The way we tell #MeToo stories is changing
In her new memoir, “Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond,” filmmaker Joyce Chopra describes her youthful efforts to break into the French film industry in the 1960s. She treks to various offices, “full of high hopes,” only to be groped once, twice or three times by some producers, one of them no different from “the creeps who plagued women on the Paris streets, walking just steps behind while whispering obscenities.”
This master class in cringe sits all too comfortably beside a scene in the film “She Said,” adapted from the 2019 book of the same title, in which three women, all reporters at the New York Times, meet at a bar to discuss their latest investigation. Their conversation is promptly derailed by an aggressive pickup artist, who keeps propositioning one of the women (Carey Mulligan), even as she explains to him that they are trying to work. Only a loud, expletive-filled rant finally scares him off.
Dolly Parton said it best: What a way to make a living.
“She Said” authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, along with Ronan Farrow, put forth paradigm-shifting accounts of the Hollywood machinery in their reportage. There was a time, not long ago, at the height of the #MeToo era that followed, when each morning brought a new, shocking allegation. But “it was a different time,” a phrase that used to be the stuff of damage control, is now a legal argument. Just because things change doesn’t mean time’s up. Even if our cynicism is warranted, though, it’s not especially useful. How, then, can artists and authors make the movement new again, push back against the media eulogizing and find a new way to tell a depressingly familiar story?
Into this toxic miasma called the “cultural conversation” arrive Chopra’s book and “She Said.” Chopra is best-known for her critically acclaimed 1985 film, “Smooth Talk,” and her work often centers on mothers and daughters, ambitious women, and girls coming of age. Her autobiography traces the evolving role of female directors in Hollywood by drawing extensively on her own five decades in film and television. Director Maria Schrader’s film adaptation of “She Said,” by contrast, seeks to transform long-form journalism into a textbook-journalism movie, the reporters remade as active protago- nists who whisper with sources at shadowy bars and whose home and work lives inevitably blur together into a bleak, gritty mess. These texts, despite their differences, take a common tack: They make us feel the stories we already know, fixing on the shared, embodied horrors of moving through the world while female.