I don’t like the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ as it implies we should be ashamed of enjoying art, whether low or highbrow. I’m old enough to be comfortable liking what I like without needing everyone else in the world liking it.
Disclosure, though, comes as close as it’s possible to get to a guilty pleasure for me.
It’s a glossy, hi-tech thriller, which gets quite a lot of its macguffin technology right – even its virtual reality setup wasn’t totally stupid, and in fact had some neat ideas, which I’ll touch on shortly.
But its representation of gender politics is (to my taste) appalling, and almost every single character is repellent to some degree. Michael Douglas is once again cast as the lead in a sexy thriller, presumably because he’s experienced at playing a character who can’t keep his trousers done up. Demi Moore plays the power-hungry business woman almost as a younger Cruella DeVille. Dennis Miller plays his usual politically incorrect man boy, and Donald Sutherland plays another in his long list of silken tyrants.
For me, Michael Crichton (who wrote the novel) is a bit like Richard Wagner – someone whose art you appreciate but whose personal politics you would probably despise. What with this story’s misogyny, Rising Sun’s xenohobia, the fear of nanotechnology in Next and the climate change denialism of State of Fear, many of his apparent positions are quite opposed to my own. But he knows how to put a story together. It’s almost as if he’s got a formula.
In fact, sometimes the formula shows itself. Jurassic Park had the same basic plot idea as Westworld, and Airframe has almost the identical plot to Disclosure.
It’s a shame, when he wanted to tell a story about sexual harassment in the workplace, he chose to ignore the overwhelming examples of women being harassed and passed over by men because he couldn’t resist being ‘clever’ and switching things around. But now he’s straying into science fiction since instances of women harassing men in this way are vanishingly rare. I’m sure it happens, but it’s more like a statistical error when balanced against the huge amount of institutionalised sexism against women.
It’s as if he wanted to write a story about rape, but decided to make it about a woman raping a man (which this movie does come dangerously close to). It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but presenting it that way just serves to deflect from the real problems.
It’s especially problematical when Douglas has to defend himself against accusations that he harassed Moore, not the other way around, since all of his protestations of innocence do, in fact, sound exactly like the kinds of things abusers say. By framing the story so that the audience knows for certain that Moore was the abusive party, it naturally makes the arguments against her seem reasonable and plausible, which can’t help but make actual male abusers’ protestations and excuses seem reasonable.
It gets even worse when Douglas reacts to Dennis Miller’s wife talking about Barbie, and how women are oppressed, with “80% of suicides are committed by men, they’re dropping like flies from heart attacks. I don’t have my own crisis hotline” and suddenly he’s sounding like all the people posting on a reddit Men’s Rights forum.
And then Dennis Miller, who’s been told about the recent events by Donald Sutherland, although obviously from a skewed point of view, and is worried he’ll lose a fortune if the company merger falls through, starts victim blaming. “You’re like one of those goddamn women, Tom, who think they’re going back to the hotel room at 2 in the morning drunk to watch HBO. Could you possibly be more lame?”
Even Douglas’ (female) lawyer can’t help but speak with the authorial voice. She’s talking to Douglas’ wife Susan after a long mediation hearing where both sides have told their version of the story.
SUSAN
You married your boss?
LAWYER
Classic case of sexual harassment,
he asked me out five times before I
said yes. Today if I had said no once
he would have been afraid to ask again.
So the movie has a fairly poisonous moral agenda (from where I sit). Does it work just as a thriller? Well here it’s better. It efficiently puts its protagonist in a deeper and deeper hole from which he must escape, and clearly paints the villains as villains. There’s almost no grey area there. Only Michael Douglas’ inability to initially resist Moore’s seduction gives the movie any real ambiguity, and frankly that behaviour was required to make the rest of the plot work better.
And then, when Demi Moore is played the answering machine tape of the encounter, and she’s asked “Doesn’t no mean no?” she replies “Sometimes no means that person wants to be overwhelmed, dominated. But we can’t talk about that. The way we’re supposed to have sex nowadays we’d need the UN to supervise it.”
There’s that blasted authorial voice again.
How about the depiction of technology? Well, it doesn’t start off well. The first image in the movie is of a huge spinning ‘you have mail’ icon.
And whatever email client everyone is using insists on animating a piece of paper unfolding to show the email. It’s not quite as egregious as Mission Impossible where he emails ‘max@job.3:15’ but it’s close.
The film does better with its Virtual Reality gimmick, ‘The Corridor’. This one was pretty good. Head-mounted 3d visor, data glove, 3d scanning to display your avatar in the system, and a treadmill to let you walk around.
