SPEAKING HER TRUTH
Rose McGowan’s new memoir exposes the struggles of women in Hollywood,
Rose McGowan’s book tour for her new memoir, Brave, was abruptly cancelled on Feb. 2, only two days after the book’s release, following an incident at a New York event during which she engaged in a shouting match with a trans activist over what was perceived as her lack of support for trans women and women of colour.
At their best, the critical discussions around McGowan and her responsibilities challenge the role of a feminist leader and need for inclusivity in this era of #MeToo. Brave may not reflect these broader conversations, but it is a valuable and damning insider view of an industry that has violated women for way too long.
Take this anecdote, for instance: When McGowan was shooting Planet Terror, the schlockey 2007 zombie film directed by her then-boyfriend Robert Rodriguez, she resisted performing a stunt that would require her to back-bend over another actress. It was a challenging feat considering McGowan was wearing a four-inch high-heeled boot on one leg and an eight-pound cast that stood in for her character’s machinegun shin on the other.
At a skeletal 97 pounds, McGowan knew the back bend was a risk. Rodriguez — who McGowan refers to in Brave as RR — was not sympathetic. He had already been terrorizing her with his jealousy, demanding she take a lie detector to prove that she had not slept with Quentin Tarantino, her director on a second film that would be released as a double feature with Planet Terror. And then the inevitable happened. After Rodriguez pushed McGowan into the stunt, she felt her arm snap “like a cable in an elevator shaft.”
Despite her clear physical duress, which would lead to four operations that Rodriguez refused to pay for, McGowan was expected to hop back into character for the next scene, which involved cradling her dead boyfriend’s body, an emotionally surreal moment for the actress considering her real-life first love had been brutally murdered. (The case is still unsolved, but McGowan has vowed to “remedy that.”) From the set, she was then ushered off to a public appearance at ComicCon. Always the professional, McGowan made sure to tilt her head so as not to ruin her makeup with tears. Just another day in Hollywood.
McGowan’s story has chilling similarities to Uma Thurman’s account in the New York Times over the weekend of injuries she experienced while shooting Tarantino’s film Kill Bill. At the time, she smashed a car into a palm tree after unsuccessfully demanding that an experienced teamster take the wheel instead.
And of course, both women have come forward with their own horror stories of being sexually assaulted by producer Harvey Weinstein, who is referred to in Brave only as “the Monster,” or occasionally, “the Pig Monster.” McGowan’s details of that fateful night are as heinous as have been reported.
Brave is just one weapon in McGowan’s multi-pronged plan of attack for her Rose Army, which was born out of the #MeToo movement. With almost military precision, there is the E! documentary Citizen Rose, a forthcoming music album and, interestingly, a skin-care line. Although there are enough shocking details to satisfy the gossip-hungry, the book transcends the typical celebrity tell-all. It is a Hollywood takedown.
In diaristic episodes, McGowan describes her life as a series of escapes leading up to her arrival in Tinseltown at age 16. She grew up overseas in the notorious Children of God cult, until her family fled Italy for the U.S. when the cult’s leadership began encouraging sex between adults and children. She was shuttled between her father and mother, both of whom were ill-equipped to nurture offspring. After getting caught high on acid, 13-year-old McGowan was sent to a rehab centre, from which she would run away. She lived on the street, growing into a quick-witted hustler before she was old enough to drive.
Brave is written with a crackling intensity that indirectly demands readers examine their own complicity and media consumption. McGowan shares that it was her naked appearance wearing nothing but an ammunition belt on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 that led to her retreat from Hollywood.
She calls out predatory websites such as the now-defunct Gawker, which in its early days would stalk celebrities’ whereabouts, and the abusive vulgarity of Perez Hilton, who targeted female celebrities with his MS Paint gun, scrawling insults such as “whore” across their photos. (One could argue that these sites also laid the foundation for the current vitriol found on social media.)
Although Brave is framed as a call to arms, when McGowan directly addresses readers with her manifesto, the message feels superfluous. Brave’s real power is the shouting voice of a woman whose stories have been silenced for way too long. Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire.