She Said, Women Talking, and pushing Harvey out of the spotlight.
Five years ago, New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s gross and violent abuse of his power in the New York Times; two years later, in 2019, they wrote a book about it. What makes their book so riveting — it is absolutely engrossing, required reading — is its meticulous attention to the two-inches-forward, one-inch-back work of reporting such an explosive story. Getting the facts right, crafting a legally and ethically airtight expose, and dodging the best defenses that power and money can buy is not easy. They pulled it off, and the book explains how.
But Twohey and Kantor’s book is mostly about texting reluctant sources and being rebuffed by frightened victims, and while it’s great on the page, none of that is inherently cinematic. So I was delighted, and startled, to realize that the film adaptation of She Said (out November 18) nabs the tone and tenor brilliantly, with Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan starring as Twohey and Kantor. How it treated the menacing presence of Weinstein himself is even more brilliant.
I watched the film adaptation of She Said on a cold October day in New York, just blocks away from the Times Square building where the journalists did their work and, eventually, confronted Weinstein himself. I’d just realized that morning, thanks to my Facebook “memories,” that the story broke five years earlier. Somehow, it had been five long years since #MeToo. I remember the heady feeling that hung in the air at that time — a sense that something in Hollywood and the world at large was changing, that long-accepted exploitation was being punished, and that nothing would ever be the same. It was frightening. It was thrilling.
Now, as the film approaches its November release, Weinstein is currently serving a 23-year sentence for sex crimes in New York. He’s on trial in Los Angeles on rape charges, with arguments starting on Monday, October 24; he also faces charges in London. He’s 70 years old and, according to his attorney, in poor health. It’s fairly safe to say he’ll die in jail. He’s a pariah in the industry that coddled him for so long, a response that feels at times as much like an attempt to purge something from their conscience as any actual fit of virtue. (After all, a powerful person accused of abusing their power today seems as likely to complain of “cancel culture” as to apologize.)
But Weinstein, and everything that came after his downfall, still looms over the industry. TV and movies — from the richly complex Tár, about a female conductor who takes advantage of a youthful protege, to the upcoming second season of HBO’s The Vow, which unpacks the abuses of self-help guru and NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere — feel like they couldn’t have existed without the Weinstein story jolting everyone awake. Say “Harvey” out loud, and everyone knows who you’re talking about. And in casual conversations, fresh accusations against other figures tend to get measured mentally against his crimes — it’s like Weinstein is a measuring stick by which almost everyone else seems bad, but not as bad. If we punish him sufficiently, you can almost hear the cultural subconscious musing, then maybe everything can go back more or less to normal. As if it’s the man who matters, not the system.
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Universal Pictures
Weinstein’s shadow is nearly impossible to grapple with effectively, and the industry is still scrambling, in part because efforts like Time’s Up have flailed and in part because so much of the Hollywood that might make a movie about him is in some way complicit.
But the bigger reason is simply that Harvey fought hard his whole career to cast that shadow. He was so effective that, eventually, most of the industry fell beneath it. (One of the most satisfying moments in She Said comes when we find out that when Weinstein met with Martin Scorsese, it was Weinstein who was nervous because Scorsese “hates him.”)
The extent to which Harvey had the industry in his thrall — and the way his presence smothered so many, whether or not he directly assaulted them — was richly illustrated in The Assistant, Kitty Green’s phenomenal 2019 film starring Julia Garner. The central character is a young woman with a new job in the film industry; for the most part, we follow her through her day doing menial tasks, like making travel arrangements and sheepdogging visitors through the office. We never catch a clear glimpse of her boss and only hear his voice a little.
But we know it’s Harvey. You can feel him in the room even when he’s not there, the threat of his temper is thick and stifling in the air. Watching The Assistant, you feel the anxiety and dread that came with crossing his path. To have the sun blocked out by his shadow. A worse movie would have had him thundering through the room, leering and shouting, making explicit what’s felt much more viscerally in a vacuum. (See, for instance, the portrayal of Roger Ailes in the abysmal 2019 movie Bombshell.) Without him there physically, our imaginations work to fill in the details.