This is pretty much state of the art for today. Their system also has some clever conceptual ideas. If you’re accessing the system but not using the full 3D scanning system, it will display a generic avatar with a flat photo of you as its face. And, importantly to the plot, their demo system, which visualises the filesystem as a big library, is just plugged straight into the company’s file server with no security.
Now, some might argue this is stupid, and of course there would be security, but even this part of it rings true. This is a proof of concept demo system, so it’s quite likely that features like file security wouldn’t be a first priority. And in a small company, the people making the VR system are also probably sysadmins too, so they would have full access to everything.
Naturally, this all comes int play later in the movie, when Douglas has to get to files in the system after he’s been locked out of his own account, so he goes to the hotel where the company have set up their VR system to show it off to their potential partners, and we get a nice tense scene where he’s trying to find the vital evidence while elsewhere, Demi Moore is logging in from her terminal to try to delete the files. And since she’s not using the VR system, it naturally uses the generic avatar for her.
So if we set aside the clunkiness that any 3D filesystem visualisation would inherently have, I think the filmmakers really nailed this one.
The other part of the technology plot, the magical ‘arcamax’ CD ROM drives, also make sense. I’m not sure why they decided to change the name from the book, where the drive was called ‘Sparkle’ – trademark search, probably. But the drives and their manufacturing problems, on which the major plot hinges, is all completely plausible.
I’m less sure about Douglas’ mobile phone, another plot pivot. I wonder if there were ever any phones manufactured that used LED matrix displays, rather than LCD displays.
And when Douglas retrieves the answering machine tape which proves much of his side of the story, he still can’t help himself, and gives Mr Levin a big kiss.
Now let’s get to the other major plot device used in the film. Douglas keeps receiving cryptic emails from ‘A Friend’ like this:
He gets several of these over the course of the movie. This is such a common conceit in movies that we barely notice it – characters withholding information they have for no reason other than to build tension or evoke mystery. The emails could easily have said “Your job is at stake unless you find out why the drives aren’t working” or even, if they had more information (which is never made clear) “The factories were built to the wrong specification” But instead, the emails are kept cryptic to generate false tension. The Pelican Brief did a similar thing. The contents of the titular brief are known to everyone in the movie, and yet it takes half the movie before we even discover what its deadly secret is, despite it not actually being a secret to anyone at all in the film. False Tension.
I feel like I’ve kicked this movie enough. Its thriller elements are well done, it’s rare in being a realistic depiction of technology, and its viewpoint on gender politics is repellent. But still a guilty pleasure. I watch it, but I’m not proud to watch it.
Afterwards, recording switches, and we get the end of an episode of The Persuaders on the old Bravo channel.
Then we get a film that I can’t describe as a guilty pleasure, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. I’ve watched this before, and it’s quite bad. Grungy gore effects, gratuitous nudity, awful synthy music, bad dubbing, murky cinematography, bad acting, slow editing. It’s just bad. And I suspect this version is cut, too. At least it’s letterboxed.
After this, there’s a short film from an old Popular Science newsreel, this one about aircraft testing.
Then the tape stops.
Adverts/Trails:
- trail: Robocop
- Barclaycard – Rowan Atkinson
- The Times
- Abbey Life
- Look Again
- trail: The New Look Bravo Channel
- trail: The Playboy Channel
- trail: Manga
- Newcastle Brown
- Army
- Bisto ready-to-pour – Julie Walters
- Boots
- Nimble
- Grattan
- Gillette Sensor Excel
- The Singles Network
- trail: New Bravo
- trail: Playboy Channel
- trail: Twilight Zone
- Tetley’s Bitter
- Australia
- Mr Muscle
- The Times
- Andrex
- Options
- American Express
- Just For Men
- Grattan
- trail: Manga
- trail: Robocop
- Hooch
- Wella Experience
- Boots
- MFI
- Kelloggs Hot Krumbly
- Mail On Sunday
- The Post Office
- Options
- Look Again
- The Singles Network
- trail: Redemption films – with a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in someone’s kitchen.
- trail: Vampyros Lesbos
- Mail on Sunday
- Wellaflex
- Next Directory
- Barclaycard – Rowan Atkinson
- Hot Krumbly
- Johnson’s Baby Breatheasy Bath
- trail: Boon
- trail: The Paradise Club
- trail: The Chief
- Craftmatic adjustable bed
- trail: Playboy Channel
- trail: Discovery Channel
- trail: Robocop
- trail: Twilight Zone
- Tetley’s Bitter
- TCP
- barclaycard
- mail on Sunday
- Look Again
- Nimble
- Singles Network
- trail: Trouble TV
VHiStory 