USA TODAY International Edition
‘Romanoffs’ misses #MeToo lessons
Spoiler alert: The following contains details of the third episode of “The Romanoffs,” now streaming.
Time is not exactly up.
More than a year after the #MeToo movement was started by allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein, a new TV series written by a man accused of harassment has arrived on Amazon: “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner’s “The Romanoffs.”
As the fallout from our national reckoning about sexual violence and gender politics continues, many have wondered how, when or if men who have been accused of sexual misconduct should return to their work.
For men accused on the less criminal end of the spectrum, there are no widely agreed-upon solutions. Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari performed surprise standup comedy sets, and Jeffrey Tambor and James Franco appeared in new seasons of “Arrested Development” and “The Deuce,” respectively.
Whatever the answer, the right move is certainly not what Weiner has done in the third episode of “Romanoffs,” “The House of Special Purpose.”
The episode, which takes place on the set of a TV show rife with abusive behavior, is not unlike C.K. making a rape joke during his “comeback” – inappropriate and angering. Whatever intention he had with “Special Purpose” (written before he was publicly accused, he says), the message it sends in the context of #MeToo is radically different. And that new message is not a good look for Weiner, who has denied the accusations.
“Mad Men” alum Christina Hendricks stars as Olivia, an actress who travels to Austria to film a miniseries about the Romanoffs, a family of Russian royals. It’s a navel-gazing setup, but things only get worse as the episode progresses. On the set, Olivia is emotionally, physically and sexually abused by the cast and crew, repeatedly, until a final horror leaves her dead.
Olivia’s main abuser is Jacqueline (Isabelle Huppert), an actress-turneddirector and a stereotype of a crazed old woman. Jacqueline gaslights and mocks Olivia, encouraging others to do the same. At one point a male co-star (Jack Huston) attacks Olivia in a scene, claiming to be “in the moment” as he feigns a sexual assault that wasn’t in the script. Olivia calls her agent, Bob (Paul Reiser), and begs to escape, but he belittles her and warns she could be seen as a “difficult” woman.
And in the final act of Olivia’s degradation, she is kidnapped and thrown into a room with her fellow actors, where seconds later she believes bullets are flying as the people around her start falling and bleeding. To Olivia, it seems as if her co-stars are being murdered and she’s next, and she screams, cries and collapses. Of course, it was all Jacqueline and Bob’s plot to get a more realistic performance of terror from Olivia, for the big Romanoff death scene. But when they go to check on her,she hasn’t fainted: She died, seemingly of fright.
There’s an uneasy and exploitative feel to “Special Purpose.” That Olivia’s torment is put on display for the audience’s entertainment is wrong. That it’s so specifically akin to the stories of women’s real trauma on Hollywood sets makes it worse.
As Hollywood reckons with what happens behind the camera in the aftermath of #MeToo, we also have to pay attention to what goes on in front of it. Representing women as victims and playthings whose pain is ignored only contributes to a society that views women that way.
Even before #MeToo, Hollywood’s track record in portraying women onscreen is spotty at best. Dating back decades, female characters have been put through constant maltreatment in stark contrast with their male counterparts on the big and little screens.
“Game of Thrones” has been dogged by criticism of its depiction of sexual violence, which is seen as gratuitous. Crime dramas such as “CSI” – which aired on CBS, formerly run by Leslie Moonves, another man accused of harassment and assault – objectified women by using their dead naked bodies as literal props for the weekly murders, and we still see similar objectification on such shows as “Criminal Minds” and “NCIS.”
The abuse in “Special Purpose” is particularly grating coming from Weiner. In 2017, Kater Gordon, a writer on “Mad Men,” accused Weiner of sexual harassment, describing an incident in which he allegedly demanded to see her naked. Gordon has since left the entertainment industry and started a foundation to combat sexual harassment.
Weiner, his writers and many executives at Amazon had plenty of time between Gordon’s accusation and the debut of “Special Purpose” to rethink whether the episode should even be released. A fictional TV studio where a woman is physically and psychologically terrorized, created by a man himself accused of bad behavior on his own former show, is ill-advised at best and trolling at worst.
Television has the unique ability to rapidly respond to events in the real world in a way that film doesn’t. In the past year, many series have aired “#MeToo” episodes, usually dramatizing the downfalls of characters including Weinstein or Kevin Spacey or Matt Lauer. Those episodes mostly assume something that “The Romanoffs” does not: that the #MeToo era is the start of some kind of change. In that context, series that follow the old Hollywood habits when it comes to portraying violence against women – like “The Romanoffs” – feel not only distasteful, but dated.
And time should be up for them.
Representing women as victims whose pain is ignored only contributes to a society that views women that way.