Disclosure.
Disclosure is the first movie I remember questioning the monolithic “men are a bunch of b-stards” worldview which has been propagated by our media, our universities, and society as a whole since our institutions have been contaminated by the radicals of the 1960s. It also marked the first time that email was an intrinsic part of a storyline or that it was even used in film. Back in 1994, it must have appeared twice as cold and impersonal as it does today.
The story’s theme is foreshadowed by the words of a “surplused” or laid-off older worker in the very beginning. Michael Douglas knows him from their joint commutes upon a Seattle ferry. He warns that “we used to have fun with girls, now they want our jobs.” Soon after, we are introduced to Demi Moore’s character, whose desire is exactly that. She alludes to the future when she sees Douglas waiting for the elevator and asks, “Going down?” He certainly is.
The real landscape of Disclosure is not Seattle or the corporate world; the action takes place within society’s battle of the sexes, a battle that never should have never been faught at all. There is no reason why relations between the sexes has to be cut-throat or adversarial. We were made to be complementary to another and that is how our interactions should have remained, yet the western world allowed some of the worst arguments about human behavior ever blathered to be accepted as the truth.
Our courts, legislators, academics, and even Presidents have given recognition to bogus concepts like “the patriarchy” and that heterosexual intercourse demeans women. In fact, sex often achieves the exactly opposite result. It turns women into mothers who then perpetuate our species. The rise of womyns’ studies programs and the legitimacy given to the hysterical denunciation of 49 percent of the population illustrates well the old saying that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, and that is precisely what the mass of men have done in regards to radical feminism. Instead of standing up for themselves and their brothers, they extended chivalry to those who were women in name only, and had no investment in the lives the majority of the earth’s women live. To supine before those who desire your destruction is suicide, and the exploitation of men like the one played by Michael Douglas here will occur again and again until the ominous hate-spewed cloud of radical feminism is blown from our shores.
God bless you, Michael Crichton and Barry Levinson for calling attention to this heinous state of affairs at such an early date.
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Denis said,
Fire,
great post!
July 20, 2005 at 11:43 am
PolishKnight said,
Douglas rocks!
I also loved other films he had made early that enraged the P.C. elite: Falling Down , Fatal Attraction , Basic Instinct , and even Romancing the Stone and War of the Roses were films in which the man was a noble albeit politically incorrect figure. Feminists even began to ask if he was perhaps a misogynist.
Falling Down is a classic and has a huge fan following if you check out amazon. It simply was one of the first films to truly thumb it’s nose at the Hollywood elite. It transformed Los Angeles from this false image portrayed by “Baywatch” into the reality of just another rotting, decaying inner city. (I have a Russian friend who broke down and cried when he saw what L.A. really looked like.)
Fatal Attraction single handedly blew away the 70’s and 80’s notion of aging single career women as empowered perfect goddesses and showed them to be often desperate, lonely, and even psychotic. It was not the kind of image that feminism was trying to market to young, aspiring career women.
I wish it was the case that Michael Crighton had a sincere personal agenda to maybe write such a film as Disclosure , but maybe he was just viewing it as a fun project more than anything else. His later Jurassic Park films dripped with political correctness and environmentalism. For example: Imagine if the slimey lawyer who got eaten early in Jurassic Park was a woman? Wouldn’t THAT have been something interesting to see? Instead, everyone who dies is a man. Boring. The next two films he made in the series was predictable sequel trash.
July 20, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Fire said,
Thanks Denis!
Polish, with Crichton, can’t say I know much about him, but, back at the time, I heard him in an interview and he was solid. What his attitude is now I do not know.
July 20, 2005 at 3:53 pm
PolishKnight said,
Maybe Crichton is ok
It’s possible that some other hollywood influence took over. Wasn’t it Speilburg who directed the J.P. films?
July 20, 2005 at 4:13 pm