Hollywood has always been this way. It has always been the monster we have always feared, and it has always been the beast that people have died trying to conquer. Still, we march on, with our dreams and our passions, and we want to be a part of that world creates, that inspires, that pushes the boundaries of comfort with visuals which can send chills down your back. Many people have always wanted to be a part of Hollywood, despite its tales of horror. I too shared a love for the film industry, though as a black woman, my love for it has always been restrained, and I’ve always been cautious about making a career out of the film.
But then the #MeToo movement happened. And it gave me even more reasons to hate Hollywood. The horrors we speak about in film school, and I had grown up hearing hit the surface of reality. They now had faces, names, and confessions.
And the horrors were not just one studio, it was all of them, and they were not just in Hollywood, they were throughout the world. But the final straw was last week, when the New York Times published an interview with Uma Thurman, as she recounted being sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein and how Quentin Tarantino nearly killed her with a stunt on the movie “Kill Bill.”
It was the final straw in which I began to question just how much I truly loved this industry, and if the stakes were worth the gain. If I were to allow an industry to throw stones at me, and if I were to choose an industry to bleed for, would it be filmed? The inevitableness of suffering worries me and the widespread poison of the racism and the sexism has given me no choice but to choose an archer, and now become the target.
But until graduation, I am still a film minor, and I’ve decided to spend my last two years trying not to be haunted by the words of Uma Thurman in the Times article. In film school, Pulp Fiction is the highest cinema can get – it’s a masterpiece.
We are trained to believe Quentin Tarantino and men like Quentin Tarantino are the greatest of all time, and they have reached their success because they are the best of the best, not because they also benefited from a system which excluded minorities and pushed women aside. We studied men like Charlie Chaplin and worshiped Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, Weinstein produced one of my favorite musical adaptions Chicago.
But now when I watch the film I wonder what horrors Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger went through on that set. Can we love directors and producers and hate them at the same time? This was a conversation I had in one of my film classes when the topic of Birth of a Nation, the film by Nate Parker, was brought up. This was a year ago, before the #MeToo movement, when Bill Cosby was taking over headlines, and I wondered why it was only black men who were reaping the shame of the sexual assault scandals rather than the entire community of Hollywood.
It was the conversation of the art versus the artist and could we love an artist in spite of. I don’t know. It’s a question I have, for many years, been trying to figure out. At that moment, I questioned, at what point do we draw the line? Today I observe, wherever the line once was, it is being redrawn.
In that class, most people said they do not separate the art and the artist, which were their reasons for not liking or wanting to see Birth of a Nation. But now the horizon has expanded. Now we must look at all movies, all the classics we are forced to worship, all the X-Men movies who have been directed by Bryan Singer, all the films who were produced by Harvey Weinstein, and thousands more.
I don’t know. But most importantly, who do you work with and who do you work for? The monsters who are public, or the monsters who are private? How many of them are there? And is it possible to have a career without them? In the Post-Weinstein era, how many films in which we consider to be gold standard will be left and will the title be rescinded in the Post-Weinstein era?
Birth of a Nation was a good film, and its cinematography was stellar, but it was shut out, and that year, Casey Affleck, who was accused of sexual assault as well, went on to win the Oscar for his performance in Manchester by the Sea, a film I also saw. It’s confusing in terms of emotions and what am I supposed to feel, who am I supposed to see when I see these actors accept an award for performances when they come dressed as their actual selves?
And so, its polarizing, especially as a black woman, having interests in joining the film industry – joining any industry - when, as the systems begins to fall apart, you see just how much they was designed to work against you. They teach us how to create good stories, and they teach us how to deal with demons. But not everyone is facing demons, some of us are up against the devil. Who can prepare you for that? But honestly, why should we have to be prepared for it, at all?