Which is in a sense what we’ve all been doing for years. You may not have known Harvey, but you probably know someone like him. Your memories fill in the blanks. Even in disgrace, men like him tend to suck up all the air in the room, to inevitably drive the discourse back to themselves. As She Said richly illustrates, identifying yourself can bring down more abuse from the public, so many choose to remain as anonymous as possible. So we’re still sitting here five years later, using “Weinstein” as a shorthand, and we will be for a long time.
That’s what makes a movie like She Said or its upcoming inadvertent companion piece Women Talking so effective: both center the women, instead of their attackers, by pushing the latter off-screen as much as possible. She Said is the story of two women who haven’t directly been the victims of the man they’re investigating but live, as the film shows, in a few key scenes, in a culture that fosters him and others like him. In one scene, Mulligan (as Twohey) screams at a man in a bar who simply will not leave them alone. In another, Kazan (as Kantor) discovers, to her sinking horror, that her young daughter knows the word “rape” — though not its full meaning — because kids at school throw it around.
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United Artists Releasing
Similarly, in Women Talking, a group of Mennonite women that have been systematically raped by men from their community for years, must decide how to move forward. Do they stay and fight? Should they leave and establish a new community? Is it better to just remain and hope things get better? The movie spends nearly all of its runtime in a barn loft with the women as they talk through what to do next.
She Said focuses on Twohey, Kantor, and the women who stepped forward because they are taking action in much the way that Women Talking spends nearly all its time with the women who are trying to decide how to deal with their own heinous assaulters. Both movies show women trying to figure out what it would take not just to be sure the offenders are met with justice but to build a world where ongoing acceptance of their offenses is unthinkable in the first place.
Not only does keeping the abusers off-screen keep our focus on the women taking their fates into their own hands, but it also starves the abusers of exactly what they want: attention. The chance to brush accusations away. The chance to put themselves back in the center of the story.
Both She Said and Women Talking carry their theses in their titles: that the goal of the abuser is to keep his victim silent and that talking is how their power can be broken, at least if the right person is listening. But neither end in a proclamation of triumph because victims who raise their voices aren’t suddenly free. In She Said, Weinstein victims, played in particularly extraordinary performances by Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton (as well as Ashley Judd, as herself), remind us that there are thousands of these stories, and none are simply resolved now. The wounds leave scars.
Five years later, we’re still trying to walk out of Harvey’s shadow; other accused abusers are escaping their own consequences. It’s their names that still dominate the headlines, their toxicity that still attracts those desperate to maintain their stranglehold on power. It’s ironic, but illuminating, that snatching the spotlight away from them — the only thing that can truly break their power, that turns the focus from the man to the system that enabled him — falls to those who know, all too well, that changing the world happens not with one splashy story, but an inch at a time.
She Said opens in theaters on November 18. Women Talking opens in theaters on December 2. The Assistant is streaming on Hulu and is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
Inconvenient history, long buried, finally gets the spotlight in Netflix’s Descendant.
In 1808, two generations before the Civil War began, it became illegal to import humans to sell as slaves in America. But importation went on long after that, and the final ship bearing enslaved people reached American shores in the 1860s, just a few years before the 13th Amendment made enslaving a human illegal. Named the Clotilda, the ship’s human cargo was sold into slavery in Alabama. The ship itself was destroyed, burned, and sunk upriver, to hide the evidence. The punishment for importing slaves was severe, and the men who broke the laws to become rich from it didn’t want to be caught.
But for almost 150 years, the existence of the Clotilda was more or less denied because it was written out of the official record. The reason for that is almost painfully simple: Powerful families in Mobile, where the ship made landfall, were still benefiting from inherited wealth accumulated in the slavery era. But in Africatown — an enclave founded by 31 formerly enslaved people and many survivors of the Clotilda — the story was kept powerfully alive, and residents became activists to demand its inclusion in the historical record.
