The Inconvenient Truth of Women Like Catherine/Cate in "Disclaimer"
Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's latest drama says more about societal complicity in maligning successful women than anything else.
Spoilers for the series “Disclaimer” are below.
As a rule, I’m drawn to films and shows that subvert cultural gender norms, causing us to reevaluate our long-held beliefs. That’s why I gravitated to The Morning Show and had this to say after watching the first season and witnessing the reckoning of UBA’s workplace culture, which was reeling from the fallout of the Mitch Kessler scandal, thinly veiled after the real-life Matt Lauer Today Show scandal.
Without disclosing too much, the 10 episodes in Season 1, are magnificent, even as the sexual abuse stories of of predators like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein feel more and more removed from everyday stories, the culture of industries that allowed for the power dynamic to exist in the first place still exists. The news needs to reflect that story but for Alex, her perspective is nuanced and yes, muddled by years of friendships, professional gain at the expense of others with an inconvenient narrative, and a mental toughness curated from years of “just going along to get along.”
Mitch Kessler destroyed one woman’s life and made a few more permanently miserable in his predatorial wake. This is after years of being known as the nice guy with a stellar reputation. And yet it was Alex Levy, his well-established co-anchor, who was left questioning her own involvement in permitting his sexual predations to persist. In Disclaimer, after 6.5 episodes, we learn in the season finale that the much-adored hero of our tale, who even risked his life to save a child, Jonathan Brigstocke, was a sexual predator who raped Catherine Ravenscroft repeatedly in the course of one night. This might be where the two shows divert, but there are more similarities between these dramas.
In both Apple TV+ shows, there’s a public perception of a “fallen” woman whose reputation is questioned and is gaslit - her story is the secondary tale, trumped by the rage-fueled misdeeds of another. She is cast as the victim in her story, but it’s never really her story. We are quick to believe the story of the other, generally, an angry man or a sad mother, as it’s a convenient one we’re familiar with over an uglier, more painful truth. These are familiar archetypes that don’t cause our brains too much dissonance because it’s stories we’ve come to know well. Moreover, in Disclaimer, the audience, alongside Jonathan’s father, Stephen (Kevin Kline), who is leading the witchhunt punitive retribution, is complicit in prolonging Catherine’s suffering because she did a bad, bad thing - namely, cheated on her husband with Stephen’s willing, consenting son, and derived pleasure from sex. In the show, we hear the refrain from readers of the fictional book Stephen’s wife Nancy (Leslie Manville) wrote, villainizing Catherine, how bad she is, and how much they “hate” her. Disclaimer is very much a trompe l'oeil - the story we’re being fed and easily buy into and the one beneath the surface.
Catherine’s husband Robert (Sasha Baron Cohen), who unfortunately suffers from Main Character Syndrome and is quick to play “judge, jury, and executioner” with his wife, willingly accepts stranger Stephen’s (Kevin Kline) version of events, the one which casts his wife as a Jezebel. He mistakingly views Catherine’s reticence, but really his inability to allow her to tell her version of events, as an admission of guilt. The illicit “bedroom romp” photos Jonathan took of Catherine don’t help the cause. Still, the fact of that matter is that Robert is a dud who valued the narrative of a stranger that suited him best over honoring the 25+ years of marriage to a dedicated partner. That Jonathan raped Catherine, and this version of events was a much more palatable and convenient one for Catherine’s family, her work community and the show’s viewers is the point.
Side Note: I knew Jonathan was at least a douche from episode 3 and possibly something sinister. What sealed the deal was Catherine, when she able to get a word in with Robert, told him that she never had an affair and alluded to wanting Jonathan to die.
Let’s for a second believe that Catherine (Cate Blanchett) seduced a younger man (Jonathan) and had a one-night tryst in Italy 20 years ago. She took provocative photos with Jonathan, a budding photographer and consenting adult. The next day, tragic circumstances led Jonathan to die while swimming out to rescue Nick, Catherine’s son, after Catherine, the young mother of a toddler, had fallen asleep while watching him.
The lesson is that Catherine was forced to pay for her “sins” - that of infidelity, when in fact, we later learn that in both versions (that of fiction and truth), Catherine experienced moments of joy and pleasure, which are at the root of the distaste. In one story, she’s happy because she’s being sexually pleasured, and this is bad. In the other, she’s enjoying being on her own, having made it through a really good day with her young son. She feels accomplished and is affirmed. In both versions, her joy or happiness is abruptly ended by tragedy - rape or her son’s mortality.
posits the short-lived and often tragic consequences of female joy in her Substack post this week, aptly titled, “quick question: do people like happy girls?”It can seem like the happiness of a woman deeply bothers people.
In it, she cites Meg Ryan’s City of God character’s blissful moment riding the bike with her hands off the handlebar and swerving down a steep road, eyes closed, before she crashes into a truck. She was finally content. Nick Cage gave up immortality for her. The night before, she had the best sex of her life, and <boom>, she was gone. Is it possible she was too happy, and this is the cautionary tale? When I first saw this film, I judged her for being reckless: “Who closes her eyes while swerving down a narrow road on her bike? Of course, she’s going to die!” But, the happiness stupor can transport those it finds, rendering them less aware of their earthly surroundings and detaching them from reality for a moment. Seemingly minute details like forgetting the key to the door of the hotel room after enjoying a glass of wine won’t necessarily invite a predator into your room. Still, the warning sign is that it could, and the lesson is “always be on high alert.”
In Disclaimer, Catherine is, in the end, unable to find a path forward with her husband, Robert. His apologies fall on deaf ears. After all, apart from his being more OK with her being raped than her cheating on him, it’s only when Stephen Brigstocke proclaims the truth that Catherine shared with him that he’s willing to accept her truth.
‘There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more…’ Alexandre Dumas
Thx for watching shows so I won’t have to. Hehe. “Disclaimer” sounds like a very un-Steefel household show.
Better late than never...I just finished watching this and found it a quite frustrating watch, for some of the reasons you mention and in the other comments. The topic of whether a woman feeling joy or pleasure has to end in tragedy (in film, books, etc.) is an important one, but I don't feel like this series ever truly explores this. Also, the show is extremely manipulative. It's one thing to reveal the rape in the last episode, but to include Catherine's voice-over, implies that we are in her POV at times, which I don't think we ever were. I did start to wonder if we were in the story of the book or the "true" story in many scenes (starting probably episode 3 or 4). I am curious about all the voiceovers, from all the different characters (or was it just Catherine and Stephen?) I'd have to go back and check, but often the character's VO spoke over other characters' scenes, so I'm a bit unclear on what it was telling us.
I found all the characters unlikable and 2-dimensional. I kept with it because the editing and pacing kept me sticking around. But, in general, it all was like an artsy British soap opera. Kevin Kline gave a masterclass in overacting. I kept expecting Sasha Baron Cohen to break into Borat voice. If he did I might have liked it more.