FILM COMMENT : Hollywood Just Doesn’t Get It : Two new films dare to tackle the sensitive subject of sexual harassment in the workplace . . . showing us men hassled by women. Is this evolution or what?

Earlier this year, many months before the appearance of “Oleanna” and “Disclosure,” a network news show asked me to come up with a list of movie clips for a segment on sexual harassment. What seemed like an easy request turned into a real head-scratcher. Almost without exception, the examples were of the giggly-smirky variety.

There are tons of movies where bosses pinch or ogle their secretaries, but it’s always played as a joke. Even when it’s not endorsed as a joke, it’s a joke--like the “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” number from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

Did I hear you mention “The Apartment”? But, in that movie, Shirley MacLaine is genuinely in love with the boss.

Where are the movies that show the unwelcome lunge; the power play; the fear?

The arrival of “Oleanna” and “Disclosure” isn’t exactly a case of the famine turning into a feast. It’s still a famine out there. As far as I can tell, Hollywood has never made a serious mainstream movie specifically about the effects of sexual harassment against women in the workplace. (Hollywood movies, as opposed to TV, try to stay out of the workplace altogether--too “real.”)

But now we’ve got two films that show us how men are harassed--by women. As evolutionary leaps go, it’s a great sick joke. What can we expect next? A searing drama starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a destitute welfare mother?

Right now it’s OK for Meryl Streep to be harassed on a river raft but not at the office. Given how few serious films are funded in Hollywood about women’s lives, and given the honchos at most studios, it would be surprising if there were any films out now that didn’t posit sexual harassment as male victimization.

What both “Oleanna” and “Disclosure” are about is not so much sexual harassment as the abuse of the charge of sexual harassment. In David Mamet’s movie version of his two-character play, a somewhat supercilious professor up for tenure is dragooned by one of his flunking female students into a morass of false harassment and rape charges that scotch his tenure and ruin his career. He ends up physically assaulting her--he becomes the person he was falsely accused of being.

In “Disclosure,” starring Demi Moore and Michael Douglas and directed by Barry Levinson from the Michael Crichton bestseller, Tom Sanders, a married-with-children executive at a Seattle high-tech computer company, is preyed upon by Meredith Johnson, an old girlfriend from another division who has been promoted over him. She is now his boss. Meredith initiates a sexual encounter in her office; he breaks it off; she charges harassment, he countercharges. It’s he-said-she-said time at the corporate OK Corral.

Both Mamet and Crichton--whose book was dubbed “Harassic Park” when it came out--have made a lot of noises in the press about how balanced their material is; how the hurts of men and women are given equal time. But what comes across in the play and the book and, now, in the movie adaptations, is essentially a rant against the destruction of male privilege. The destroyers are a frigid scold and a hothouse Circe.

How can we accept in “Oleanna” that both the professor (William Macy) and his student (Debra Eisenstadt) are equally culpable? Mamet may like the way that sounds but his movie sure doesn’t play that way. The student’s charges are patently false--we can see that. And yet she somehow manages (offscreen) to persuade a tenure committee that she was harassed and raped; she blossoms from a frightened, insecure wallflower to a full-throated feminist squadron leader backed by the muscle of her “group.” It is only on a phony-mythic level that “Oleanna” evens the playing field. The professor may be innocent of his student’s specific charges but he is guilty of the larger charge of male power-mongering: He’s a patriarch. Collective guilt turns him into a bogyman.

No sexual tension whatsoever exists between student and teacher; their faceoff is all ideology and sloganeering. If there is any consummation at all, it’s in the final provoked assault against the woman (which the audience is made to crave). Mamet turns the dissonance between men and women into a screech. Some balance.

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In his afterword to “Disclosure,” Crichton admits that the “great majority of harassment claims are brought by women against men” and defends the use of a role-reversal story for its power “to examine aspects concealed by traditional responses and conventional rhetoric.” Fair enough. Even if one pauses at the way Crichton in the book self-servingly overstates the statistics on female-to-male harassment in order to give us the heebie-jeebies, the subject is still fair game. But in place of our “traditional responses” Crichton has inserted his own traditional agenda. Once again, as in “Oleanna,” what is billed as a level (scorched-earth) playing field turns out to be a mirage.

