I’ve been musing for the past few days on just how it is that so many ostensibly liberal people can be so completely blinkered when it comes to the Polanski arrest. Outside of Anne Applebaum (who has doubled down on victim-bashing), the defenders of Polanski come from the entertainment community, specifically the film community. And those supporters are overwhelmingly liberal.
Now, “Hollywood Liberal” has gotten such overplay as to become cliché, but no doubt there’s an element of truth to it, just as there’s an element of truth to the idea that most bankers are conservative. It’s not, as some on the right believe, a case of witch hunts and blackballing. Rather, it’s that acting and the arts tend to attract people who are more inherently liberal. Hey, if you’re by nature a conservative person, you’re not going to chuck it all and move out to L.A. in the hopes you can get a gig as Corpse #2 on Law and Order: CSI, just as if you’re by nature a free spirit, you’re not going to become an accountant. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but the imbalance is an effect of people’s political leanings.
But while Hollywood is a generally liberal town, Hollywood is not a perfect liberal Utopia. As anyone who’s studied media knows, Hollywood tends to be whiter than average, prettier than average, and thinner than average by a ludicrous degree. And it tends to sneer condescendingly at those who are not.
But where Hollywood really falls short is in its treatment of women. Since its earliest days, most starlets have followed the predictable arc from sudden fame to total ruin. So rare is a female star who stays in the public eye for decades that the few who manage — Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, Susan Sarandon — are viewed as almost freakish.
True, Hollywood treats many male stars as disposable, too. But you can name dozens of actors who’ve had staying power — Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Sean Connery, Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins…we could name stars all day, but we won’t, because it’s pointless.
Hollywood has different rules for men and women. It treats them differently. It regards them differently. And it recruits them differently.
It’s that last one that is the reason Roman Polanski is getting such fervent defense from fellow artists. Because while Polanski’s transgression is outrageous to most decent humans, it’s really just a short distance away from the way Hollywood once expected its starlets to make their entrances — on their backs.
The Casting Couch, like Hollywood Liberalism, is the stuff of cliché. But like Hollywood Liberalism, it has an element of truth to it. Oh, no doubt the practice is being slowly squeezed out, as trifling things like anti-harassment laws. But it’s still alive and well. Megan Fox has stated that she’s beenpropositioned more than once while meeting with producers and directors about projects. And Michael Bay had her wash his Ferrari as part of her audition for Transformers – and filmed the whole thing, because he could.
And that’s in this decade, with years of anti-harassment litigation on the books. It was worse in the 1970s. Quite a bit worse.
Which is why Hollywood is, to a large degree, rallying around Polanski. Because his crime was of a piece with the culture of the town. It was expected that a woman (or in this case, girl) trying to break into the business would give a famous director some incentives to hire her. It was assumed that this was just a standard quid pro quo. Indeed, to this day Polanski defenders argue that his victim’s mother understood this trade-off and set her daughter up for it, as if that excuses drugging and raping a 13-year-old.1
Many — not all, but many — of Polanski’s defenders defend him because all too many of them have been on one side of the casting couch or the other. Some have asked for favors, some have given favors, some have been on both sides of the deal. And for them, that fuels their support. Because the casting couch is an integral part of rape culture, a point at which a powerful person can force a weak person into sex. To paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg, it may not be rape-rape. But it’s on the continuum.
And that fuels the impassioned defense of Polanski. Because if Polanski is a criminal for using too much force on a 13-year-old,2 what does that say about every director who’s talked a 19-year-old aspiring actress into similar acts, in the interests of her career? And what does it say about an actress who let herself be talked into it? After all, the need to deny one has been raped or assaulted is nearly as strong as the need to deny one is capable of assault.
And so Polanski’s crime is minimized, because it hits too close to home. Yes, he was guilty of excesses beyond those usually found in Hollywood, but they were differences of degree. He used force when others used coercion, he used drugs when others dangled carrots, he chose a 13-year-old as his target instead of a 20-year-old. His crime is worse. But it is of a kin with the daily transgressions that continue to drive Hollywood’s attitude toward its female actors.
Hollywood, for all its squishy liberalism, is in racial and gender politics a very conservative town. While most of America has accepted at least the basic concept that women and men are equals,3 that people of all races are equals, Hollywood has not even begun to wrestle with the idea. Instead, it tries to deny that it has a problem at all — and in its denial, ends up defending the indefensible.
- If you believe this, at best it would make the victim’s mother an accessory. However, you’d have to believe the victim’s mother intentionally pimped her daughter out for a casting couch rendezvous, then took her daughter to the police to press rape charges within a few days — which seems like more than a stretch to me. None of this, incidentally, changes the fact that Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old; no matter how crappy a parent is, you don’t get to rape their child. [↩]
- As Kira helpfully notes in comments at my site, it should be obvious to anyone that “too much force” is equal to “any force.” But it should also be obvious that rape is bad, and a lot of Polanski supporters seem unable to get that, so I think I’d best footnote this. [↩]
- I’m not arguing that women and men are in fact treated equally; they are not. But most Americans would agree with the statement, “Women and men should have equal rights.” The concept is generally accepted, at least in theory. [↩]
Exactly. And for all the people who are saying “what good can prosecution do now?” – because people *need* to see these similarities and be uncomfortable, and if things really are better now they need to keep getting better.
