Saying what a film is “about” is a marker of critical authoritarianism; when it doesn’t pin thoughts about a movie into the narrow confines of the film’s ostensible action, it does something more insidious—it gaslights readers into considering the movie to be something other than what they’ve seen. That’s why it’s essential to discuss, and to determine, what “The Assistant,” Kitty Green’s emotionally devastating, conceptually powerful new movie, is about. The constraint of thought to exactly and only what’s seen, and the way a character is manipulated to disbelieve what she perceives, are the very premises of the action.
“The Assistant” is a story modelled on what has been widely reported to have gone on at the Weinstein Company, at a time when Harvey Weinstein relied on his business to supply himself with young women to pursue for sex. (Just yesterday, Alyssa Rosenberg published a reminder, in the Washington Post, that such reports appeared as early as 2004.) The main character of “The Assistant,” who is on camera for nearly the entire film, is played by Julia Garner; according to IMDb, the character’s name is Jane, though I don’t recall the name being spoken in the course of the film (and, if it was, it was said only in passing). Jane is the assistant to the head of a film-production company, whose offices occupy two buildings on a Tribeca block, a busy company that, as one employee says, has thirty projects in development.
The tone of her work, and its effect on her life over all, is ominous from the start of the movie, which opens like a horror film, with Jane leaving her Astoria apartment building in the early morning, in the dark before dawn, getting into a black car, and then entering, alone, the Tribeca building in which she works. She’s the first person in the office, and as she moves through the shadows of the modified industrial space, turning on lights and looking around, the mood is thick with menace and foreboding. As in a horror film, Jane seems likely to encounter a flesh-and-blood predator, evil spirits, or ghosts—and, in the course of the action, she meets some version of all three.
Alone at her desk, she’s surrounded by binders—a word indissociable from Mitt Romney’s revealing debate gaffe about his “binders full of women,” and which turns out to be an apt association in “The Assistant.” Jane turns on her computer, prints out the day’s business, places it on the desk of her (still absent) boss, and finds an earring on the floor of his office. She eats a bowl of Froot Loops (“Get Out”-style), and she hears voices—she’s not alone. A terrifying chill suffuses the mundane details of “The Assistant”: even her banal rounds of printing and xeroxing scripts, making travel arrangements by phone, and preparing glasses of water for visiting clients have an air of robotic alienation and impending doom.
The nature of that looming terror is soon revealed. Jane, a recent college graduate, shares the front office with two young men, white and fratty, who seem to be in their mid- to late twenties, one nerdy and one slick. One of them asks Jane to handle a phone call; it’s the boss’s wife, who is furiously demanding to speak with her husband about her credit cards being blocked. Jane does her best to stay calm and take a message, but it isn’t good enough: soon thereafter, the boss buzzes Jane and berates her loudly (“They told me you were smart. . . . You’re good at ordering salads”) within earshot of her two male colleagues.
The world of “The Assistant” is an ordinary one, but, as in a horror-fantasy of alternate realities, its details are out of whack—and many of the ominous perturbations of Jane’s experience have to do with sex. A Ukrainian woman, conventionally model-like, comes to the office, summoned to a meeting with the boss; she dumps her coat on Jane’s desk and delivers her passport for Jane to scan. Jane receives boxes from a mail carrier; do they contain DVDs? No, syringes of alprostadil (used to treat erectile dysfunction), several of which, later on, she’ll collect from her boss’s garbage can and place in a biohazard bag. Jane prepares checks for her boss to sign—schools, extracurriculars, babysitters, etc.—and two of the checks, made out for thousands of dollars, have the recipient’s name left blank.
The crux of the movie is a doubling of the title: another young woman shows up in the office, claiming to have been hired as an assistant. She seems to be about eighteen and has little apparent background for the work; she’s a woman whom the boss met in Sun Valley and invited to come for the job. He’s putting her up in the luxurious Mark Hotel and, soon after she gets there, he also heads to the hotel—as other colleagues know and even joke about. It would be a cruel spoiler to say what happens next; suffice it to say that, when Jane conveys her suspicions that the young woman is being exploited, she is menaced with a velvet glove of corporate coercion.
“The Assistant” is a drama of moral epistemology, in which the details that Jane perceives have an obvious meaning that is being overlooked, denied, or ignored by the people who work in her office, and that Jane is being harshly and rigorously trained to dismiss, too. The movie’s subject, in effect, is: everyone knew, and everyone recognized that their interests depended on pretending not to know or not caring about what they knew, and making sure that others in their orbit would do the same. It’s significant that the office is dominated by men—and also that there are women, senior to Jane, who work there in positions of some authority, who are in on the coverup.
The key is “pretending”: if there’s a margin of plausible deniability to the evidence that presents itself, then, no less than the boss would rely on it if accused, the employees can rely on it to exonerate themselves for inaction. If they can’t intellectually squeeze themselves into that margin, then they can concoct a hand-wavingly immoral justification for what they know. (One employee tells Jane, “Don’t worry, she’ll get more out of it than he will.”) And, if they can’t bend their sense of morality to justify the boss’s actions, they can—in the final step—merely keep their mouths shut in the name of loyalty, self-interest, and fear.
That third step, the ultimate safety net that the boss has woven for himself, is at the heart of the movie: the conditioning that Jane, a new employee (only a few months into the job), is receiving in order to make her what might be called a team player. In addition to the plethora of details suggesting to Jane that her boss is using his business to procure the sexual services of the women he’s hiring, the movie is filled with a profusion of details that show how her personality, her very identity, is broken down by the demands of the job and by her boss’s own conduct, how she’s being alienated from herself and subordinated to her boss’s authority.
