I need to watch a couple more movies before I post my favorite movies of the year, but I can’t imagine The Invisible War won’t be on it. Kirby Dick’s documentary depicts the retributive culture of the U.S. armed forces, one that punishes women — and men — for reporting fellow officers and enlisted men of sexual assault. Tailhook and the Air Force Academy scandals taught these men nothing. Statistic after statistic enrages instead of numbs, the most grotesque of which is the number of male officers who rape women who also happen to be the administrators to whom the women should report the rape. Even the military’s pathetic responses in recent years do not go beyond implicating the women for exposing themselves to the risks and thus making themselves victims. The most shattering anecdote preserved by Dick: a soldier whose jaw was broken during the assault, leaving an endless string of hopeless messages at Veterans Affairs while her husband can’t contain a frustration stemming from empathy for his wife’s plight and annoyance that they can’t enjoy a normal sex life (the photo I chose preserves the moment).
When Aaron Sorkin changed one of the supporting characters in his hit play A Few Good Men to a starchy woman played by Demi Moore in the film version, he and director Rob Reiner let a disgusting bit of sexism reverberate in the most hackneyed way: we’re already manipulated to accept Jack Nicholson as a villain; now he’s a pig too. The quick closeup of Moore’s unfathomable response suggests, in the kindest of readings, that she’s used to these cracks, and, at worst, in the speed at which she responds, that Reiner and Sorkin know full well what horrors a female officer as attractive as Moore endured without the benefit of a glib response.
Humanizing The Vacuum 