Movie-watching in the MeToo era
The airing of Tinseltown’s dirty little secrets has made moviegoers reassess their moviegoing choices,
TSir Ridley Scott replaced Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, but landed in more hot water when it emerged that Mark Wahlberg, above, had earned astronomically more than his female co-star Michelle Williams.
welve months is a long time in Hollywood. Around this time in 2017, we were all debating what Darren Aronofsky’s polarising Mother! was actually trying to say. But now, thanks to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, you have to wonder if the film would have even been released or made, given Jennifer Lawrence’s (Aronofsky’s girlfriend at the time) traumatic experiences during its production.
Likewise, last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the last major gathering of Hollywood’s elite before the wave of sexual abuse allegations began to surface, feted the likes of Louis CK, Morgan Spurlock and Harvey Weinstein, all of whom had new films to share.
Fast forward to September 2018 and I, Love You Daddy, Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! and The Current War all seem destined to never see the light of day, tarnished (rightly or wrongly) by their association with those subsequently disgraced figures.
While I don’t agree with all of the decisionmaking that has landed such projects in limbo (I feel desperately sorry for the US poultry farmers whose plight against corporate ‘‘Big Chicken’’ was highlighted in Size Me 2), there’s no doubting that airing Tinseltown’s dirty little secrets has made myself and other moviegoers reassess their moviegoing choices.
Some names that were once big draws are now box office poison and it’s arguable that many oncepopular conceits – remember the ‘‘torture porn’’ days of the mid-noughties, or the gross-out comedies of the late 1990s? – are now consigned to streaming debuts and more niche viewing.
And thank goodness for that if it means more room at the multiplexes and other cinemas for movies like Crazy Rich Asians, Lady Bird, The Florida Project, On Chesil Beach, A Quiet Place and The Wife. But should we really condemn a project just because of the actions of potentially one person, penalising the hundreds of others who worked on it?
Sir Ridley Scott tried to come up with an elegant solution to head off such a scenario by replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, only for the production to land in more hot water when it emerged that Mark Wahlberg had earned astronomically more than his female co-star Michelle Williams for the resulting reshoots.
But the movie still raked in respectable dosh. And the presence of Jeffrey Tambor didn’t seem to hurt Armando Iannucci’s ensemble comedy The Death of Stalin. So there’s no black-and-white blueprint for shun-versus-celebrate just yet.
What is clear, though, is that audience tastes are changing. The anticipation and appetite for the Fifty Shades sequels. When the first trailer for Fifty Shades Darker was released in September 2016, it was viewed by 114 million people in just 24 hours. Fourteen months later, the debut of Fifty Shades Freed’s first lengthy promo managed less than half that figure.
Locally, there was the case of ‘‘subversive’’ Aussie horror movie Better Watch Out. Released in early December last year, the Adventures in Babysitting-meets-Home-Alone-by-way-of-Scream tanked in Kiwi cinemas, earning just over $5000.
Once likely to pack teens (and other older males) in, the premise of two 12-year-old ‘‘boys’’ looking forward to arrival of their 17-year-old babysitter so they can ‘‘seduce’’ her by any means necessary proved a turn-off (it fared even worse in the US, where it accumulated only US$20,369).
Of course it was all done-and-dusted production wise before the movie industry’s year of reckoning and recalibration, but watching its combination of disturbing teen fantasy and nasty, manipulative power games just made it feel like a microcosm of everything that needed changing.
But what to do about cinematic history? There are some who suggest we should actively avoid and boycott the back-catalogues of all those with the discredited and disgraced attached.
That somehow American Beauty, The Usual Suspects and Baby Driver are not now worth seeking out because Kevin Spacey is in them.
Throw in anything produced by Weinstein, or written by Paul Haggis, not to mention those long-running, outstanding concerns about veteran film-makers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.
Well, that would mean you’d have to avoid The Fellowship of the Ring, Fahrenheit 9/11, Good Will Hunting, Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royale, Annie
Hall and Rosemary’s Baby just for starters. Movie-making is almost as old as suffrage in New Zealand and there are plenty of films that have fallen out of favour because of their content, but have endured because of their importance in the development of the artform (Freaks, The Triumph of the Will, The Birth of a Nation, A Clockwork Orange).
I’m not saying that the now seriously outdated
views on show in Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Animal House, Back to the Future, The
Breakfast Club, American Pie and Clueless are outweighed by them being ‘‘essential classics’’, but they are all products of their time, reflective of what was happening in the world when they were made. And, in some of those cases, important markers towards our more enlightened society today.
So while I’m excited by the kinds of stories a new, more gender and ethnically equal and diverse Hollywood might hopefully bring, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to seek out, share and celebrate its eclectic past in all its sometimes morally-flawed-by-modern-standards glory.