The Belko Experiment (2016)

Why do these screams matter?

A morality tale steeped in violence, The Belko Experiment centers on eighty American employees of a company located in Colombia who are told that they must choose thirty colleagues to execute or sixty employees will be chosen at random and killed. As grudges over nepotism and microaggressions begin to reveal themselves, the employees realize that they only have two options: kill or be killed. For Leandra Florez (Adria Arjona), survival is complicated by her history of being sexual harassed while on the job. As the executive assistant to the Chief Operating Officer, Leandra is routinely harassed by top executive Wendell Dukes (John C. McGinley).

In our first clip, Leandra is fleeing down a stairwell with her boyfriend and the security guard when she is accosted in the stairway by her boss and Wendell. After her companions are bludgeoned and stabbed in a flurry of violence, Wendell is instructed to grab Leandra.

Leandra’s scream here is obscured by a cacophony of voices that almost drowns her out and reflects rather aptly her experiences working at Belko. We know from earlier scenes that Wendell has a history of making unwanted comments toward Leandra and that he stares at her to the point she feels she needs to close her office blinds. And yet, even her role as the COO’s executive secretary does little to shield her from these unwanted advances. She may have the ear of the boss but really what good does that do her when the corporate culture is such that sexual harassment is written off as awkward flirting? For his part, Wendell is convinced that Leandra is simply playing hard to get and he reminds her that he has the emails to prove it.

But the emails in question are actually demands by Leandra for Wendell to leave her alone. It’s a subtle moment in the film that speaks to a much larger cultural shift. According to a 2002 study in CyberPsychology and Behaviour that compared in-personal sexual harassment with virtual sexual harassment, findings showed that misogynistic behavior and sexist language read as more threatening when received online (Biber et al. 34). And yet, definitive statistics as to how many women have experienced cyber sexual harassment are difficult to come by. We know according to a 2018 NPR report that 41% of women have experienced cyber sexual harassment but those numbers account for experiences in and out of the workplace (Chatterjee). According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, employers paid out a record 68.2 million dollars as a result of sexual harassment violations but whether those violations were in-person or cyber-based is unknown (“Charges Alleging Sex-Based Harassment”).

Identifying the line between cyber sexual harassment and in-office sexual harassment is not as easy as it would seem. And it is a point highlighted in Leandra and Wendell’s interactions. We see Wendell harass Leandra over email, but he is doing so from his office, a location which enables him to add to Leandra’s discomfort since he has a direct line of sight to leer at her. Leandra’s scream at this moment is a recognition that the online/in-person harassment she has been experiencing is now a direct and immediate threat to her safety. And this threat is compounded by the breakdown of social order that enables Wendell’s threat of physical violence to go from implied to direct.

This threat comes to a head in our second scream, which occurs when Leandra stumbles upon Wendell who is in the throes of killing a colleague.

Wendell’s attempt to explain his actions in killing his friend echo closely how he rationalizes his sexual harassment of Leandra. In both cases, Wendell expresses a victim mentality. He had to kill his friend because otherwise, he might not rack up enough kills to survive. He had to harass Leandra because she insisted on playing hard to get. In both cases, Wendell resists taking accountability, and his ability to rationalize his actions, no matter how heinous, makes him a threat. Leandra’s scream in this scene reflects the immediate danger she is facing as well as her anger that Wendell’s violence has been allowed to exist unchecked for so long. Her scream is one of rage no longer confined through subtle threats of professional retribution. It is a scream only given space to exist once all cultural norms are abandoned.

Both of Leandra’s screams are extensions of one another and demonstrate the insidious ways in which cultural norms can perpetuate violence. If the first scream underscores how women are silenced when threats against them are not taken seriously, the second scream is a culmination of the anger that comes with these casual dismissals. That it takes a social breakdown in which all behavioral norms are abandoned for Leandra to verbalize her rage is a pointed critique of how misogyny becomes ingrained and replicated in the culture.

Works Cited

Biber, Jodi K., et al. “Sexual Harassment in Online Communications: Effects of Gender and Discourse Medium.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior : The Impact of the Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Reality on Behavior and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, Feb. 2002, pp. 33–42. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1089/109493102753685863.

“Charges Alleging Sex-Based Harassment (Charges filed with EEOC) FY 2010 – FY 2020.” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, www.eeoc.gov/statistics/charges-alleging-sex-based-harassment-charges-filed-eeoc-fy-2010-fy-2020.

Chatterjee, Rhitu. “A New Survey Finds 81 Percent Of Women Have Experienced Sexual Harassment.” NPR, 21 Feb. 2018.

The Belko Experiment. Directed by Greg McClean, performances by Adria Arjona, John Gallagher Jr., and Tony Goldwyn, Orion Pictures, 2016.