Descendant tells the true story of the ship and the descendants of the enslaved people who have fought hard to establish the truth of the Clotilda’s existence, both to better understand their own roots and to prove to the world that the crime actually happened. It declares that history cannot be brushed aside because it makes some people feel bad to remember it.
Director Margaret Brown, who grew up in the white part of Mobile, has explored the racial history of her hometown before, most notably in her 2008 film The Order of Myths, about the segregated Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile. In Descendant, she leans heavily on the stories told by the residents and activists of Africatown. The result has heavy significance in a country ablaze with battles over whether the truth of slavery and other history can be taught with frankness to schoolchildren. Descendant demonstrates that when we ignore the real story, it doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future.
Descendant made a splash at its Sundance premiere in early 2022, where it won a special jury prize, and landed on the Obamas’ slate of films at Netflix, where it debuted on October 21. I spoke with Brown and the film’s award-winning producer, Essie Chambers, about the hard work of telling this story, its implications for the future, and the big reason it all matters. The following conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.
The story you’re telling in Descendant is literally true, but it also feels like a metaphor for something much larger: for the way people often try to ignore inconvenient history and hope it just goes away, as well as the involvement we all have in our history even if we are merely descendants of the people who experienced it directly.
When you were beginning to work on the project, did you anticipate that it would have such far-reaching implications?
Margaret Brown, director: I knew about it because I’m from there. Africatown is part of Mobile, where I’m from, but it’s a little bit further away. It was annexed by the city.
This film started with this community I’d already been involved with. But I think there were some flashes in my mind of images that started it. I started reading Zora Neale Hurston’s letters and got really obsessed with her and who she was. The film eventually became more focused on the community, but I was obsessed with her voice.
But I learned more about it as I worked on the film because two environmental organizations in town were already doing work there before we started. When you enter a story, you try to go in with an open mind and see what’s there, and I walked into a community that’s an incredibly activist community. The first thing we did was go to so many meetings, just to see what was going on. You’re immediately struck that there are people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who go to meetings every day. It’s very inspiring. I just opened my ears and tried to be present.
Essie Chambers, producer: I was immediately struck, when I joined Margaret, that when we talk about metaphors, what’s happening [in Africatown] is very much part of the history of Black America. So to be entering this at a moment when people like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Clint Smith and the 1619 Project are re-centering Black American history — the way that intersected with this story was mind-blowing.
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Netflix
I saw the film as part of Sundance this past January, where there were a number of movies about powerful people trying to ban the telling of true history because it made people uncomfortable. That’s a big element in this film as well. Did you encounter resistance as you were making the film, too?
Brown: I made another film there in 2008 called The Order of Myths. In that film, a lot of white Mobilians talked to me because it was about segregated Mardi Gras and my grandfather was part of the white Mardi Gras. So he opened all these doors for me, and all these white people talked to me. The film is about whiteness, more than anything else.
After that film came out and the city saw it, a lot of people who are in power were silent. People who would possibly be involved in the fate of Africatown kept putting off interviews. So there was this wall that wasn’t there before. I think the film is about these questions of justice and reparations, and I think when things become about money, white people get scared.
Chambers: In terms of the typical definition of reparations — like a stimulus package or something — that’s not something they’re actively discussing. But I think that there are all kinds of ways to look at reparations. There are land trusts and a lot of issues with the land. And I mean, the [powerful family the] Meahers still own a lot of land in Africatown.
So you have a crime that was committed. You have the most intact slave ship in history that has ever been found. You have the only group of people descended from Africans who established a community after being enslaved. It’s living history. There’s a possibility that DNA could [show] a direct line in a way that there has never been before in this kind of a scenario. I know that there are other examples of reparations that other cities are grappling with and actually acting upon.
Chambers: It’s a testament to the vitality of oral traditions. Oral history is not a lesser history. We were taught the history of a country that doesn’t exist — what does it mean? These people and their collective memory are what got us to this moment. What’s next is our responsibility, and our collective memory, and how we are going to hold people accountable and make sure that we change the narrative.
