33. Tupperware

These characters are highbrow lowlifes whose proximity to power defines them and gives them a chance to exercise their gift for the underhanded maneuver.

A Vulture headline I recently came across had me thinking that the attached article would use the occasion of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel—which had opened to enthusiastic reviews—to focus on a sort of amazing scene in her first feature, The Assistant. (“Time to Brush Up on Succession’s Assistants, Aides, and Attachés,” the header proclaimed.) But it was a case of careless reading. The article was actually about actors with small but important recurring roles in the series. I’d glimpsed the word “Assistant” and the reference to Succession and made the assumption that someone had finally discovered and written about Matthew Macfadyen’s cameo in Green’s quiet, unassuming 2019 Me Too movie, where he appears in a single scene as the human resources director to whom the title character, played by Julia Garner, tries to report her concerns about the Harvey Weinstein–type movie mogul she works for.

The article on Vulture turned out to be from back in March, when Succession was drawing to a close. All the same, it got me thinking about that scene in The Assistant and why Macfadyen’s performance in it blows me away.

Macfadyen’s career has followed an interesting trajectory. In the Oughts he played archetypal British heroes of the stoic, brooding Byronic breed, like Tom Quinn, the starting protagonist of the television series that was “Spooks” in England and “MI-5” in America, and like Darcy in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Now he seems to spend a lot of time demonstrating his genius for playing a certain kind of American weasel—like Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s loathsome husband in Succession, and like the HR guy here. These characters are highbrow lowlifes whose proximity to power defines them and gives them a chance to exercise their gift for the underhanded maneuver. What seems to me singular about Macfadyen’s approach to these roles is the way he manages to make the characters unambiguously reprehensible while refusing to explicitly project the very thing the character is all about, whether that’s his own ferocious ambition or his delight in intimidating an underling.

I can’t emphasize enough how understated The Assistant is—and how chilling. All it does is follow this young woman, whose name (I think we never find out) is Jane, through a single day in her job working for a gross-mannered, abusive man who is never mentioned by name and only “appears” in the sense that you hear his voice once or twice over the phone or in emails. In the course of the day you see the low-grade abuse Jane is subjected to by her mostly male colleagues who demean and haze her and amuse themselves by trying to make things uncomfortable for her in various ways.

We also see how Jane’s job brings her into contact with impressionistic evidence that her boss is using his power and position to gain sexual access to a constant stream of young women. She finds an earring on the floor of his office. She opens a package that turns out to contain a supply of syringes filled with an erectile dysfunction drug. Later we see her dispose of the used ones she’s had to retrieve from her boss’s wastebasket. And she has to escort a fresh-faced young woman who caught the mogul’s eye in Sun Valley to the Mark Hotel, where a room has been procured for her, and whither—according to the talk when Jane returns to the office—the boss has also repaired.

One of the things that makes the movie so effective is that the viewer becomes complicit in the open-secret aspect of the Weinstein phenomenon. The camera only need dwell for a moment on Garner’s affectless face in these situations for us to intuit what she knows or suspects is going on.

Everything is established elliptically. And it’s the unavoidable ellipses in Garner’s halting attempts to report what she sees as unethical that allow the character played by Macfadyen to feign confusion as to what she’s getting at and spin things so as to make her appear the villain. It’s only with his Parthian shot, as Garner is on her way out the door—“I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You’re not his type.”—that Macfadyen reveals how perfectly he understood her.

It took my watching a poor-quality clip of the scene on someone’s Matthew Macfadyen fan page on Facebook to bring home to me why this scene fascinates and moves me. Maybe the slightly blurry aspect to the print called to mind the wavy dissolve effect that used to indicate a flashback in old movies and took me into the past. What I realized re-watching the scene is how perfectly Macfadyen captures a nuanced brand of covert corporate menace that I remember encountering in the interview in which the process of my departure from The New Yorker was explained to me.

