Time’s up for Hollywood dinosaurs
If I looked like the Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein – and the way things are going, Lord knows, I may one day soon – then I’m not sure the bathtub would be my chosen locus of seduction. I’d want somewhere darker where I could be fully clothed. Such as the cinema, perhaps. Does he ever go?
Weinstein, who has produced or executive produced a formidable slew of movies, from Reservoir Dogs to The English Patient, was on Sunday sacked from his own company after an equally formidable slew of sexual harassment allegations surfaced in the American media. Ashley Judd is one of several to bring up baths in hotel suites. Another tale, from a journalist, has him doing unspeakable things to a restaurant plant pot.
None of this stuff is proven and plenty of it denied. Still, there are worlds in which sexual harassment is a hidden thing of which nobody knows, and then there are worlds in which some waiter with a trowel has to change the little brown clay beads in the aspidistra by the loos, again. The Weinstein scandal, wherever it leads, shows Hollywood as the latter.
Which, of course, is not very surprising. You could lose your mind trying to summarise examples of the dogged, predatory, institutional sexism of Hollywood, and simply find yourself making a mad list of almost everything.
Forget the films. Start with the many teenage wives of Charlie Chaplin or the tastes of Errol Flynn who once said ‘‘I like my whisky old and my women young’’. Linger perhaps on the bailjumping exile of Roman Polanski (and we shall come back to him) and rest up at the Oscars of 2013.
Here, host Seth MacFarlane sang a jaunty ditty called We Saw Your Boobs in which he reeled off the nude scenes of actresses, who were sitting there listening. There was a joke in there about the hacking of Scarlett Johansson’s private photos (for which somebody went to jail) and a fun mention of Jodie Foster’s nude scene in The Accused, during which her character is gang-raped on a pinball machine. This is not the way you talk about equals. It is also the primary engine of western culture and has been for half a century, at least. This is not, in other words, a quiet, internal, industry problem. We breathe this stuff in, through our eyes.
In 2009, Weinstein was an outspoken critic of Swiss moves, later abandoned, to extradite Polanski back to the United States. The director has been convicted of the statutory rape of a 13-year-old, that conviction itself the result of a plea bargain in a case in which he was initially charged with far, far worse. At the time, Weinstein called him ‘‘a great artist’’ and referred to his ‘‘so-called crime’’. His attitude isn’t unusual. Dig out the footage of Polanski’s Oscar win, for The Pianist in 2003, and watch the standing ovation. Weinstein is there, whooping along, but so is everybody else, from Jack Nicholson to Meryl Streep to Martin Scorsese. The strength of his work transcends the obligation to care about it. This is the call Hollywood makes about what matters more.
Polanski may not be the only person they have been making such a call about. It would be dishonest to pretend that Weinstein has shrugged off decades of allegations until now simply because he was powerful. He was also brilliant. Had he been involved only in stupid, exploitative, sexist films, this story would be far neater. Whereas actually, from Shakespeare in Love, to Good Will Hunting, to True Romance, to The Reader, to Silver Linings Playbook, he has been involved in the best of Hollywood rather than the worst. Even here, Hollywood has tended to give us stories of inspirational men and their adoring womenfolk. Even in Shakespeare in Love, when there was really no need whatsoever, we still saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s boobs. Probably we had come to expect them. Possibly we would have felt a little robbed had we not.
Weinstein’s disgrace and defenestration are not happening now wholly by chance. They are part of a changing world. You can feel it in the films of Kathryn Bigelow, for example, which are fairly conventional in most respects but somehow manage to feature incredibly beautiful women (eg Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty) without randomly forcing them to have sex with people or take their clothes off. You can feel it in the evolution from Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft, in hotpants and a boobtube in Tomb Raider, to Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games who, in films with women strongly involved in writing and production, struts her stuff for the most part in a relatively sensible leather jerkin.
Even more so you can feel it on the small screen. From Big Little Lies, to The Handmaid’s Tale, to Transparent, we are living through a time of femaleled filmed fiction that often seems to have simply rolled its eyes at the malegaze-led conventions and assumptions of a century of Hollywood, and turned out far better as a result.
You can feel mass culture, and particularly the cleverer end of it, changing in a way that makes a generation of film makers into dinosaurs for more than just their alleged bathroom or restaurant habits.
We cannot know how a century of lust and casting couches have shaped Western society, but my hunch is quite a lot. We also can’t know what it will do to us if, finally, they get shamed out of town. Speaking as a father of daughters though, I look forward to finding out.