THB #99: Keepers of History
Outrage is all the fashion these days, followed in close order by apathy.
During this weekend, we saw a conversation you could hear at Oscar voters’ dinner tables over the last four months get weaponized to the giddy joy of people who didn’t really pay attention to what that conversation actually was. Then, just 2 nights later, the same person who made that one group of the partisan half-deaf happy got hoisted on her own petard, giddily overreaching in a moment of her own joy, trying to share, but seeming to exclude powerful people of color.
Sam Elliott didn’t say there should be no movies about gay cowboys. And Jane Campion didn’t say that she was superior in her efforts as a 67-year-old white woman to two living legends of tennis who are black american.
But that was the impression some chose.
And now we can argue about how Campion’s apology was just right, as there was no apology from Sam Elliott to Campion. But this too is rife with bullshit, as Campion is backed by supporters - many of whom are just recently acquainted with her work (unlike, ironically, Sam Elliott) - and a multi-million publicity apparatus assuring that her apology will be accepted by the majority, while we all know that had Elliott issued an apology, it would been positioned by media, Twitter, and Netflix publicity as a self-serving and desperate effort to save his own career.
I am not arguing that Sam was right in his opinion. I am not arguing that Jane was wrong in her opinion.
I am arguing that people say stuff. Sometimes, it is ill advised. Sometimes that ill advised thing is done clumsily in the midst of great enthusiasm and joy. Sometimes, it is a small opinion that gets overloaded with verbal Christmas lights until it pulls the tree over.
But for me, what really matters in every case - once I put aside my human, personal, intellect-free reaction - is the truth. The truth of the words and the intent.
We are inundated with stuff these days. It’s like playing tennis against a cultural tennis ball server, shooting balls at us at high speed every hour of the day.
Lizzo is 100% “that bitch.” But that was her appropriating a hateful word to empower herself in her music. For me, the only excuse for using the word “bitch” in the culture is in discussing a female dog or in making some kind of cultural reference to Lizzo or another female artist using that term. I am not okay with it for my kid and his online friends… or comics… or male musicians. I lived through it being almost required in songs for a few years. I know that Jesse in Breaking Bad used it constantly. But I’d like to think we are past that.
And I am not okay with Jane Campion using it about Sam Elliott. I don’t think it’s adorable or empowering. I think it’s used to try to emasculate and reduce. Also, “he’s an actor, not a cowboy,” is again, a form of hate speech.
I don’t think that the actual exchange is a deep offense punishable by cancellation. But celebrating it is 100% that hypocrite.
If Sam Elliott had called Jane Campion “a bitch,” he would be rightfully cancelled, in my view. At least in terms of an easy embrace. It would have been wildly inappropriate.
Sam Elliott did say, “what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West? And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was?’ So that fuckin’ rubbed me the wrong way, pal.”
People felt this was deeply offensive, seizing on the word “woman” as though he wouldn’t feel the same way if a man made the film. Is Campion reducing Elliott as “an actor, not a cowboy,” any less dismissive?
And how very different is the sentiment from how people steeped in issues of inclusion expressed about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights movie?
Taking a step away, I disagree strongly with Sam Elliott on principle. I don’t think filmmakers are required to be of the place in which they set a story. Or we couldn’t have any science fiction or action movies or spaghetti westerns, for that matter.
But my issue is not with the broader issue. On the broader perspective, the whole thing is childish nonsense. Sam didn’t like the movie. Many don’t. Who cares?
This morning, I ran into this Facebook entry from the great Paul Schrader.
I, too, watched The Warhol Diaries this last week. I didn’t know Ryan Murphy was involved until the credits. I tuned in, in part, because I like the doc work of Andrew Rossi.
I read The Warhol Diaries from cover-to-cover when it came out in 1989. I was new to Los Angeles, having moved from New York, and I was unemployed. So I had the time and the recent history to feel close to the work.
The series doesn’t really feel anything like the book. It turned out to be much more an Andy Warhol bio-doc with a particular interest in his adult romantic life, even as it constantly talks about how he separated his work from his home life with serious intention.
But what struck me about Schrader’s comment was that Ryan Murphy has become the de facto keeper of popular history, starting on FX, but continuing with the largess of Netflix.
I think Mr. Schrader is taking a swing at Mr. Murphy with the comment, connecting him to the tumescent rise and fall of culture. What hit me was more that we have allowed Ryan Murphy to be the voice of the decades of culture in which he has lived and even before.
OJ, Versace, Halston, Lewinsky/Clinton, Warhol, Old Hollywood with Bette & Joan and Hollywood, with Marlene Dietrich and Jeffrey Dahmer to come. He’s also brought us new looks at classic gay genre, like The Normal Heart and Boys in the Band, as well as a new take on A Chorus Line that is brewing.
Before Murphy, I think this position was Oliver Stone’s, who has catalogued El Salvador, Vietnam, the first wave of master of the universe Wall Street, Chinese gangs in Manhattan (Year of the Dog), the return of vets from Vietnam, The Doors, JFK, Nixon, the NFL in the 80s, Castro, Alexander The Great, Snowden, 9/11, George W Bush, Turkish drug penalties, South American dictators, and serial killers as culture heroes.
