The Assistant is a film directed by Kitty Green (2019) in which we follow the daily life of Jane, who has begun a job as an assistant to a high-profile entertainment mogul.  Jane is the first one in, last one out and her day is filled with mostly typical tasks such as taking phone calls, ordering lunch, making coffee and arranging travel and meetings.  As the film continues, Jane realises there is misconduct and abuse within the organisation and she decides to confront the HR department about it.  Surprisingly to Jane, she is told to play along with the behaviour if she wants to make it in the industry and her dreams of landing a role in the film industry are somewhat crushed.

The film intentionally has a slow pace and juxtaposes mundane office tasks with serious misconduct, contradicting the glamourous ideas that Jane initially had of the industry and her new role.  As Macnab notes “Imagine getting your dream job with a top independent film company and then discovering that your tasks include disinfecting the sofa on which your Harvey Weinstein-ish boss likes to entertain actresses” (2020).  The film deals with serious and topical issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace and the Me Too movement, however it also portrays white-collar worker life and the hierarchical structure of large corporations.  We can find similarities here with the film, The Apartment (1960), “…  presents corporate life as a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t proposition. If one stays within the corporate culture, he is forced to collude with the powers-that-be and compromise his ethics to get ahead. And if one steps outside the corporate arena, he is doomed to dwell in a small-time parallel universe, where virtue has to be its own reward. (Levinson, p. 82).  Jane is left disillusioned questioning what she could be propositioned to do to get ahead and the audience feels the mundane and banal daily life of the assistant, where this abuse seems common and ordinary.

Reference:

Green, K., Garner, J., Macfadyen, M., Leigh, M., Froseth, K., & Dominczyd, D. 2020. The assistant. Bleecker Street, New York, USA.

Levinson, J.  2012. The American success myth on film, 1st ed. , Palgrave Macmillan, UK.

Macnab, G. 2020, ‘Kitty Green on making a film for the post-Weinstein world with The Assistant’, Financial Times, 17 April, viewed 13 September 2020, < https://www.ft.com/content/edfbcc60-7e2e-11ea-b0fb-13524ae1056b>