I’ve said before that after I left the magazine I used to see sexual harassment everywhere. For years I’d come across something I thought was an example of it or related to the topic and file it away in a manilla folder. Sometimes it was a clipping, sometimes a note on a line of dialogue or a song lyric or the plot of a play. And since I could never remember where I’d put that file, I would always have to start a new one the next time it happened. Late in 2017, when I went looking for old issues of The New Yorker, I found that every box I opened contained a file that was labelled “Sexual Harassment” and contained just one or two items.

A couple of artifacts I came across resonated particularly. One was an article about a woman named Rena Weeks, a former secretary who in 1998 had won a sexual harassment suit against Baker McKenzie, a law firm that was characterized at the time as the largest in the world. I could remember where I was and who I was with and what we were talking about when news of that verdict came in.

The other item was an article about a court ruling that was going to allow Hedda Nussbaum, the former domestic partner of child-killer Joel Steinberg, to sue him for years of physical and psychological abuse despite the statute of limitations for personal injury lawsuits having expired. What interested me was the legal theory that Nussbaum’s lawyer, Betty Levinson, had come up with to persuade the court that certain victims of domestic violence deserve an exemption from the statute of limitations. She had argued that Steinberg’s abuse had left Nussbaum so severely damaged that she couldn’t understand what had happened to her at the time.

It was physical damage that Nussbaum’s lawyer was using to make this argument. All the same, I was fascinated by the strategy and for years used to wonder whether some version of that argument could or should be made in cases of sexual harassment. Because so often the victim has no way of knowing what’s really going on. It’s a problem of epistemology. In both instances, it’s the offense itself that cuts off access to information, preventing the victim from being in a position to take legal action.

In the Matthew Macfadyen scene in The Assistant, the character he plays shifts the focus of the interview, embarking on a series of questions about Jane’s ambitions, aspirations, and accomplishments before saying, “So why are you in here trying to throw it all away over this bullshit?” What Macfadyen captures so beautifully is coercion masquerading as allyship, the threat dressed up to make it look as though the person threatening you has your best interests at heart. In my case I was told that I was being sent off with something called “a first-look contract,” a point that seemed to come up every time I tried to inquire too deeply into the precise reason why I was being fired.

I had told Bob Gottlieb about the situation with Mr. New Yorker Writer—twice. What I didn’t know was whether he’d passed the information on to anyone who was part of the new regime. Common sense would suggest not—that such important people had more significant things to discuss. And yet there was something strangely punitive and contemptuous about the way I was being treated.

It wasn’t until years later, when I saw how the departure of one of my successors was handled that it came home to me how harmful and damaging the way The New Yorker handled my departure had been. In her case there were items planted in other publications full of quotations from David Remnick about how good she’d been at her job and how sorry they were to see her go and how leaving had been her own decision as she had other projects she wanted to undertake. In my case, under Tina Brown, there had been nothing—just silence.

And it took years of unreturned phone calls and emails for me to understand definitively what I suspected, that “a first-look contract” was meaningless, that it had just been a way of keeping me quiet and discouraging me from creating any unpleasantness. Or hiring a lawyer.

Which, of course, I’d have done if I’d had any idea what was actually going on.

As it was, when I got a call from one of the guys in the messenger room telling me to come in and clean out my office, I consulted my agent, which I would never have done had she not gone out of her way earlier to assure me that she was in a position to negotiate for me with the new regime at The New Yorker, phoning me on the day Tina Brown’s hire was announced to tell me that a woman named Pam McCarthy, Brown’s chief lieutenant, was an old and dear friend. They went way back together, so if I ever needed anything I should remember that.

Perhaps by the time I was fired my agent was no longer in a position to negotiate for me.¹ In any case, her advice was to approach McCarthy like a peer: to call and graciously ask if I could take her to lunch.

I tried to follow this advice but my invitation was countered with a suggestion that I come into the office to talk.

What I’ll never forget is how at a certain point, while McCarthy was telling me how much I was owed for accrued vacation time, she leaned down and began pulling Tupperware items full of food out of a bag. I watched her, bewildered, as she began placing them on the table between us. Finally, I asked what she was doing. Pausing, she made a show of looking surprised. “I thought you said you were hungry,” she said.

1. Under Tina Brown, the agent’s husband became a columnist for The New Yorker.