Conservative Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The other day I watched a double feature of Jay Roach’s Bombshell, followed by his earlier film Game Change. In contrast to my recent article on political fiction, I’m more interested here in the role that real-life political figures play in these fictionalized dramas. What follows is not a critique of any real person, but of the way that cinema manufactures morality through victimhood while frequently erasing other types of harm (specifically harm to communities of color).

I can understand, first of all, why these films are deeply unappealing to people. Stephen Robinson at Wonkette joked that Megyn Kelly is “the least likable real-life person Charlize Theron played on screen”, adding, “yes, I’m aware of the movie Monster.” [1] Funny, yes, but it’s also the kind of joke that only works because we understand a truth behind it. Seeing a woman who once “reassured” kids that Santa and Jesus are definitely white (a clip briefly seen in Bombshell) presented as heroic and noble by Charlize Theron is pretty hard to watch.

Ditto Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin in Game Change. Palin, in fact, is arguably a much worse human being, even if only for her style and what she helped enable in U.S. politics; it’s hard to argue with Laura McGann in Vox, writing, “The party of Donald Trump began almost 10 years ago to the day, when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to join his ticket.” [2] Palin’s own racist attacks on Barack Obama — as seen in Game Change when Moore delivers the line “pallin’ around with terrorists” — is not unlike Kelly’s Santa/Jesus comments: blatant attempt to assert white supremacy by denying people of color positions of leadership, be they literal or symbolic.

There’s a larger issue here, and it’s one of the ability to empathize with those we disagree with and disagree with those with whom we empathize. Sometimes this issue manifests in small ways, and sometimes in absolutely brutal fashion.

In January of 2015, a terrorist attack was carried out on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine that had published what can only be described as deeply racist, Islamaphobic images. Attempts to defend the right of the magazine to publish usually lacked the necessary nuance. This is a problem, as Katherine Cross put it at Feministing: “by making untouchable martyrs out of the slain Charlie Hebdo writers and artists, and belittling longstanding concerns many have had about the newspaper’s history of racism, we compound the tragedy and do further violence to free expression.” [3] The harmful nature of the imagery doesn’t negate the horror of the shooting, but the horror of the shooting doesn’t negate the harm of the imagery. Both can be true at the same time.

Game Change plays up the trauma of public scrutiny towards Palin in order to absolve her of wrongdoing. This moral binary is typical of mainstream U.S. cinema going back to Griffith: the victimized are wholly good, the wholly good are victimized (but for Griffith as for so many that followed him, only certain people — specifically white people — count in this regard).

I’ve noted something similar in my own research on transgender cinema. The shift towards sympathy for, and liberal attitudes towards, the transgender population was marked by a cinematic shift from portrayal as villains (i.e. Psycho) to that of victims (i.e. Boys Don’t Cry). Privileged people love to show their liberal bona fides by painting marginalized groups as victims.

But I digress.

In Bombshell, we are asked to valorize Megyn Kelly on the more watered-down end of the #MeToo spectrum. What initially reads like a bold willingness to reach across an ideological chasm eventually comes into view as another way to bury the radical nature of the changing culture that enables a film like Bombshell in the first place. Roger Ailes actions towards Fox’s female employees doesn’t negate the harm the network and its personalities cause, but Bombshell would love to pretend it does. It’s that Griffithian moral tautology again. Kelly’s racism, and the backlash to it, is just background noise put there for verisimilitude.

The most worthwhile moment in either film is a scene in Game Change where Julianne Moore, as Sarah Palin, watches Tina Fey on SNL as Sarah Palin. This funhouse mirror of representations implodes neoliberal moralism, revealing a fantasy built on trick angles and stable identity politics. In that instant, Sarah Palin ceases to be a singular entity, a moral symbol, and becomes real, with all the nuance that entails.

(All apologies to Pedro Almodóvar for borrowing his movie title. This piece was not named arbitrarily; Almodóvar’s cinema is in many ways the antithesis of the Griffithian moralism I describe in the article. If you’re considering watching Bombshell, save your time and watch All About My Mother instead.)

1. Stephen Robinson, “Megyn Kelly Still Sucks. This Time About Trump, Coronavirus.” Wonkette, March 20, 2020
2. Laura McGann, “John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Rise of Reality TV Politics”, Vox, September 1, 2018
3. Katherine Cross, “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie: On the Charlie Hebdo Massacre and Duelling Extremisms”, Feministing