Hollywood’s collective guilt on show in awards season
It's a sure thing that certain causes have greater traction at certain times, some issues that dare not be mentioned.
In the new film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri there’s a scene where a grieving mother, having lost her teenage daughter to rape and murder, is consoled by a Catholic priest.
In an earlier era the cleric might have been played by Pat O’brien or Spencer Tracy, or perhaps Bing Crosby if the film was a comedy or musical.
His pleas to forgive the law enforcement officers who have failed to progress the case, if not the perpetrators of the crime itself, would be taken at face value.
Not so today. Three Billboards is written and directed by Martin Mcdonagh, a British-born playwright of Irish extraction, well versed in institutional corruption. The scene thus plays rather differently.
Interrupting the priest, the mother, a deliciously subtle Frances Mcdormand, compares the church with a street gang.
She references a 1980s law whereby gang members could be found guilty of crimes committed by other people, if the others were also members of the same collective.
By this logic, each and every minister of the Catholic church is as culpable of child molestation and paedophilia as those who violate choir boys and innocent parishioners.
Given the systematic cover-ups that for decades protected sexual predators and perpetuated their offending, the idea doesn’t seem entirely unfair. By passing off sin as rectitude the church has lost all moral authority.
On Monday afternoon, Three Billboards won the Golden Globe for best picture – drama. As three of the four other nominees have yet to have a New Zealand release, it’s impossible to judge the merits of this decision.
However, there’s little doubt that Mcdonagh’s black comedy captures the zeitgeist in ways a lot more interesting and complex than the presumed frontrunner, the heavy handed race polemic Get Out, a film that was shunted into a different category.
Collective guilt is something Hollywood has been wrestling with ever since the Weinstein saga began.
It hung over the Golden Globes like a sanctimonious pall. Host Seth Meyers spoke for all white, heterosexual men when he apologised for being himself, lacking the courage to even deliver his own punch lines, farming them out to A-list women or B-listers from minority groups.
The targets were as expected: Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and the ever-growing list of those accused, but are somehow yet to charged with predation.
Stars and supporting players alike dressed in black, demonstrating solidarity. Oprah told us a new day had dawned.
Should we accept all this at face value? Feisty Rose Mcgowan, Weinstein’s earliest and most vocal critic, claims the Golden Globes were still more window dressing, a continuation of the silence that’s abetted industry abuse since the dawn of Tinsel Town.
She wants to know why she and other Weinstein victims were not part of the show.
Were they not asked because they could point the finger at others in attendance or undermine Winfrey’s proclamation of the new utopia?
If every Catholic priest is guilty, so every Hollywood filmmaker is either a predator or an apologist for one. Claims that you ‘‘did not know’’ will not wash.
Like any political grandstanding, that of the American movie industry tends toward the topical, a fact extenuated at the Golden Globes by the fact the Weinstein affair initiated wider societal debate about sexual abuse. It is the cause of the moment.
Whether topicality reflects a lack of sincerity is debatable, but it’s a sure thing that certain causes have greater traction at certain times and many are the issues that dare not be mentioned. Morality is ever selective. Gone are the days, for example, when Richard Gere could mouth off about Tibet at the Oscars.
In 2018, the only concerns Hollywood has about human rights abuse in China involve the underperformance of Star Wars: The Last Jedi at the Asian box office.
As Oscar season approaches, so too does the 40th anniversary of a political pronouncement that was decidedly against the grain and all the more courageous for it.
At the 1978 Academy Awards, Vanessa Redgrave, a controversial winner given her advocacy for the Palestinian cause, labelled her critics ‘‘Zionist hoodlums’’.
There were boos and hisses and renowned scribe Paddy Chayefsky later hit back, arguing the Oscars were no place for ‘‘propagation’’ of recipients’ ‘‘personal propaganda’’.
It’s a noble thought, one that might have carried more weight if Chayefsky had not himself been so determinedly pro-israeli. The changes of this year’s Oscars being politics-free are on par with those of Lorde co-presenting with Gal Gadot.