The question, I suppose, in both cases, is whether the audience for all this work - some sensationally good, some not - has replaced actual history, the way biopics often do for people as the image of the actor replaces any historic image in the viewer’s head forever.
It should not. The actual facts matter.
Just a few days ago, Amber Ruffin did a well-considered takedown around how the Pocahontas/Matoaka story keeps getting told… which starts with familiar complaints about how her relationship with John Smith is portrayed in culture, but digs deeper into how Native American women are still being abused.
This all leaves us, as humans living in the world, to make a choice about where we want to spend our focus… since it can’t be everywhere all at once. When you think of how many years it has taken you, as an adult, to accumulate all the truths and lies you hold in your head, you realize how hard this is for every one of us.
We can try to sift through the endless ball machine of stories and reconsiderations we face every day… or we can take an extreme position in which we react in a Gladwell instant to the info tsunami and embrace the talking points, which have been crafted by someone with a lot more time focused on one take on the issue.
I admit it… I am enraged by people throwing out talking points passionately about any issue that is much more complex. And I should be more forgiving. Because I am sure there are things I take on faith and - as a result - am dead wrong about, exhibiting the same behavior I so dislike.
We have come to a time where we have to shop for truth a lot of the time. I find myself balancing out the coverage of Ukraine between all the news outlets to try to find the truth. This is madness. I am not qualified to do so and the idea that The Truth is different on 6 different media channels or more… horror.
Then there is the argument that U.S. support of Ukraine is hypocritical in light of our national relationship with Israel. Must we always be right - in anyone’s perception - in order to ever be right? Is anyone always “right?”
So…
this brings me to the other conflicting thing that came up this weekend… the death of William Hurt.
I have a warm place in my heart for William Hurt, both from his work on screen, and from personal engagement as a movie journalist.
I have done over 2000 30-minute interviews with film/tv talent over the years and when someone asks what my favorite interview was, I always start with Hurt.
This was my second sit with Hurt, who didn’t much like doing press. But somehow, I had gotten him into a dark room for A History of Violence, without cameras, at TIFF. And that hour was a journey that I can barely do justice to in describing it.
What I can tell you is that I always thought of him as a madman and a genius from then on… with great affection.
When I wrote about his passing on Twitter, his own history of violence came up, with Marlee Matlin and his first wife.
ET Canada asked Matlin about his passing on the red carpet at the CCAs. “You’re the first person to ask about him. We’ve lost a really great actor and working with him on set of Children of a Lesser God will always be something that I will remember very fondly. He taught me a great deal as an actor. And he was one of a kind.”
You can see her sadness and tension in her face, even as the generous words came.
But what do those feelings mean? She has chosen to take the high road, in terms of her experience of the man in their private relationship. But she also may be feeling loss. She may be feeling many things.
Is it our job, as the peanut gallery (hopefully, that phrase won’t offend sentient peanuts), to decide how she is feeling based on how we are feeling?
Is it our job to disconnect - when we know about a period of a person’s life and not much about his last 30 years - from the work that enriched us at an earlier time in our lives, as punishment or retribution or absolute judgment of that person?
I am guessing this answer will come easy for many. Yes or no.
Yet I know very few people who, as adults, don’t have to navigate their emotions about this kind of disconnect in regards to their relationships with their families and friends as well. When it is closer and more detailed, it becomes harder.
Harvey Weinstein is an easy call. He has always been a grotesque and now, a long list of women have confirmed abuses ranging from nasty talk to career assault to rape. But sometimes, there is a lot more to the story… and we all seem to feel forced to pick a side. Truth rarely offers itself up so baldly.
There was a long thread on Twitter on how William Hurt came out and watched a stage show in Chicago that no one else showed up to watch and spent hours afterwards engaging the actors as equals.
Can he be a man who hits women - perhaps when drunk - and also be that gentle, kind, loving person? Yes. Of course.
There are legitimate and complete answers to these kinds of issues. But it takes a lot more insight than a soundbite.
But how do we measure or value one story against another?
Well, most effectively, we seek context. We seek more history. We seek a timeline. We seek excuses, fair and unfair.
I have a tendency to offer some forgiveness to people who, under the influence of whatever, do terrible things in their lives… but then do the work to get themselves back together and to be decent. Does this erase the past? No. But who amongst us doesn’t have things in our pasts we deeply hope are forgiven?
Anyway…
I don’t have an answer for all of this. It is a great gift that we now all have access to so much information, in ways our grandparents born before WWII could not even imagine. (Those who are still alive are trying to get you to help them with their new phone.) But with great power comes great responsibility. We are not equipped as humans to judge and categorize 100s and sometimes 1000s of pieces of information coming across our digital transom every day.
Yet, not doing it and not doing it with a certain absolutism comes with social penalties. Or social celebration.
And really, all we really need is a way to take hold of the truth.
Sigh.
Until tomorrow…
David....your writing is wonderful.....look forward to reading it....keep it up. Gene Light