Films focus on personal assistants
Many Millennials feel cursed. Having entered the job market around the 2007 recession, they’re now dealing with another hurdle from hell: financial vulnerability brought on by COVID19.
Terms of frustration for working toward impossible success like “pivoting” or “back to the drawing board” are commonplace in the media. If there’s a fitting cinematic trope to symbolize the Millennial dilemma, it’s the personal assistant. Climbing the corporate ladder without getting anywhere, assistants have been around in film and TV for generations. Now, more than ever, they tell an important story we might not want to hear.
In “The Assistant,” released in theaters in January but now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, we witness a corporate sexual harassment web through the eyes of a jaded executive assistant portrayed by Julia Garner (of the Netflix series “Ozark”).
In the 2018 Netflix film “Set It Up,” two frustrated assistants seek to pair off their powerful bosses in hopes of easing their workload. In HBO’s comedy series “Avenue 5,” Iris, personal assistant to a flamboyant billionaire, is the only functioning adult on set, navigating disasters on a spacetraveling cruise ship. In “Little,” the 2019 film directed by Tina Gordon now available on HBO, Issa Rae plays the personal assistant to Regina Hall’s nightmarish boss; when Hall’s character wakes up one day in the body of her 13yearold self, the assistant becomes her confidant.
These characters have traits in common: they’re young, overworked, undervalued and bullied by powerdrunk superiors.
In “Little,” the boss calls her assistant incessantly. She barks orders, terrorizes and shuts down the assistant’s creative ideas — until the plot twist.
More somber and #MeToothemed, “The Assistant” portrays its protagonist as invisible and taken for granted, a secret keeper for her horrible Hollywood boss, whom we never see.
These onscreen assistants are supposed to be forgettable; their office mates and bosses don’t care about them. Yet their very role implies that they have ambition and crave the power their bosses wield.
Liz Van Vliet, who is behind the executiveassistantthemed podcast “Being Indispensable,” said many Millennials view the job as “a viable steppingstone into the business world, a company or an industry.” Drawing the line between P.A.s and “career E.A.s,” who become executive assistants for the long run, she said Millennials who chose assistant roles to climb “may find the role limiting and lacking the autonomy they crave.”
In “Set It Up,” both Harper (Zoe Deutch), assisting a spoiled media mogul, and Charlie (Glen Powell), the assistant of a selfish venture capitalist, hope to get ahead eventually, but their
demanding jobs hinder their creativity and productivity, while demeaning dynamics dig at selfconfidence. April, in “Little,” circles around the pitch meetings at the tech company her boss started but can’t make herself seen as a creative.
As for “The Assistant,” ambition is weaponized; Garner’s character is constantly told, by the male agents, that to “get ahead” in the movie industry she must turn a blind eye to sexual, predatory behaviors the boss exhibits. This push and pull of ambition and hopelessness, upward mobility and treading water, is the trap younger workers often fall into.
The assistant as an onscreen character is hardly new, from 1957’s “A Face in the Crowd” to 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada.” Recent films, however, try harder to empower the assistant roles, by equipping them with forgiving plotlines and some dreams that come true. For filmmakers now, the assistant is a key to positive workforce changes.
“I wish I could say that nowadays assistants are treated with more gratitude and respect, but unfortunately I think the very fact that our movie resonated so much with a Millennial audience speaks to the fact that not much has changed,” Juliet Berman, a producer at Treehouse Pictures, which made “Set It Up,” told The Chronicle. “What we are seeing, though, as a result of the #MeToo movement, is a bigger conversation about decency in the workplace and a recognition of the role of power dynamics, and I’m hopeful that will have a positive effect on assistant culture.”
In “The Assistant,” director and screenwriter Kitty Green uses the assistant as a magnifying glass, looking at #MeToo undercurrents. “The assistant has the least amount of power,” Green told The Chronicle. “She or he often deals with a lot of different people in the company, and you can see what’s going on behind the scenes, how the sausage is made, so to speak, through their eyes.”
Are assistants a storytelling tool because Millennial audiences see themselves in the portrayals?
“It’s a position that we often ignore and overlook,” Green said. “But if we want to change, if we want the system to be better, we need to acknowledge everyone with respect, including the people in those positions.”
“The assistant is, in some ways, the ultimate underdog,” Berman said. “Now more than ever, we want to root for the underdog.”
If the postCOVID19 recession indeed comes and Millennials — though, not them exclusively — come to reconsider the thankless entrylevel job, at least there’s cinematic glory to hold onto.