CMU School of Drama


Thursday, October 19, 2017

Sex, Lies, and the Issue that's Larger than Harvey Weinstein

Cultural Weekly: Every time a character is killed in The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist Western distributed by The Weinstein Company in 2015, blood and butchery splatter across Jennifer Jason Leigh’s expectant face. Tarantino stages these violent outbursts, and the degradation of the female lead, for gleeful male laughter. The residue on Leigh’s face is a porn trope: blood substitutes for semen. To promote the film when it opened, distributor Harvey Weinstein cajoled People Magazine into heavy coverage.

In microcosm, that’s the larger context for the past weeks in Hollywood — because Hollywood is just part of a pervasive cultural fabric that interweaves the complex relationship between business and art, studios and talent, power and media, men and women, entertainment product and sexual assault.

2 comments:

Kelly Simons said...

I am so pleased that Harvey Weinstein has finally been punished for his years of sexual abuse against women working in Hollywood. Although, I will agree with the article that all of this does seem like a big publicity act. The article reads: “For the first few days after the New York Times and New Yorker stories broke, the entertainment industry’s reaction was swift and unanimous. Weinstein’s name was stripped from projects; he was fired by his board; he was ousted from the Academy. The whole thing felt like the kind of over-the-top showmanship Weinstein himself had used to promote his films, loud and with bare knuckles.” Abuse against women in the entertainment industry has been happening since there has been an entertainment industry, and now all of a sudden one man who has perpetuated this abuse gets in trouble? Seems like Harvey was the fall man for this scandal.

Unknown said...

I think this article does an excellent job of showing how cultural this problem is, extending to environments well beyond the reach of Hollywood. One reason I believe the Harvey Weinstein scandal is receiving the kind and level of attention it is, is because Hollywood is visible. It is the thing people look to and at with near-constant attention. And because such a visible microcosm was shaken up, the ripples are now being felt across our societal culture as a whole. Hollywood - as the author points out - is such a point of convergence for so many topics and concepts, and this environment was - if there ever could be - the ideal amphitheater for something like this to happen in because so many different threads of the fabric of society are being tugged on now, their validity examined and questioned like never before. Finally, as the author expresses, I am concerned that these great cries for change will last only as long as the societal memory of this scandal does.