Watching Woody in a Post-MeToo World
In my mind I am the emotional equivalent of Samuel L. Jackson’s character Mr. Glass from Unbreakable. I think of myself as literally being the world’s most hyper-sensitive human being (no mean feat in a world with eight billion people in it!)
I know that’s not true. I am hyper-sensitive. I take things personally. It takes me a long time to get over things. But I am also a grown-ass man, a husband, a father, a professional and a man who has written about pop culture professionally for twenty-five years.
So while I am sensitive I am nowhere near as sensitive or fragile as I fear I am. In the wake of #MeToo, for example, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to watch movies or television shows starring artists I previously adored, looked up to and modeled myself after but who have been exposed as horrible human beings and/or sex criminals.
Would I be able to put my intense negative feelings about these people aside so that I could do my job to the best of my abilities? Or would the real world prove too distracting?
For my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror, for example, I have been watching a slew of movies about movies starring deeply problematic figures.
Over the course of a single week, for example, I watched and wrote about the Kevin Spacey show-biz melodrama Hurlyburly, the 2002 Woody Allen vehicle Hollywood Ending and most recently the notorious 1997 Joe Estzerhas vanity project An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.
I remembered that An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn was gross and painfully unfunny. I did not remember, however, that Harvey Weinstein has a sizable supporting acting role as a gruff detective.
I figured that if I was going to subject myself to painful, problematic horseshit, I met as well get it all out of the way as soon as possible. Rip off the bandage, as it were.
All three movies fucking suck, though Hurlyburly is not completely worthless, if I might give it the faintest of praise.
Yet I suffered through them all the same because that is my job and I take my job seriously and want to do it as well as possible.
Hollywood Ending and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn were painful experiences because the movies are god-awful, not because they prominently feature men accused of horrible crimes.
What bugged me about Hollywood Ending is what has ALWAYS bothered me about Woody Allen movies: that they’re lazy and narcissistic and repeatedly cast beautiful young women decades younger than Woody Allen as beauties sexually obsessed with the diminutive jazz buff.
What affected me deeply about these movies wasn’t seeing people I once loved but now hate but rather seeing someone I love who is gone forever.
Like Harvey Weinstein, Robert Evans ACTS in An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn and even though the context could not be worse I still found myself getting a little choked up.
When Evans is filmed in his pool all I could think was, “I was THERE.” When he’s shown in his screening room I couldn’t help but think that I would have seen a movie there if that asshole Bret Rather hadn’t burned down the screening room when he was staying in the guest house.
Am I professional? You bet your sweet ass I am, and part of that entails having some nice, personal pop culture memories, like Robert Evans inviting me to spend a weekend at his home, along with all of the negative and deeply scarring ones.
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