Beneath all its reverse-field politically correct rhetoric, “Disclosure” basically is a puritan cautionary fable about a power-thwarted man who turns the tables on a predatory vamp. Meredith is a veritable T. Rex of sex. Our first shot of her in the movie is a low-angle hubba-hubba glimpse of her gams. (Crichton was one of the film’s producers.) It’s odd: None of the Good women in the movie--Tom’s wife, his lawyer, co-workers--are characterized as fully sexual beings. It’s as if sex appeal was a malignancy.

Actually, Meredith really isn’t sexual either: Her lunges are power plays. In the novel, Crichton served up a full women’s chorus of feminist ranters, including a vitriolic newspaper columnist who refuses to believe that women can oppress men, and Tom’s very own wife, a lawyer who mouths the party line and can’t take more time out for her children. Tom’s lawyer, a Latino woman, is lethally effective and yet her strength is as chilling and steely as Meredith’s.

The movie, scripted by Paul Attanasio, eliminates the columnist and ups the sympathy factor on the others but the only truly sympathetic woman is a starchy, fifty-something co-worker and mother who recognizes Tom’s valuable contributions and lacks the asp of carnality. Her ambitiousness, unlike Meredith’s, is acceptably prim. She gets her reward. Meredith, following in a long line of ruthless boss women in the movies, gets her comeuppance.

The movie initially shows us Tom in a few offhanded moments ogling a woman’s rump or swatting his secretary’s. But all this is innocent stuff. Basically Tom is no Oppressor. He’s not even terribly ambitious--he expected to be promoted to Meredith’s position but apparently didn’t think he had to angle for it. He’s naive enough to believe the corporate world is a meritocracy and yet his naivete is his saving grace. It sentimentalizes him.

‘D isclosure” comes out at a time when man-bashing has become part of the tone of the culture: It has even achieved Time cover-story status (a sure sign that the tone is fading). By transforming the fears of men who see their power being eroded by ambitious women in an increasingly competitive job market into a species of victimization, Crichton has pulled off a real switcheroo: He’s given Pale Males official minority status, with all the rights and privileges thereof.

Tom even gets to have sex (sort of) with Meredith--a woman much more exciting than his wife. And--here’s the best part--he doesn’t have to take any real responsibility for the sex. (First “Fatal Attraction,” then “Basic Instinct,” and now this. Michael Douglas must be royally pooped.) Tom’s enforced submission is eroticized--this could be the first heterosexual male rape fantasy ever depicted in a mainstream Hollywood movie. But because Tom doesn’t go all the way with the sex he feels secretly emasculated, feminized. He even has a bizarre dream where his boss--Meredith’s mentor, played by Donald Sutherland--tries to soul-kiss him.

Tom is only righted when he does to Meredith figuratively what she does to him literally. He’s been to the dungeons of the vamp goddess--the childless, familyless, castrating vamp--and returns victorious to the meadows of domesticity where his adoring wife and daughter await.

Who says you can’t have it all?

The impasse between men and women has become big business. It sells magazines and books and movies like “Disclosure” and “Oleanna.” The hot field in science right now is evolutionary biology, which basically says that what keeps us apart is all in the genes. Maybe it is. Maybe men are wired from pre-birth to like “The Three Stooges” and women are wired to like “Fried Green Tomatoes.” But there’s a defeatism about these findings that fits into the way we feel--if men and women are bio-genetically incapable of changing what keeps them at odds, then what’s the use? Vive la difference went by the boards some time ago. Now it’s more like Vive la guerre.

But are “Oleanna” and “Disclosure” the best bulletins from the battlefront that we can come up with? Both would be better if at least they acknowledged the author’s real impulse, if they exploited all that messy male rage at what women hath wrought. What’s bad about a movie like “Disclosure” isn’t its glib, crass nastiness. That’s what’s fun about it. It’s fun in the way that films noirs like “Double Indemnity” or the current “The Last Seduction” are. Hate is a turn-on in those films; the gun smoke from the war between the sexes is their oxygen. No, what is bad about “Disclosure” are the constant irruptions of sanctimony, as if we were watching a civics lesson and not a ripping revenge fantasy. Why not just lay out all the demons and can the cant?

And maybe when this latest backlash fades we can actually have a movie about a woman who is sexually harassed by a man.

What a concept!*