Microsoft Incel: Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994)

I genuinely thought that the year 2024 could not get more stressful, and then the Female Candidate Discussion came out of nowhere and T-boned me at the intersection. 

To sum up: There is a Female Candidate (Kamala Harris) in this year’s presidential election. If she wins, we will have a Female President; we’ve never had one of those before, which is depressing. However, since Kamala Harris is a woman (singular; one person) and not the entire gender of Woman (3.95 billion people and counting) it is unlikely that her victory would be A Victory For All Women Everywhere. Her loss, on the other hand, will be construed as A Loss For All Women Everywhere, and we will conclude that she lost because she is a woman, which will be used in the future as a reason that women (all women! everywhere!) shouldn’t run. We know this, because we all saw what happened in the last Female Candidate Discussion. 

I am not quite the liberal feminist I’ve sometimes been caricatured as — I don’t believe that women climbing the established hierarchy will, in and of itself, fix sexism, or any other form of oppression. I don’t believe women are “naturally” good or kind or better leaders than men; the Western patriarchal gender binary is fundamentally unnatural, and this is, to my mind, the cornerstone of all feminist thought. However, I do think it’s good to normalize seeing women in positions of power, because as long as we essentialize “power” as a masculine quality — maybe the masculine quality, or the most desirable one — we’re going to normalize things like rape and domestic abuse as a “natural” extension of men’s dominance. We need to expand the common definition of “woman” or “feminine” so that it includes authority and power in the public sphere, because if we don’t, all the people with power will be men, and they’ll use that power to oppress women. So there’s that. 

But I don’t want to do Female Candidate Discussion. I don’t want to stump for Harris, get screamed at for three solid months, and then watch her lose, taking all my burnt social capital with her. I don’t want to stump for her, watch her win, and then be held personally responsible each and every time she does something I dislike, which (since she’s running for president, and since U.S. presidents do bad things) she will do. I don’t want to sit this one out, watch the U.S. teeter into fascism, and wonder if there was something more I could have done to stop it. 

I don’t want to do any of it. So here’s my solution: I’m not gonna. I hate to play the “dead Dad” card, but my Dad is extremely dead, and the circumstances were depressing, involving homelessness and dying in a hotel and the police taking a long time to find anyone who knew him. My inheritance from my dead Dad is a bill for his cremation and a bunch of unsettling mental images, and I think that, under the circumstances, I am allowed to say that I would like to be excluded from this narrative. 

I admittedly came up with this erotic-thriller series as a way to turn my brain off and have some stupid fun while awaiting a second Trump presidency, so that’s what I am committing to for the time being. I’m just going to sit down and cover the movie I selected well over a month in advance, a movie which has nothing to do with women, and ambition, and power, and our cultural hostility to women “taking men’s jobs” or occupying seats of power that are historically male, and that movie is… oh, goddamn it. 

The place: Seattle. The industry: The fast-paced and glamorous world of CD-Rom manufacturing. The time: 1994, as evidenced by the movie’s opening scene, wherein Michael Douglas’ grade-school-age daughter goes over to his computer, reads his one (1) email, and then prints it out and hands it to him so he can read it, too. 

This is Disclosure, which is a less a movie than a window into the subconscious of America’s divorced dads. It’s MRA propaganda. It’s the world's first incel thriller. It’s porn for dudes who don’t fuck. It has the guileless un-self-awareness of self-insert fan-fiction written by a twelve-year-old Yu-Gi-Oh fan, and the politics of a hardened sex offender. As in porn, every single character is a projection of the presumed thoughts or wishes of the white male viewer. Only Michael Douglas is given anything like personhood, and even he is more a rolling collection of grievances than a human man. 

But sure, let’s start there: Michael Douglas plays a long-time professional in the world of Computer, whose only sin is that he is too nice and loves making Computer too darn much. Michael Douglas is eagerly awaiting a promotion to Head of Computer, but on the very day his triumph seems assured, his boss (Donald Sutherland, somehow still delightful, even in this) notifies him that his job, his very birthright as a long-time Computerman, will be going to — gasp! — a woman! Even worse, this woman is Demi Moore, his ex-girlfriend! Even even worse, Demi Moore is a sales person! She does not know Computer at all! 

