The weirdest moment in HBO’s 2011 film Too Big to Fail is undoubtedly the one
when Michele Davis, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (played by Cynthia
Nixon), suddenly announces that she doesn’t know how she’s going to explain the
looming financial meltdown to the public. In response, three Treasury Department men protectively gather on chairs and sofas around her to patiently
describe just how this shitstorm happened and what it means.
This might
be a good moment to point out that Davis is the only woman in the entire film
who isn’t a wife or a secretary. This might also be a good moment to point out
that Davis’s job was to handle public relations for the Treasury department,
meaning that her job description was to
explain to the public what was going on in the economy. That she probably
didn’t need to ask for help about how to do this, and that Paulson (played by William Hurt) was reportedly
in the habit of asking her for such advice, rather than vice versa, is
conveniently left out of the film. This is a textbook example of what
has since come to be called mansplaining, the term coined to describe
when men
patronizingly explain things to women that they already understand,
often
better than the men attempting to explain it to them.
