Director Kitty Green's second film The Royal Hotel follows two backpackers on their adventure around Australia. But it does much more than that – it implores us to redefine our conception of sexual harassment and assault, as well as where male culpability must fall.
Based on a documentary of two Finnish backpackers' real experiences, the movie stars Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, who play the unlucky travellers who end up working behind a bar in the Outback mostly frequented by misogynistic male miners. We see the bar's patrons (and owner) sexually harass our protagonists through possessive comments and other threatening behaviour that is all too familiar for so many of us.
Kitty's debut feature, The Assistant, documented the story of a young woman's career as a – you guessed it – assistant to a Hollywood filmmaking mogul and how he navigated his sexual crimes. Sound familiar to anyone? This time, Kitty is tackling a different area of sexual harassment.
A feminist thriller.
In an interview with The Guardian, she explained why she chose to not include a full sexual assault scene. “I felt like this behaviour is enough. It was important that it never crossed the line," she explained. “Otherwise male audience members could say, ‘Oh, that’s not us. We are not like that. Those men are villains and that’s not us.’” In other words, Kitty is fighting back against the toxic element of the #NotAllMen argument – especially seeing as 97% of women in the UK have been sexually harassed, and in the vast majority of incidents of sexual harassment of women, men are the perpetrators.
Kitty's decision to portray sexual harassment this way broadens the scope of male culpability – it doesn't begin and end with an individual who commits a full sexual assault. The spectrum is much broader, and media representation of sexual harassment must reflect that.
“If it’s about behaviour that is very common, a joke here and a weird gaze there, then it’s harder to dismiss," Kitty said. "We need to have a conversation about that behaviour. How we can stop it from escalating into sexual violence?”
It's a significant decision – to zero in on the smaller, oftentimes microagressive, incidents that can escalate to something more sinister, but are also no less important and worthy of discussion. A victim doesn't deserve to be verbally abused, bullied or objectified while she's trying to work any less than she deserves to be raped or sexually assaulted in any other way. By minimising the more subtle, less direct forms of sexual harassment, we in turn minimise so many victims' experiences and let so many would-be, past, present or future abusers off the hook.
The Royal Hotel's portrayal demands that many people take a second look – while they may not know of someone who has sexually assaulted someone, they are much more likely to know of someone who has partaken in other forms of sexual harassment and abuse, which are no less damaging. Or maybe they've done it themselves, and until now haven't thought they're part of the problem.
Kitty's decision to shine a light on this nuance is an incredible feat, especially seeing as she was told by numerous potential financial backers that the film was “missing something” because there wasn't more sexual violence onscreen.
“They wanted more violence, which is so crazy,” she told The Guardian. “We’ve gotten a lot of ‘It simmers away but never reaches boiling point.’ I think there are a lot of reviewers, particularly male reviewers, who are waiting for that scene,” she said, referring to an explicit scene of sexual assault. "That really overt act of violence, be it rape or whatever. And I think that frustrates them. It’s awful, wondering what it could be that they not only expected, but desired. We’ve had enough of that in movies. We definitely don’t need that scene.”
Kitty described these conversations as “interesting”, but ultimately “upsetting”. As well as being both of these things, they're also rather obvious evidence that a significant proportion of the film industry have normalised scenes of sexual assault as part of entertainment value, which can work in turn to normalise these acts in real life. But more than that, it further underlines a wider lack of nuance in understanding sexual assault – and why it's even more crucial that the director fought to showcase these microaggressions onscreen, as the unacceptable behavioural patterns that they are.
It's concerning to hear that the more insidious, but no less damaging, elements of sexual harassment are deemed by some as not entertaining enough – as they are the daily reality for so many women. Kitty's depiction of these behavioural patterns is an act of rebellion against an outdated definition of sexual harassment, and encourages all of us to take a second look at what kind of behaviour we should be exhibiting, as well as calling out.
The importance of male culpability and responsibility was also explored in another female-directed title that was released on the same day as The Royal Hotel. How To Have Sex, directed by Molly Manning Walker, explores the experiences of three teenage girls on holiday in Greece and how they navigate the different nuances of sexual assault and harassment. It explores the impact of men not calling out their friends for this behaviour, even if they're pretty sure it has transpired, prioritising their own relationships over the safety of women who have been assaulted.
Both films demand we recognise that the scope for culpability goes beyond an abuser – it expands to all who don't define the full spectrum of assault and harassment correctly, and those who recognise it but don't report it or call it out.
The Royal Hotel is out in cinemas now.