“She doesn’t know the difference between software and a cashmere sweater,” is actual dialogue, uttered by Michael Douglas, in the movie Disclosure, which — believe it or not — was criticized at the time for being a little bit sexist. 

Now: Michael Douglas is a man, and like any man, he is terrified by today’s women and their godless appetites. (In an early scene, his daughter informs him that one of her classmates has two mothers, to which he responds with barely disguised panic.) Also like any man, Michael Douglas does sexual harassment all the time. In the introductory scene, walking into his office, Michael Douglas scopes out the ass of an anonymous female colleague, spanks his secretary, and commiserates with a recently unemployed fellow, who — like all people who lost their jobs for totally innocent, non-sexual-harassment-related reasons — whines that “we used to have fun with the girls. Nowadays, she’s probably after your job!” (This man, though never seen again, has summarized the movie Disclosure.) In later scenes, Douglas is shown happily taking part in discussions about whether his female boss has “nipples like pencil erasers” and/or whether she gives him “a boner;” he threatens to rape his children's nanny, to her face, to prove a point about how unlikely it is that he would rape anyone.  

Does any of this contradict our previous characterization of Michael Douglas as a saintly Computers genius whose only problem is being too nice and good at his job? No. For that to be true, women would have to be people, and female employees would have to be workers, not just sexy office decorations. Michael Douglas knows they’re not, and the screenplay assumes that you know it, too. However, there is one context in which sexual harassment is a very big problem: When a woman does it to a man, shortly before MAKING FALSE RAPE ACCUSATIONS AND RUINING AN INNOCENT MAN’S LIFE!!!!!!!!

Demi Moore assails Michael Douglas in her office. Demi Moore gets shot down. Demi Moore MAKES FALSE RAPE ACCUSATIONS AND RUINS AN INNOCENT MAN’S LIFE!!!!!!, or, at least, she will ruin it, unless Michael Douglas uses his only true friend — Computer — to prove his innocence and put her in her place. 

I think you know, in your heart of hearts, that Michael Douglas will succeed in this. The other option is allowing a woman to run a Computers business, which, as we all know, is biologically impossible (they don’t have the upper body strength for long-range typing, plus their hormones attract Clippy). But the movie lets Michael Douglas twist in the wind just long enough to give several moving soliloquies about how society is stacked against the white man, like so: 

SOME LADY: Women are oppressed. It’s just a fact of life. 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: Women are oppressed, huh? 80% of the suicides are committed by men. They’re dropping like flies from heart attacks…

SOME LADY: You’re not as tough. 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: Hey, sorry, we’re just fighting the wars. 

SOME LADY: You start the wars. 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: I don’t have my own crisis hotline!!!!

The hits keep coming. And coming, and coming, until at last we are hit with a scene that sums up the entire Michael Douglas film project: A teary-eyed, middle-class white man, threatening to “be that evil white male you’re all complaining about” and demanding to know when he has ever had power over anyone. 

Disclosure was the first Michael Crichton adaptation after the success of Jurassic Park — the film rights to the novel were sold before the book was finished; one character was re-written in draft so that Dennis Miller would be a better fit for the part — and, though it should not have been surprising to learn that the guy who wrote a novel about a commune of man-eating lesbian separatist dinosaurs had some weird ideas about women, the sheer dorkiness of it all is spectacular. It is painfully obvious that you are watching a high-concept science fiction writer attempt to comprehend people, and failing at it, which is why, midway through, the movie sort of forgets it’s about sexual harassment, and decides to be a virtual reality thriller.  

