The insult of heaping pain on top of agony of abuse
What timing, director Bernardo Bertolucci and John Key, such profound opposites, making headlines on the same day in two different hemispheres. It makes you approach the boring and familiar with something like enthusiasm. Cardies have their uses.
John Key has been unflappable, unexciting, but to the best of my knowledge a decent and responsible guy in a world where they seem few on the ground. Don Brash was catty about Key’s time as prime minister, but most people seem to agree that Key didn’t do anything majorly dumb, like get filmed climbing into a kiddy car, even if he didn’t do what you wished he would.
Donald Trump is another matter, with his terrifying constituency of gullible idiots, and earthquakes don’t help. They feel more like a malign force trying to shake us off the planet than divine retribution for homosexual acts, as Bishop Tamaki would have it. I can’t watch reports on the war in Syria any more, there’s no point in feeling miserable over things you can’t change, but what does Tamaki think the children in Aleppo did to earn the hell they’re living in?
Humans don’t learn from the past, so thank goodness for dependable people, and, just think, Key considered his family when he pondered another term in office. Once – only yesterday – that would have been impossible for a man in public life to admit to; the family were bottom on the list of priorities, and a wife at the bottom of that. So note that brief moment of change, too, before it inevitably gets revoked.
I could warm to Key now, like an old boyfriend you never appreciated, and, as is usual, replaced with something worse. And now for his opposite, from the world of art, not money.
Back a couple of generations Bertolucci was a famous film-maker whose nostalgic movie, 1900, I like. Despite its creative camera work I never felt the same about Last Tango in Paris for a number of reasons, like the way Marlon Brando mumbled his lines as if he had a gob full of mashed potato.
I also disliked the scene where you were led to believe he had intercourse with his co-star, with the help of a pat of strategically-placed butter. Cue sniggering in the theatre. My goodness, how arty.
There are times when art is ugly, but there should be a good reason for it. That scene was gratuitous and bewildering, but gave the film notoriety, and earned Brando and Bertolucci Oscar nominations. Not the actress, however. She was typecast.
Nobody listened to Maria Schneider, the 19-year-old Brando apparently violated, as prearranged with the director without her consent. Nobody listened to young women’s complaints about such things in the 1970s. Her shock and disgust were real; they wanted it that way; and complaining just meant you were a miserable cow, not a true artist.
Now that Bertolucci’s admission of guilt and his lack of repentance have finally surfaced, years old, it’s clear that what happened was rape, which was what Schneider called it from the outset. But at the time excuses would have been made for the two ageing artists, as they still may be among misogynists hiding behind the cloak of art for art’s sake,
Brando and Schneider are dead, so sympathy is no more use to her than revulsion is to him. Bertolucci joins the long and shameful list of famous old men who’ve been revealed as arrogant bastards where sex is concerned, who believed they were being sophisticated when they were humiliating other people. And look how we’ve heaped them all with honours.
What followed for Schneider was a life-long struggle with depression, drug addiction, and suicide attempts. Her real violation on screen was bad enough, but what would have hurt more was that nobody listened, or cared, when she described what happened, more than once.
That degree of pain surely lies behind a demand here for an official investigation into the past abuse of children in state care. If women were not listened to in the recent past, it must have been worse for children. In their case nobody even bothered to ask.
I’m not sure that such an investigation would tell us any more than we know already, but I can’t speak for the needs of the victims here, the greatest of which must be to be heard, and not forgotten