In on the Joke

This past winter, the morning after arriving back in New York from Sundance Film Festival, I sat on my couch, eyes bleary and dry from altitude and airplane air, and screened a final debut film in the remaining hours of my press access. Sorry, Baby jolted me awake.

Through five chapters, this slow film—which came out in theaters in June via A24, and was written and directed by its star, Eva Victor—follows a few formative years in the life of Agnes: a brilliant, quirky young English professor at a remote college who was raped by her beloved thesis advisor. The film opens after the assault has transpired, then backtracks through several years to explain how it happened, what sorts of neuroses Agnes acquires as a result, and how her understanding of what happened between her and her professor shifts over time. Agnes’s trauma freezes her in place, while those around her move through life steadily. Gloomy though this may sound, the film manages to be at points both tender and caustic, an unusual combination powered by Victor’s near-perfect comedic timing.

June also saw the release of another, buzzier A24 acquisition that uses sexual assault as its fulcrum: Celine Song’s newest rom-com, Materialists. That film follows a young woman named Lucy (Dakota Johnson) who works as a flourishing matchmaker at a company called Adore, in a robotic, present-like version of New York City where dating has become fully corporatized and clients’ romantic desires are treated no different than boxes to check on an RFP. Although the first half of the movie is deliberately exaggerated and self-consciously comical, it takes a sharp turn when one of Lucy’s female clients, “Sophie L,” is sexually harassed and stalked by a man Lucy had set her up with. Lucy is devastated when she learns this news, for not only has the star employee taken an “L” at work, but—shocker!—she actually feels guilty. Meanwhile, her sterile boss Violet (Marin Ireland) sees the assault as simply as one of the risks a company like Adore assumes. If you do this line of work long enough, she rounds off, “it happens to all of us.”

This is supposed to be the beginning of Materialists’s turning point: the moment Lucy stops viewing relationships like “math” and starts seeing each half of a pair for what they really are: people, rife with flesh, flaws and “intangible” traits. It’s already driven critical controversy—NPR’s Aisha Harris called Song’s use of sexual assault as a plot device to spur character development “oddly cynical,” while the New Yorker’s Justin Chang wondered if it was “questionable” to use “an ancillary character’s trauma as a way station on Lucy’s path to learning and romantic fulfillment.” The film does take a turn for the worse here, but I’m not sure this is why.

Both these movies draw attention to the elephant in the room: namely, the post-#MeToo era, in which one and a half Trump administrations, the Harvey Weinstein years and gynecologist Robert Hadden’s conviction have made the power dynamic between boss and subordinate, doctor and patient, and professor and student abundantly clear—but accomplished little else. As Jamie Hood recently observed in the Drift, the moment we’re in now is one in which “women’s trauma may be witnessed—their account might even be believed!—but no transformation comes.” The pendulum has swung again, and the moment when lasting improvement seemed possible now resembles ancient history. Instead, we live in a time of political recantation: of, as Hood puts it, “anti-anti-rape sentiment.”

Addressing this reality is one of the many characteristics that sets Sorry, Baby apart from Materialists. Comedy might seem like a suspicious genre for a topic as grave as sexual assault, but it’s the very rendering of Agnes’s tragedy with dark humor, often driven by Victor’s consistent deadpan affect, that makes Sorry, Baby feel so singular. As with a stand-up skit or a headline in Reductress, Victor’s former place of work, the humor in her film stems from an assumption of cultural awareness in its viewers. We can laugh, Victor seems to say, because it’s ridiculous that we’ve only come this far. Nowhere is this done better in the film than in a scene on the day following Agnes’s assault, in which two lawyers tell her that because her harasser has already fled the university, there is nothing they can do about him. In the same breath, they tell her that they understand what she is going through, on account of being women too. There’s a long pause before Agnes replies with confusion. We laugh because the gulf between Agnes and the lawyers’ understanding of female solidarity is palpable.

Meanwhile, Materialists’s polarizing sexual-assault plot twist marks the moment when the film shifts genres, moving from an almost-funny skewering of commodified romance into something desperately earnest. And in doing so, Song reveals just how out of touch she is when it comes to our current climate of sexual politics. When Lucy apologizes to Sophie L for what she has gone through, the com in rom-com leaves the room. Sophie L shudders and calls Lucy a “pimp,” maintaining that the matchmaker must have set her up with this man because Lucy sees her as damaged goods. By the end of the film, we learn that Sophie L doesn’t really see herself as any better, unable to locate a shred of self-respect because she’s forty and still single. At this point, absent any ironizing, we can’t help but think that Song must agree.

Instead of reinforcing stereotypes about female helplessness, Sorry, Baby questions them, using Agnes’s often overly literal perspective to push against the way the rest of society has resigned itself to accepting anti-anti-rape sentiment. Though Victor’s character sometimes struggles to understand herself, she uses her experience not to ponder whether the tragedy was her fault, but rather why, despite the promises of #MeToo to achieve more accountability and more equitable sexual relations, the cards are still stacked against those who suffer: in the legal system, in doctor’s offices and on college campuses. With all dashed hopes, as Agnes knows, it’s better to be in on the joke; this time around, we finally get to laugh.