I’m a Black woman and I grew up in an all-white community in a small town. And [in school we] would get to the chapter on slavery and they would ask if I wanted to stand and speak. That was my experience of learning about slavery. It was horrifying.
So I think for Black Americans who have this incredibly rich history of passing stories down, it’s a complicated relationship to slavery, where we were taught to experience a lot of shame around it. I felt embarrassment and shame because I didn’t understand all of it. Imagine encountering this kind of story in a history book! It’s so inspiring.
I would imagine people will see this movie and immediately wonder how they can get involved.
Brown: The reason we worked with a company like Participant is that when a film ends, you have this weird postpartum feeling: What am I going to do now? You pour yourself into the film, but then there’s the impact campaign, which is real life. There are introductions being made [to organizations that already exist] and ways to amplify the work they’re already doing.
I guess that’s one big argument in favor of having a film like this premiere on a major streaming service, right?
Brown: Hell yeah.
Do you think there’s also an argument to be made specifically for telling this kind of story in the documentary form, rather than in a scripted film?
Brown: Yeah, I’m sure there will be one. But I consider myself an artist, not a journalist, though I guess I’m kind of a journalist. When we shot this film, we imagined it big in a theater, with these majestic people telling their story. Our characters are so inspiring.
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Netflix
The film’s images are really beautiful too.
Brown: Yeah, our cinematographers Zac Manuel and Justin Zweifach shot Garrett Bradley’s [Oscar-nominated documentary] Time too. We always imagined it majestic and large, befitting the story. But there’s power in the Netflix platform, with millions of subscribers.
The moment that really sticks in my mind is very early on, when we were in development. We were driving down a shell-lined road through Africatown’s Lewis Quarters. They’re surrounded by the lumber yards and you can smell the chemical plants. It’s very loud. Then you get down the road, and there’s this tiny community that is very well kept and very proud. It’s like this little hamlet. I’d been there years before.
But I was in the car with two other collaborators in the film, and we all just teared up. We were like, “How do we translate this feeling of being in this moment right now?”
So for years, I was trying to figure out what the shot was that would communicate that feeling. I was just like, “How do I communicate the smells, the feelings, what this moment is?”
I feel like you really experience the place through the film. I’ve never been there, but I feel like I have now. That kind of visual splendor is often left out of nonfiction filmmaking, but it goes a long way toward creating an emotional experience for the audience.
Chambers: That’s [Margaret’s] signature. Visual poetry.
Brown: I wanted people to feel the emotions that we felt as a team and talked about. Making the film was very collaborative. We were always discussing choices. We were always trying to figure out where my blind spots as a white person were.
The film ends at a point where there’s a lot of things that could happen to the fate of Africatown. How does the city as an entity respond to this story? Are they going to support the efforts of the people in Africatown who have been carrying their story through generations, through all these iterations? Or are they going to try to grab the money for themselves? That’s something we have wondered about as a team.
All those silent, powerful forces, they’re all still there. So we’ll have to see how they respond.
Descendant premiered on Netflix on October 21.
It’s delicious, but opinions vary on texture and how close it comes to tasting like steak from a real cow.
In the late 2010s, Beyond Meat ushered in the next generation of plant-based meat products, winning over consumers with its new-and-improved take on the veggie burger. Then it wowed Wall Street in 2019 when it had the most successful stock market debut in over a decade.
But 2022 hasn’t been as kind to the plant-based meat giant: Amid declining sales, Beyond Meat recently announced it will lay off 19 percent of its staff by the end of the year. Its stock price has tumbled, and it recently told shareholders it expects to bring in less revenue this year than originally forecasted, citing increased competition and high inflation.
In response, Beyond Meat is doing what all food companies do when they’re at risk of losing market share — they’re pushing out something new: plant-based steak.
