Having had enough of her boss’s sexual harassments, Gretchen Carlson files a lawsuit against Fox News founder Roger Ailes. Her bravery triggers a domino effect, culminating into a liberation movement.
LINKING WITH PREVIOUS THEORIES:
You can understand misogyny (the poor representation of women in the media) in the same way you can understand racism, homophobia, ultra-nationalism and other forms of casual stereotyping, bias and prejudice, that is, through TEXTUAL ANALYSIS and the notion of REPRESENTATION.
As such, this film provides a narrative of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, in the same way that we could look at other stories that are concerned with other institutional prejudices – racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia etc. In other words, this film presents a version of the story of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM and MISOGYNY. It suggests a link between the presentation / representation of the female form and the ideas of a ruling patriarchy (Fox News, specifically Roger Ailes) and perhaps explains why we are presented with the stories we are presented with and how those stories are presented to us.
Institutional Analysis:
A key area of media studies is to look at the role of companies, organisations, businesses, institutions. This takes the form of critical analysis. In other words, it is not looking at from a Business studies perspective – organisation, profit, structure – but rather from a sociological perspective – issues of ownership, power, control, behaviour management. I have made a post on my own blog which you can find here, but central to this kind of approach is Althusser’s notion of ISA’s (Ideological State Apparatus), which is often traced in media production by the way in which media texts INTERPELLATE (hail, call, construct, build, maintain) an ideological identity.
Arguments presented against sexism and misogyny (ie the hegemonic struggle re: Gramsci) are raised through Feminist Critical Thinking and we have looked at early feminist movements as well as 2nd, 3rd and 4th wave feminist critics. We have even looked at theories of gender representation that look beyond binary gender values (male/female), which can termed as intersectionality, which first emerged as Queer Theory.
There’s a degree of irony in the fact that Bombshell, the movie about the fall of Fox News boss and serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes, was awarded an Oscar for make-up and hairstyling. One of the themes that runs through the movie is the objectification of Fox’s female employees, so giving the movie an award for the way its female stars look on screen feels a little jarring.
It’s certainly a superb cast and a stellar set of performances, starring three of Hollywood’s most bankable female stars, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie. Kidman and Theron respectively play two of Fox News’s most recognisable former news anchors: Gretchen Carlson, the former Miss America and Stanford graduate; and Megyn Kelly, a former attorney whose nightly programme, The Kelly File, vied with that of Bill O’Reilly for popularity during its run from 2013 to 2017. The film centres on Carlson’s 2016 sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes, then chairman and CEO of Fox News.
“He had either an old-school understanding of the sanctity of marriage or he had a fear of the woman having a protector,” said Randolph. “My source did not know, but said that [the harassment] was sort of a thing that you would get when you were going through a divorce or you would get when you were first there and you were known to be single. A boyfriend wouldn’t prevent him from [approaching]…. But one of my sources, who’s quite a powerful source, said that was something that was discussed internally. That once you were married, you were beyond predation on a certain level.”