Thus the movie devolves — like Jurassic Park; like all ‘90s movies featuring Computer — into the different characters typing furiously into janky ‘90s tower PCs, with their commands dramatically highlighted on monitors which run on no known operating system. Michael Douglas attempts to access his Computers privileges and finds out that Demi Moore has taken them — I mean to say, he repeatedly clicks a menu item called “access privilege” and finds out he doesn’t have any, which is very funny. Demi Moore types “COMMAND: KILL ALL M - “ and we hold our breath for a second, wondering if the movie is going to go there, before she completes it as “KILL ALL MALAYSIA.” (Not better, Demi Moore!) Then, finally…

Look, you’re not going to watch Disclosure, are you? It’s all right. Disclosure is universally regarded as a dated, toxic embarrassment. No streaming service carries it. You have to pay Jeff Bezos $3.99 — which I did, twice — to see Disclosure, and even then, it’s like two hours of MRA rambling and maybe fifteen minutes of funny business with Computer. So if I told you “the climax of the movie is Michael Douglas in a VR helmet, experiencing an alternate reality that looks like an immersive-theater production of MECC’s Opening Night, attempting to outrun a wire frame skeleton with Demi Moore’s employee ID photo pasted on its face, which — the wire frame model, I mean — causes him to shriek as if he’s seen a velociraptor and say things like ‘my God, she’s IN THE SYSTEM,’” well, you would have no reason not to believe me, nor would you feel spoiled, because you were never going to watch Disclosure. 

In fact, I don’t have to tell you anything. I can just show it to you:

There you go. I just saved you $3.99. Buy yourself something nice.  

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this year’s Female Candidate Discussion. I suppose it makes sense for the female gender to notch up a big win right after I leave — I was only holding them back, after all. The night I wrote this review, there was a conference call, “White Dudes for Harris,” and it raised a lot of money. The messaging (as I gather) is that, by supporting Harris, you can be a white dude who’s not like the other white dudes — not like Trump, not like the dudes who like Trump, not like J.D. Vance and his dolphin porn and his calling any woman with her own income or apartment a “childless cat lady.” For just $19.99, you, too can be One Of The Good Ones, and if you pledge now, we’ll also give you this free tote bag. 

It's actually not a bad strategy, if it works, though it's a little humiliating to realize that we need this much hand-holding and praise just for showing up. We were all — you, me, J.D. Vance, everybody — raised to distrust and dislike women in power. Within living memory, the idea of allowing a woman to manage male employees was a horror premise for a movie that made $200 million at the box office. Regardless of Kamala Harris’ specific record and qualifications, this is true; it will stay true whether she wins or loses. One female president won’t be enough to resolve all our problems around Women and Power – a dozen, a hundred female presidents couldn't do that – but we will have to surmount all of those problems in order to elect even one.

1994 seems like a very long time ago. This is particularly true when you’re watching Michael Douglas dodge Demi Moore’s floating headshot in the municipal-records-office level of Tron, but it’s true all the time. You just don’t notice it until something, like a memory or a photo or an old movie, stops you short. It’s fun to visit 1994 as long as the past stays in the past, pinned down behind me. It is a lot less fun when I realize that 1994, or something very like it, may still be up ahead. 

Michael Douglas: Yes.

Demi Moore: Yes. 

Terrifying Female Sexuality: And even more terrifying management skills!

Gay People: Look, buddy, if Donald Sutherland wants to make out with you in an elevator — even if he is your boss, and even if it is just a dream sequence expressing your horror at being feminized — you take that offer.

Boats: Michael Douglas’s salvation arrives on one! 

Death… by MURDER: A man’s reputation was murdered. His career was murdered. His good name was murdered. Is that not enough for you???? 

Did People In the ‘90s Know What Sexual Assault Was? Interesting question! Allow me to revisit the exchange in which Demi Moore, defending herself from sexual harassment allegations in what appears to be the RoboCop boardroom, defines consent for us:

LADY LAWYER: Doesn’t no mean no?

DEMI MOORE: Sometimes, ‘no’ means the other person wants to be overwhelmed, dominated. But we can’t talk about that. The way we’re supposed to have sex now, we’d need the UN to supervise it. 

First of all: Demi Moore! This is not an appropriate monologue for your SEXUAL MISCONDUCT HEARING! Secondly: No, they absolutely did not. 

Disclosure is available on Amazon Prime, if you pay $3.99 to Jeff Bezos.

Over at my other job: Project 2025, the Republican plan for the next presidency, is obsessed with restoring male dominance and "the nuclear family" in a way that would put even Michael Douglas to shame.