It’s not a rib-eye or T-bone, but steak “tips” — the kind of meaty chunks meant to be used, say, in a taco, stir-fry, or sandwich. Though a number of small startups have steak-like products on the market, this is the first one that will be widely available and one of the rare products employing “whole muscle” technology (more on this later).
Last week, a few Vox colleagues and myself — a mix of vegetarians and omnivores — got an early chance to try it in the form of a plant-based Philly cheesesteak (with dairy-free cheese), prepared by a DC-area chef. The verdict: delicious with some varying opinions on texture and just how close it comes to tasting like steak from a cow.
“This is uncanny,” said Libby Nelson, Vox’s policy editor. “My parents are from Nebraska, where they have a lot of beef, and I have a pretty high bar. Steak feels like the one thing I would never want to go artificial on … but my initial thoughts are very pro — they’ve done a good job with this.” She said that if she hadn’t been told it was meat-free, she might have assumed it was real beef.
Li Zhou, a politics reporter, was squishy on the texture: “I feel like there’s a little toughness that’s missing that you would get from steak.” Keren Landman, a health and science reporter, agreed, though she did like the “little fibers” in each bite.
Christian Paz, a politics reporter, added, “I also like that there was a sensation that there were little pockets of fat distributed in it, which is something that I really enjoy in a regular meat sandwich — the sense that it’s not all lean meat, that there is some textural difference within it as you’re biting a piece.”
Jonquilyn Hill, a podcast producer, said it wasn’t good enough to fool her into thinking it was real beef: “It is very good, but as a person who eats meat, it’s very obviously not meat. I think it’s the texture. When I think of steak, I always think of sitting down and using a knife and fork. … It’s more like the meat that’s used for Philly cheesesteaks that you’d get from the freezer section.”
The reactions reminded me of how much expectation can change what we think of food. Cooked alone, does plant-based meat taste exactly like the animal meat they’re intended to replicate? Almost never. But when used in a dish with oil, spices, and vegetables, and put on a bed of rice or in between two pieces of bread, it’s much harder to tell whether it’s plant- or animal-based, hence Nelson’s “uncanny” comment.
So much of our perceptions around food are based on how we expect it to taste, which is why people — even professional chefs — can be easily fooled into thinking they’re eating animal meat when it’s really plant-based meat. The perceived inferiority of plant-based meat might be a bigger barrier to its growth than how it actually tastes. (That, and price — on Instacart, a 10-ounce package of Beyond Meat steak tips costs $7.99, or 80 cents per ounce, compared to 69 cents per ounce for real, low-cost steak tips — a 16 percent cost difference.)
Starting today, the Beyond Meat steak tips will be available nationwide in more than 5,000 Kroger and Walmart locations as well as some Albertsons (Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco) and Ahold (Giant, Stop & Shop) stores. It’s also available to food distributors, so it could start showing up on restaurant menus soon.
Since beef is far and away the most carbon-intensive food, any market share Beyond Meat steak tips can seize will represent a win for the environment — and a steak made of faba bean protein and wheat gluten is clearly an animal welfare win. When it comes to nutrition, there’s a longstanding debate as to whether or not plant-based meat is healthier than animal meat, but Beyond Meat steak tips provide comparable nutrition to the real thing. Beyond Meat scores a point for having zero cholesterol but loses a point for the high sodium content: 300 milligrams to the 55 milligrams of sodium in a 3-ounce serving of Steak-Umm sliced steaks.
What separates the steak tips from most plant-based meat offerings is that it’s made with “whole muscle” technology, what some in the field call the “holy grail” of plant-based meat. Most of the plant-based meat you’ve tried is made using “chop and form” technology — essentially taking a bunch of ingredients and mashing them together, which is why most products in the sector mimic ground meat in burgers or nuggets. Whole muscle, on the other hand, is meant to imitate whole cuts of meat like steak, which gives it the more fibrous texture some of my colleagues noticed.
Can the plant-based category catch fire again?