For what it’s worth, most bankers are liberal (or Democrats, anyway). For example, here’s data on the political contributions of Goldman Sachs employees:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000085
You hit the nail on the head here. I worked in the film industry, in production, for several years and even behind the scenes there’s a tremendous amount of pressure to get on your back if you’re a woman trying to make it as anything other than a PA.
The only thing I would point out is that “Hollywood” is more of an imagined community than an actual place in this instance. The actual place of Hollywood isn’t the star-studded wonderland people usually imagine, nor is it all white and all “beautiful”. But as an imagined community – which stretches to various countries and the smaller networks that are engaged in the process of filmmaking, such as the huge numbers of Europeans who’ve leapt to Polanski’s defense – it certainly is all you describe. And I only say this because it’s important to recognize that the dynamics you speak of are not inherent to the physical location but to the ways people utilize particular cultural norms in order to structure their identities in similar ways because of their professional context.
I once read this detail about the filming of CHINATOWN: Faye Dunaway’s hair, very tightly styled in a 30s-period perm, would not lie down properly…her stray hairs looked very obvious and distracting under the lights. Hair stylists were repeatedly brought in, spraying madly, to no avail.
Finally, Polanski just reached out and yanked out the offending strands. (When Dunaway became angry, of course, she was the bitch.)
And I never forgot that story–it lets you know exactly what even the women STARS are worth in Hollywood.
Ohhhh, DaisyDeadhead. I am so with you. I was absolutely horrified the first time I browsed my way to TVTrope’s “Enforced Method Acting” category. It’s basically a catalog of abuses against female and child actors throughout film history.
Suffice it to say that if you watch a movie with a woman or child acting horrified, grief-stricken, or terrified, there is absolutely no good reason to believe that this is ACTING as opposed to actual film of a woman or child being terrorized. Hollywood has built itself by filming the real, literal abuse of women and children for our “entertainment”. And it’s not just in the past: one of the worst examples on the TVTropes page occurred in 1996, during the filming of Scream.
I’m done. No more movies for me, ever, that show female or child characters crying or being afraid. I can’t watch them knowing I may be watching real terror or desperation.
Here’s the TVTropes page, but only read it if you have a strong stomach. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnforcedMethodActing
mommyfortuna —
No doubt; “Hollywood” has become a metonym for “the film community,” the same way “Foggy Bottom” denotes the State Department or “Nashville” the country music industry (or indeed, the way “Casting Couch” denotes the quid pro quo of sex-for-job.) If there was any doubt of your point, all one needs to do is note that there are a number of Casting Couch scandals coming out of Bollywood.
DaisyDeadhead/kristinc–
That’s why Polanski’s such a great director. Because he abuses his actresses. Golly, can’t imagine such a sweet guy could also rape a kid. :roll:
That’s a bit exaggerated, kristinc: overlooking the implicit equation of women with children, last I heard, Martin Sheen, Christopher Walken, Dennis Greene, Charlton Heston, Robert DiNiro, Alan Rickman, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Hugh Jackman, Warren Oates, Barry Bostwick, Jonathan Adams, Al Pacino, Steven Weber, Chow Yun-Fat, Sean Connery, Slim Pickens, George C. Scott, Ed Harris, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Turturro, Michael J. Fox, Christian Bale, Jerry Lewis, Simon Pegg, Brad Pitt, Mike Meyers, Toshiro Mifune, Will Smith, Ian McKellan, Viggo Mortenson, Stephen Baldwin, and Ben Stiller—a significant majority of people named in the film examples—are all adult men.
Not that that excuses what was done to Nicole Kidan and Sally Kellerman, if “done to” is the operative phrase. Or justifies releasing Polanski.
Way to miss the point, Hershele.
Notice something in common about those male examples? Either everyone thought it was funny after the fact, so no harm done — or, the actors were angry. Anger is the reaction of someone who has been trespassed against and knows they have the right to not be trespassed against. Begging, pleading, and having nervous breakdowns are reactions from people who know they’re marginalized and have no recourse.
I notice there are no stories about directors threatening to abuse or kill the pets of male actors. I wonder why that is?
The point you made the first time is that directors felt free to do these things to women-and-children and in fact do them to women-and-children all the time, but (implicitly) not men.
Hershele, if you can’t read that TVTropes section and see how the treatment of women and children differs radically from the treatment of adult men, then I just don’t know how to help you.
I repeat: have you ever heard of a director threatening to kill or torture an adult male actor’s dog? Why do you suppose that is?
Kristinc, can you be more specific about what the radical difference in treatment is?
I agree that pretending to torture a dog is bad — although I also have doubts about if that story (eta: the story about Drew Barrymore in Scream) is true, because it’s so fantastic and elaborate that it sounds like an urban myth.
That aside, if the story is true, then it’s horrible. But if the story about making Christopher Walken believe he was in mortal danger of being shot in the head is true, then that’s horrible as well. I don’t see how one is worse than the other.
I do think there’s a bunch of ways that women are systematically mistreated in the film industry — from the obvious sexism of roles offered to the casting couch and rape. I’m not coming from this from a “sexism doesn’t exist” perspective at all. But looking at the particular list you linked to, I have to admit that it looks to me as if it’s a list of ways that actors of both sexes have been mistreated.