their own process is, or what the value of that process is, just feels like the approach that keeps us in a Chinese finger trap.

[whaleallright]

Just wanted to say: thanks for that thoughtful response.

[Nasir007]

You are essentially agreeing to all that I said. #MeToo was never meant to be partisan. You have somehow made it here. #MeToo was founded on sympathy for all victims of sexual abuse.

That you can allow something to color its conditionality is the thought that people find objectionable.

Where does that lead us if liberals can't sympathize with sexually abused conservative women and the vice versa? It would gut the movement.

[whaleallright]

No, you accused me in turn of:
- thinking sexual abuse was "fine"
- wishing sexual abuse upon certain people

I am not "agreeing to all that [you] said." You are now in the "ignore" file so feel free to flay your dead horse to the marrow.

[therewillbeblus]

I decided to watch this so I can weigh in, and while I didn’t love the whole composite, it did work for me in eliciting the process aox spoke of and that I outlined above, due to one main reason: Charlize Theron. She approaches Kelly with an ambiguity that allows for shades of relatable humanity without sacrificing the reality that she assembles her hierarchy with careerist motives over feminist ones in past and present, and grapples with idealistic versus realistic interpretations of, and responses to, her milieu. This carries with it its own kind of strange resilience that may not be politically correct but shouldn’t be shamed either, the shoe on the other foot of those who see this as a purely sympathetic portrait. I don’t think it is- though the treatment of Kidman and Robbie are much more clear cut in this department, and the liberal preaching can be a bit tiresome (the “Sushi is not a liberal food” anxious interaction was just too much).

Theron, a liberal, clearly brings her own ambivalence to the role, a struggle between supporting a fellow woman and acknowledging a coolness and dissonance inherent in a woman’s existence in this field without passing obvious judgment in any space, though it must be there in part. Her embodiment of this character is the thread keeping this film in this gray area that casts a shadow on the rest of the convoluted puppeteering that asks us to feel empathy for employees of Fox News as a patriarchal evil that doesn’t discriminate along political lines. This too is intermittently effectively, like the aforementioned claims of stigma attached to listing the company on a resume. The grocery store interaction with Katie Aselton walks a fine line but ultimately embraces a complicated space that implicates blind-aggressive liberals for attaching their perceptions as truths projected on these anchors as icons of oppressive institutions, forcing an absolutist rather than shared responsibility onto them, taking the surface-level easy street to self-gratification.

I really appreciated how Theron took a mature path, to not portray Kelly in an Oscar bait flashy performance but one of authentic mystery and raw honesty, a person who neither we, nor she, can ever truly know or judge, yet with the right amount of sterility to demonstrate the way all women need to sacrifice and compromise to simply exist in our world. A more animated take would have knocked this film down like a house of cards, but instead we can read every action she makes as one of self-interest or humanistic ethics, without pretending like it needs to be one or the other. The scene where Robbie chastises her exemplifies this strange complex morality judgment well, and Theron’s response is truer than the film or its audience will likely give credit for; but it's important to see that she is not made to be a hero either, for it’s not in step with the unskewed realism of mindset and social context her Kelly exists in. This allows both characters to be right and wrong, like any argument that is born from the conflict of two individualized perspectives, invalidating nor celebrating either; and the film’s ending both celebrates the optimism of empowerment and recognizes the pragmatism of coping with paradoxical sincerities. This ball of contradictions thinks it’s a bit more clearly defined than it actually is, so thankfully it remains interesting as an effective tool for audience self-reflection, even if not great as a complete work standing on its own.

[Nasir007]

No, you accused me in turn of:
- thinking sexual abuse was "fine"
- wishing sexual abuse upon certain people

I am not "agreeing to all that [you] said." You are now in the "ignore" file so feel free to flay your dead horse to the marrow.

Your comments were plenty disturbing to begin with without my attributing anything else to you. A lack of sympathy for victims is a tacit endorsement of the abuse they suffered.
Live with your horrible worldview and inject your sanctimonious politics into everything when women's lives are being ruined forever. I am sure it comports well with your political leanings which for you trump all human empathy and compassion.

You are a primary example of why the country is so poisoned with partisanship. If you can make even a devastating societal failure like this partisan, then there is no hope for any reconciliation in this country.

[knives]

I was reading Tom Nichols' excellent The Death of Expertise the day I watched this which jokingly calls Ailes' ousting as a good coda for a bad made for television movie which reminded me bad made for television movie master Jay Roach did just that. The film plays a bit like Friz Freleng trying to catch up to the experimental works of Chuck Jones as he's switched up his style to be like Adam McKay without understanding and seemingly disliking the style. The quick editing does help make the movie move quickly. but ultimately it's confusion over how to be sinks the movie to mediocrity.

It is fun seeing a bunch actors like Richard Kind and Stephen Root ham it up though. John Lithgow deserves a big pat on the back for being so gross.