In many corners of the media, the excitement over the dawn of plant-based meat has curdled into predictions of its demise — or at least it remaining a niche.
There’s no doubt that plant-based meat has been struggling at the drive-thru. Many trials of plant-based meats at fast food franchises and chain restaurants have flopped, including some from Beyond Meat. And some of the world’s largest traditional meat companies have lost faith: JBS is closing its plant-based manufacturing facility in Colorado, while Maple Leaf Foods is downsizing its vegetarian operations.
But there are bright spots as well. Gardein’s and Impossible Foods’ retail sales are up, and food conglomerates Nestlé and ADM are as bullish as ever on plant-based food, saying that consumer demand and growth potential remain strong. Despite several failed vegan fast food launches in the US, like McDonald’s Beyond Meat McPlant and Impossible Foods’ sausage topping at Little Caesars, the industry still believes in its promise: Taco Bell is testing a carne asada product with Beyond Meat, while Burger King is testing an Impossible chicken sandwich.
The real concern centers on grocery store sales data. US supermarket sales of plant-based meat are indeed stagnant, with no sales growth in 2021 and a slight decline from September 2021 to September 2022, according to an analysis of IRI data by the market research firm 210 Analytics. Number of units sold is down 11 percent during that time period.
But the context is critical: Plant-based meat grocery sales jumped a whopping 45 percent in 2020 as consumers panic-bought groceries and cooked a whole lot more than normal. The 2021 and 2022 slowdown isn’t necessarily stagnation — it just wasn’t possible to sustain that 45 percent growth. Taking a longer view, plant-based meat grocery sales went up 19 percent from 2019 to 2021.
Beyond Meat, in particular, blames its performance on increased competition. When it launched, it had much of the plant-based meat aisle to itself; that’s no longer the case. High inflation is another culprit, which may be causing consumers to cut costs by switching back to animal meat. It tends to be cheaper than plant-based meat due, in large part, to the simple fact that the price of real meat is artificially low because of a lack of labor, environmental, and animal welfare regulations.
Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics told me over email that lack of repeat purchases may be an even bigger pain point for the plant-meat industry: “[T]he willingness to try plant-based meat has been very high for years, yet we’re not seeing much of a second or especially third purchase rate. And that’s where most of the pressure comes from.”
If the stagnation continues, the sector will be in trouble, but year-to-year sales data for one sliver of the market, especially amid a pandemic, can only tell us so much about the long-term health of a burgeoning industry.
And the US isn’t the center of the meat-free universe. While the McPlant (made with Beyond Meat) failed in the US, McDonald’s says it is “delighted” with customer demand for the McPlant in Ireland, where it’s a permanent menu item (as well as at McDonald’s in the UK, Austria, and the Netherlands). Beyond Meat also has permanent menu items with Pizza Hut in Canada, Europe, and Latin America.
According to Innova Market Insights, a market research firm, plant-based meat sales are expected to grow 10 to 15 percent in the UK, Germany, China, and the Netherlands from 2021 to 2023.
Beyond Meat will be able to own a niche in the meat-free category since it’ll have the only widely available plant-based steak product, but it may soon have serious competition, as Impossible Foods says a plant-based filet mignon is on the way.
While the Beyond Meat steak tips won’t fulfill cravings for a full-on hunk of steak, a Beyond Meat rib-eye or T-bone may be in the works. “From the beginning, we said if you walk into a butcher shop or if you go to the meat aisle in retail, anything that you see there, [we have] projects that we’re either working on or plan to work on,” says Dariush Ajami, chief innovation officer of Beyond Meat.
Roerink says such innovation will be key in maintaining and growing market share: “I think we are much too early in the innovation cycle of plant-based meat to declare them over like I see in many headlines. There are still lots of new players, products, and ingredients entering this space and, importantly, [there’s a] realization that the current items need to deliver better on a cleaner ingredient list and better taste. That means these companies will continue to innovate.”
And given the endless hunger of American consumers for novelty at the grocery aisle and the fast food joint, they had better.