Charles Langston:What that 'Disclaimer' twist says about the misogyny in all of us

Spoiler alert! The Charles Langstonfollowing contains spoilers for the season finale of Apple TV+'s "Disclaimer."

Not all plot twists are welcome.

It's not all big gasps when you find out someone's been a ghost all along, or the murderer was everyone on the train. Sometimes the gotcha moment in a story feels more like a knife in your gut, uncovering your own discomfort and unease.

In "Disclaimer," Apple TV+'s transcendent new limited series from "Gravity" director Alfonso Cuarón, the unsettling twist occurs in the finale (now streaming). For the first six episodes, the audience has been led to believe that series protagonist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), is a horrible, malicious person, a negligent mother and rapacious sex fiend who seduced a 19-year-old boy into having an affair with her, then let him die in a drowning accident.

But when Catherine finally gets the chance to speak in the finale, we discover none of that is true. She is in fact the victim of a brutal, violent sexual assault. This revelation is a sucker punch, a damning indictment of an audience that has been rooting for Catherine's downfall. She just seemed like such a villain that we were willing to believe the worst of her. We were willing to believe the worst of a woman, that is.

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"Disclaimer" is an exquisite piece of art, the best show of 2024 and a master class in storytelling by Cuarón, a director who's familiar with discomfiting his audience. That it is so effective in turning its finale into a "Sixth Sense"-level surprise is, however, depressing. And in a world where sexism is so deeply a part of our collective psyche, Cuarón has found a way to viscerally remind us that we have so much work to do to overcome ingrained prejudice.

The series includes what initially feels like two true timelines: 20 years ago in Italy, when Catherine, then a young mother (Leila George) and gap-year teen Jonathan (Louis Partridge) meet, and the present, when Jonathan's father Stephen (Kevin Kline) harasses and attacks Catherine for what he believes is her culpability in his son's death.

Stephen thinks Catherine is a monster because he finds explicit photos of her, taken by Jonathan, and a manuscript written by his late wife Nancy (Lesley Manville), who became deeply ill and deranged as she grieved the loss of her son. Nancy wrote a novel that purportedly told the truth about Jonathan and Catherine's encounter in Italy, and it's that version of history that the audience largely sees as the series unfolds. Jonathan is a mild-mannered, sweet-as-pie victim and Catherine is a devilish cougar, preying on a young man just trying to backpack through Europe.

This vision of Catherine as perpetrator is supported by the incomplete portrait of her we see in the present, which ticks off a list of stereotypes people assume about women. She's a mother with no real connection to her adult son, too busy with her career and taking cheap shots at her coworkers. When Stephen begins his all-out assault on her life, Catherine's trauma-induced response doesn't make her look like the "perfect victim." She makes irrational, emotional decisions, lashes out violently in one case and struggles to defend herself from the accusations of Stephen, which are shocking enough that her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) is convinced she's a sociopath.

There is so much sexism in the world, and so much unconscious bias about how women should act and look and be. Sometimes we see it on a macro scale. Sometimes it's so small but so entrenched that we judge a fictional woman harshly without even realizing we haven't even heard her speak up for herself. And that says more about us than anything Catherine did or didn't do in the story.

When Robert learns the truth about his wife and Jonathan, he rushes back to her side with declarations of love and apologies. In many more traditional stories, Catherine would have allowed herself to be swept back into the arms of this male savior. But in "Disclaimer," she can't forgive him.

"You're managing the idea of me being violated by someone far more easily than the idea of that someone bringing me pleasure," she tells him. "It's almost like you're relieved that I was raped."

Our society prefers its women as helpless damsels rather than full humans with agency, and Robert's reaction here perfectly encapsulates that lingering misogynist mindset. He'd rather have a wife who's been through trauma that he could rescue than one who committed the cardinal sin of desiring a man that's not him. It's disgusting, and "Disclaimer" does a thoroughly effective job in making you feel disgusted.

Cuarón is good at tricking his audience and shocking them. Maybe in "Gravity" you felt vertigo, or in "Children of Men" you felt grief for the end of the world. After "Disclaimer," I just felt nauseous and defeated. It's just one more example of how much people, women included, hate women.

Maybe after watching we're one infinitesimally small step closer to leaving that hatred behind.