hierarchy, misogyny, and the abyss

never so over, always so back

Lately I’ve been reading Maureen Ryan’s infuriating Burn it Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which came out in June of last year. To be clear, the subject is infuriating, not the book itself, which meticulously documents the many kinds of abuse which have been normalized in Hollywood over the last few decades and are unlikely to change any time soon. Ryan touches on MeToo, but it’s not her primary interest: instead, she explores the verbal, emotional, and financial abuses which are less publicly discussed because 1) they’re less easy to sexualize/glamorize and 2) they’re simply an accepted part of the way that movies and TV are made. If you want to get mad (or do chores really fast while being mad) then read/listen to Burn It Down.

One of the things I’m struck by, as I listen to the audiobook of Burn It Down, is how often various forms of bad behavior are acknowledged by the industry as past problems but explained away as So Over now. Certainly, Hollywood is to some degree less abusive now than it was in the studio era, when moguls forced their actors to star in an absurd amount of movies per year and kept tight control over their personal lives, or in the New Hollywood/post-New Hollywood era when powerful directors and producers could browbeat and sexually assault basically anyone they liked, and that was seen as not only normal but a prerogative.¹ But MeToo was supposed to mark the end of all that—Harvey Weinstein is in jail, Kevin Spacey will probably never get real work again, etc. Diddy was recently arrested after committing decades of some of the most hideous misogynistic crimes I’ve ever read about. The art production industry has never been So Back, and so free from predators; artists of all identities are safe from everything (except, of course, continued socio-economic barriers to entry and crushing corporate control when they arrive.)

Ryan is very careful to point out that much of the endemic abuse in Hollywood has been leveraged along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality, but she doesn’t skip over instances where, for example, a cishet white male showrunner created such a nasty bullying environment that it probably contributed to a cishet white male production assistant’s suicide. Hierarchical abuse targets difference, but it doesn’t necessarily require those differences to be a matter of political identity, except insofar as political identities typically have some relation to inequities of power. I make a joke about this iN mY bOoK (buy my book) but I think the idea that watching movies or reading books necessarily “builds empathy” is ridiculous, partly because the art production industries are so famously cruel and abusive to everybody.² If consumption of narrative art increases empathy, then Hollywood ought to be full of the nicest people on earth, instead of hysterical showrunners who throw their computers because you brought them the wrong coffee. These abuses happen not because these guys are Artists and tempers run hot, and certainly not because genius requires abuse to function. It happens, mainly, because it’s allowed to happen. And because art is power, and hurting other people is one of the temptations of power: often enough, the main appeal.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the temptations of power lately, especially in the context of all these articles about the global male turn toward the right. Statistics and local conditions vary, but there’s at least some percentage of young men around the world who have recently embraced far-right politics and aesthetics. And, universally, they blame women for their problems. A really funny and stupid article in the Guardian yesterday profiled young male Republicans in New York who can’t get dates because everybody hates them. Every single one of these guys looks like the biggest douchebag you’ve ever met: the camera person must have been in on the joke, or else these young Republicans are simply ridiculous in any lighting and context. Anyway the first subject claims that his political worldview was formed when, as a college student, he “saw a woman on the train with a button on her backpack that said ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’” This teeny-tiny, slightly salty moment (probably one in a constellation of teeny-tiny, slightly salty moments in his life) upset him so badly that he formed his worldview around a feeling of profound imaginary persecution. Not being needed as a provider (instead of wanted for himself, which is an obviously preferable situation) ruined his life. Women, in fact, ruined his life by not conceding his necessity; by not acknowledging what so many men believe to be the true and natural hierarchy of male superiority.

The typical leftist approach in situations like this is to find the material need, the financial strain: why do so many men feel pushed out, alienated, unhappy; why do they think the re-establishment of hierarchy (which never really went anywhere, which is always So Back) will solve their problems? You can point to all sorts of material factors: work is alienating, as it always is under capitalism; there’s a lack of camaraderie and “third spaces” in the U.S. in particular. Many men lack friends and places to go with friends; they don’t hang out with the boys in any meaningful way, and so a girlfriend/wife ends up representing both the enemy and their only salvation. But men who are physically and socially alienated are not the only misogynists and abusers. The TV showrunner who throws a hissy fit and verbally abuses his staff—the boss of any kind in any industry who throws a hissy fit and verbally abuses his staff—is surrounded by people, lots of people. He isn’t even always a man; we’re currently So Over the figure of the girlboss, many of whom were just as toxic and shitty as their male counterparts. So it can’t just be that capitalism and loneliness make people bad—or, it isn’t just that abusive people are the mere victims of capitalism and social misery. They can also be its enthusiastic perpetrators.

The love of throwing one’s weight around and abusing underlings easily pre-dates capitalism; it isn’t always about political identities (though they do tend to get worked in, whatever they happen to be.) The political identity of “woman” has certainly been around a long time, and in most societies, that hasn’t gone especially well for us. This is the sort of thing that really freaks me out, in my despairing moments: that these problems, being in many ways non-material, are unsolvable, and that the temptations of hierarchical cruelty are too much—or rather, that too many people are tempted by them. It doesn’t really take that many shitty people to ruin a society. And some people do seem to really like hierarchy: they want to be the boss because being the boss feels good. Any attempt to move it forward, to create new forms of being with each other—to burn it down, and build anew—needs to reckon with the fact that some people are drawn to dominating others, and not in a sexy way or a we-need-to-get-this-project-going sort of way, but because power contains its own dark rewards.³

1. Roman Polanski did have to flee prosecution, so his rape of a child wasn’t exactly socially “allowed.” But plenty of others got away with it.

2. Also, if you look at a lot of the studies that purport to show how reading novels or watching movies increases empathy, you’ll find that they’re poorly designed. This is something you can learn from rEaDiNg mY bOoK.

3. I haven’t finished Burn It Down so I haven’t gotten to its prescription yet for how to fix/replace Hollywood, but I’m always in favor of setting things on fire.