The Ontology of Silence: A review of Kitty Green's "The Assistant"

A few weeks before the theatres shut down, I went to Varsity theatre to watch Kitty Green’s “The Assistant”. I remember having a harsh initial reaction to the film’s first 30 minutes, to a point where I left the theatre wondering what the film was trying to achieve. 

Before going to the Cinema, I had started the day with a little peak into Chantal Akerman’s feminist masterpiece “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, and when I came back home, I picked up where I had left off to explore the philosophy of “Boredom” in Cinema. about 4 hours later when I finished the film in awe, the first reaction I had was to rethink my experience with the first 30 minutes of “The Assistant”.

I will not make excuses for myself; I misjudged “The Assistant” and did not allow it to tell the story that it needed to tell, and after finishing it; I realized how my very reaction affirmed the socio-political issues that the film aimed to address.

I went into “The Assistant” blind, not knowing what it had in store for me, and evidently I left the first viewing before it had time to tell its story of sexual abuse in the workplace and the systematic silencing of sexually assaulted women on both a micro and a macro level. 

“The Assistant” begins with emphasis on the tedium of the titular assistant’s job. Julie Garner fits perfectly as the lowest rung in the corporate ladder. She is constantly diminished and dismissed, guilt-tripped by her superiors into subservience. Kitty Green makes us see the assistant as a reverse performer, the one who needs to suppress her character in order to allow her male counterparts to perform superiority. There is a poetic ambience to her monotonous work life, a complete solution of the self into industry. But unlike “Jeanne Dielman”, the tedium that gnaws at her character does not implode into a spectacle.

Where “The Assistant” says the most, is with the inconsequentialism of the assistant’s voice. The Assistant is invisible, her voice is drowned in the loud ambience of her male counterparts. Unlike films of its ilk, the Assistant is not constantly striving to stand out, but failing. The Assistant is not the heroic story of a woman who rises to equity through spectacle. The Assistant is enveloped in a subdued haze of telephone calls, trapped in a neo-Sadist highly systematic hell where sexual abuse is planned and executed by an entire corporate ladder. The Assistant is trapped without a way up..

The film reaches its peak at the one hour mark when The Assistant goes to human resources to report the sexual meritocracy of her boss, where her complaint is dismissed as “Jealousy”. The counseling scene is impeccable, depicting the elusive nature of sexual condemnation when faced with a fundamentally flawed system. She is dismissed with the sentence “You don’t have anything to worry about, you’re not his type.” In “The King Kog Theorie” Virginie Despentes describes a woman’s sudden shift from an object to subject as a hammer who suddenly grows eyes and stares back at its holder. We watch The Assistant struggle to rise to subject status, but fail due to emotional manipulation and endless mind games that make her tear up to a status of emotional object. 

After coming back from human resources, she is further apprehended by her coworkers and her boss. We see The Assistant fully broken, as her two male coworkers literally spell out her apology email to her boss. This is where most films would have created a spectacle, but The assistant does not aim to “Resolve” the deep seeded inequity in corporate power politics. The film leaves us with an uneventful dinner, a slow walk into the night and back into the same hellish system.

If “The Assistant” is boring, it’s because there is no “Excitement” to be sought after in the silencing of the abused. Trauma is a single spectacle surrounded by a endless silence and infinite boredom. Certain cases of Tedium produce spectacular events, but “The Assistant” is about all the broken people who are trapped under abusive systems, unable to ever rise above. The Assistant is above all the abuse that is buried and remains hidden.

It still breaks my heart that I left the theatre upon my first viewing. By not finding the film “interesting” I was feeding a system that avoids the deep discomfort of discussing sexual abuse by dismissing it. what one finds “interesting” can be quite telling. 

Films are not “meant” to be escapism. Films are escapist to sell, but tedious tales of sexual abuse never sell. We need more uncomfortable films .What’s uncomfortable can linger, what lingers can induce long lasting thought, long lasting thought can create ideology, and ideology can inspire change. The Assistant is perhaps the most powerful film I have ever watched about the power-politics of the corporate world and the suppression of abused voices.