118 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | IFC Films
Shere Hite sold millions of copies of a report that told women the truth about their own bodies. Then the culture decided she never mattered and wiped her off the record. Nicole Newnham digs up the proof of both.
Shere Hite publishes “The Hite Report” in 1976 and changes what the world admits about female sexuality. She surveys thousands of women anonymously and lets them speak in their own words. The book becomes one of the best-selling titles in history and makes her a global figure. Then the backlash arrives, the talk-show hosts turn hostile, and the country that bought her work decides to forget she existed. Nicole Newnham builds the film around that erasure and asks how a woman this consequential vanishes from the record.
The film constructs Hite from archive footage, and the archive does heavy work. Hite appears across decades as model, scholar, talk-show guest, and exile. She is poised and combative on camera, and she refuses to soften her findings for hosts who want her to apologize for them. Dakota Johnson narrates Hite’s own writing in voiceover, and she keeps the reading flat and unsentimental. Johnson lets the words carry the anger so the film never begs for sympathy.
Newnham assembles the picture as a documentary and treats the footage itself as her subject. She lingers on television clips where male panelists laugh at Hite and audiences turn on her. The editing places her research claims next to the public ridicule that followed them. The cut from triumph to demolition is the structural argument of the film. Newnham also uses Hite’s early modeling photographs to show a woman who understood image-making before she ever ran a survey.
This is a film about how a culture punishes a woman for measuring it. Hite tells women that their bodies work differently than the experts insist, and the experts and the press destroy her for the data. The film tracks her retreat from American life into European obscurity and refuses to call it a happy ending. Newnham recovers the evidence without pretending the recovery undoes the damage. The result is a portrait of a thinker the country needed and then threw away.