The Assistant, and the insidiousness of toxic work culture

Immediately after watching The Assistant, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It is a film that is often put in the context of the post-Weinstein #MeToo movement, and the comparison here is obvious.

Side note: I've been told to include a disclaimer that the trailer is misleading. This is not a thriller by any conventional standard. It is a slow burn of a film that wants you to feel every minute of misery felt by its protagonist, and it does a wonderfully fantastic job of taking you through that journey.

Jane (Julia Garner) is working a job that a million girls would kill for. She's a fresh out of college assistant to a faceless, nameless, high-profile studio executive, which ingeniously highlights the universality of this story. This could be anywhere. The sterile office with zero personality further reinforces this, as well as the ambiguity of the era. Although the office is clearly set in modern times, there are few, if any, identifiers that allow you to zero in on any specific year since the turn of the century.

The film follows Jane in a single work day, and even in its trim, 97 minute running time, The Assistant feels preternaturally long. But we're meant to feel every painful minute of Jane's intolerable workplace. (And yes, sometimes the film does feel painful.) She arrives long before everyone. She leaves long after everyone has gone.

She is surrounded in the workplace by white men who, at worst, treat her with contempt, and, at best, volunteer themselves to write groveling, apologetic emails to her boss. The only other women in the film are either the assumed sexual prey of this faceless studio executive or speaking in hushed tones about trying to find job opportunities elsewhere.

The insidious office culture permeates every interaction Jane has in her day. The man in power, despite his consistent abuse, is protected by layers of protection that refuse to stand up for anyone he bulldozes over to have his way. And when Jane finally decides to initiate a meeting with a seemingly sympathetic HR representative (Matthew Macfayden), the conversation very quickly takes a turn for the worse, chilling the viewer to the bone.

Jane is forced to confront every morally corrupt thing her boss does, scrubbing stains off the couch, giving back a woman's "lost" earring, and taking the new assistant, a young, fresh-faced waitress from Idaho, to one of the nicest hotels in Manhattan. You watch, helpless, as offense after offense piles up. And you watch Jane's soulless eyes as each offense adds to the weight of her struggle, sucking the life out of her. There is nothing she or you can do about the infrastructure of power that has stripped her and all these other women of their voices.

Everyone in the office tries to cover the offenses with what are supposed to be reassuring platitudes, but they seep with misdirected malice.

"She'll get more out of this than he will," one of the receptionists assures Jane as an actress disappears into his office without her coat.

"You're not his type," the HR representative tells Jane.

Director Kitty Green does a masterful job of showing how these seemingly small injustices pile up to create a suffocating blanket of oppression.

The Assistant shows these same people in power that we are here and we have been watching. We recognize the systems that uphold your power in the most insidious ways. Some day, we will take them down and take you down with them.

Another side note: I am just now realizing that nearly everything I've chosen to write about thus far has a woman as the central star and has had a woman involved as a director—the only exception being West Side Story. Sorry not sorry.

Final side note: It seems all my thoughts generally wrap up in approximately 3 minute reads. Still wrapping my head around what this might mean for me.