It’s #HimToo for the elite in ‘Scandal’
Affair or assault depends on who remembers it how in Netflix series
“Anatomy of a Scandal” lives in the crosshairs of different shows: part courtroom drama, part crime thriller, part #MeToo examination. But at the heart of it is the question of memory.
The first season of the Netflix anthology drama, premiering Friday, follows an ambitious British politician, James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), facing down a rape allegation from a young aide, Olivia (Naomi Scott) with whom he had been having an affair. When she comes forward, it’s not just his life thrown into chaos, but that of his wife Sophie (Sienna Miller), who stands by him, and prosecutor Kate Woodcraft (Michelle Dockery), who seems unwaveringly motivated to take him down.
“It’s an examination of the scandal of privilege, the scandal of elitism and the lives that are lived without examination that cause so much damage,” Friend, the 40-year-old British actor who plays James, told the Daily News.
“It’s an echelon of society that feels they’re not accountable to anyone, really, least of all themselves, and the catastrophe that that almost inevitably leads to.”
“Anatomy of a Scandal” dances between present day — mostly in the courtroom or at home with James and Sophie — and his ’90s college days, wooing girls at Oxford and partying with the Libertines, a group of similarly privileged rich white boys snorting Daddy’s money.
At times, director S.J. Clarkson mixes the two, throwing a college-aged James, played by Ben Radcliffe, into his unraveling marriage. Instead of showing a split-screen of Sophie imagining James and Olivia in the elevator, Clarkson puts the beleaguered wife in there with them to watch her worst nightmare. With tilted camera angles everything is intended to confuse the viewer.
James, in his own telling, is confused, too. He thought it was just an affair, a simple office romance. Olivia consented before, so nothing had changed. She remembers it differently.
“We’re looking at what he did. Does he know what he did? Does anybody remember it the same way?” Friend said. “It’s very much about the point of view and the subjective nature of memory.”
The next question is whether that matters. Does it matter that James thought it was consensual if Olivia did not? Does it matter that James can stand in front of the judge and jury, with his boyish grin and 40 years of history in his favor, and say that he’s never
heard the word “no” before?
“What’s the thing about Whitehouses?” James repeatedly asks his children in a practiced call-and-response. “We always come out on top!”
“Anatomy of a Scandal” is aware of the privilege of its characters, not just James but Sophie as well, as the pair dance through the allegations, barely stopping to think about the consequences of their actions. They are white and attractive and rich; they’ve never
had to think about such things before.
That, then, is left up to Kate, the prosecutor determined to force him to face his own bad decisions for the first time. The case sends her spiraling into her own history, because while James has never thought about sexual assault, his story is all too familiar to the women around him. Kate, and later Sophie, see their worlds turned upside down.
But on the stand, James spins
his story as he has always done, as he was taught to do. And he does it all without a bead of sweat.
“If you move through life without thinking you’ve ever done anything wrong, that’s inherently slimy,” Friend told The News. “On the other side of it, he was a great husband, a great dad and could have been a great politician. It’s interesting to explore how those two can [exist] in one person.”