Disclosure: Boys Would be Girls

In David Mamet's Oleanna, a male professor finds himself “harassed” by the discourse of sexual harassment when his female student acquires the language from her “group” (a euphemism for feminism) to translate his “innocence” into sexualized malice. When the professor's frustration at being unable to defend himself from the woman's accusations erupts into unmistakably sexual violence, Oleanna becomes a warning to women that if they insist on such “fabrications” they are likely to witness men becoming the monsters women made them be. If Mamet's Oleanna thus warns women that “sexual harassment” could be a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., it is the fear/fantasy of women that is fulfilled), so screenwriter Paul Attansio's Disclosure sets out to warn women of what they are likely to become if they actualize their fantasies of “masculinity.” It is striking to realize that a subject so controversial—indeed so “popular”—as sexual harassment, made eminently public and newsworthy by the Clarence Thomas hearings, has only been treated by Hollywood as a woman's problem. Thus, in Disclosure, the problem of sexual harassment receives no treatment as a social epidemic in which the hierarchy of power embedded in the very concept of gender is on display; rather, Disclosure makes the problem of sexual harassment consonant with the “woman problem.”

The film accomplishes this reinstatement of sexual difference as sexual (in)difference (i.e., a monistic, masculine monopoly on power and desire) through the simple mechanism of reversal. If ever we are to see most clearly the limitations of a discourse of reversal, Disclosure is the film to show us. First, the title makes a promise that it would seem not to keep. For what is it, after all, that is disclosed in Disclosure? The title is suggestive of a “whodunit,” a film of detection. But there is really nothing to be revealed in the film by way of evidence. As spectators, we know and see all from the very beginning and throughout. There is no