#roger ailes
In the very first scene of Bombshell, the audience is walked through the layout of the Fox News Building. We are shown where the studios are in relation to the writer’s room. We get to see the decor of the executive offices and the elevators that lead to them. We are shown such things to establish one very important fact: this script was written with intimate knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes at Fox News.
And it’s not pretty.
However, as someone who is STILL getting in intense online arguments defending the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, there was very little chance I was going to dislike a movie about rising up against a system that seeks to objectify women. But what I didn’t expect was how much this movie made me empathize with people on the far right.
It doesn’t need to be said that this is one of the most polarizing time in our nation’s recent history. But after seeing Bombshell, I am reminded that after Trump eventually leaves office, we will still need to find a way to coexist with the 40% of the country that still loves him. And those people are not Stormtroopers or Nazis or video game villains (despite how they behave at rallies). They are people. People who have DRASTICALLY different values than me, but people who have ups and down, triumphs and tears.
Early in the movie, Margot Robbie’s fictional news writer Kayla Pospisil defends Fox New’s zealous pandering to the far right as “balancing the national conversation.” That was the first time in my life I ever heard a defense of Fox News that I could actually understand philosophically, even if I didn’t agree with it. Charlize Theron’s surreally accurate portrayal of Megyn Kelly (a woman I grew up hating) made me see her as someone who was intelligent, strong, and willing to fight for her beliefs and her fellow woman. I was even moved by John Lithgow’s revolting performance as sexual abuser Roger Ailes, for while I despised his actions, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy every time he derided his own slovenly, half-crippled appearance.
It’s very easy to make an argument against the far right, but it’s tricky to do so without abandoning empathy for them. And that’s why Bombshell is more than one of the best movies I’ve ever seen; it’s also one of the most important.
FINAL GRADE: A+
