In the Labyrinth of #MeToo
A BIG FAT HAIRY MAN. A Boss-Beast. An Animal-God. Bluebeard? King Kong? No, more like the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth of Hollywood. Or perhaps, as the #MeToo movement implies, the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth of patriarchal culture.
The tale—not a myth!—is ancient. One lovely girl after another must sacrifice herself to a repellent, all-powerful Ruler, although a few among the bevy of beauties find ways to evade his advances, standing up to him with righteous passion or threatening him with the wrath of real or fictive knights-errant.
From the beginning, the stories of #MeToo were horrific—and riveting. Riveting because they weren’t just now, they were always. One of the first and most resonant tales was told by Gwyneth Paltrow, who, at 22, won our hearts starring in Emma, the adaptation of the Jane Austen novel beautifully produced by Harvey Weinstein’s company, Miramax. Blond, slim, willful Emma conquered and was conquered by the noble Mr. Knightley onscreen, but in real life, Paltrow went to a hotel-suite business meeting, at which the ignoble Weinstein allegedly suggested they move to the bedroom for massages. Then, in episode after episode recounted in The New York Times, The New Yorker, online, and on TV, victims alleged that he did more, much more, to others, demanding or forcing oral sex, raping them, exhibitionistically walking around naked while masturbating, and threatening them with career catastrophe if they were uncooperative.
We devoured these stories of assault and revenge like the audiences of Greek plays fixating on Olympian turmoil. When one celebrity (Weinstein) terrified another (Paltrow), the deific victim invoked vengeance upon him from yet another celebrity (her then boyfriend, Brad Pitt). But for a long time, as a range of famous women have attested, the fat hairy beast went unpunished, ruling the hills and dales of Miramaxand indeed Hollywood and Manhattan and sometimes even London—with an iron fist and a perpetual erection.
“I have nightmares about him to this day,” said Lucia Evans, an aspiring actress whom he allegedly forced to perform oral sex.
“A big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale,” according to Asia Argento, an Italian actress on whom, she said, he forcibly performed oral sex.
On October 10, 2017, the published a chronicle of Weinstein’s misdeeds, with portraits of some of the angry beauties who had come forward—Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Rosanna Arquette, Katherine Kendall, and others—all righteously severe, all gorgeously costumed. (Paltrow led the list in an entrepreneurial charcoal gray suit, as if she had metamorphosed from, say, Ariadne to Athena.) And too joined the jury, led by Ronan Farrow, the resentful son of Woody Allen, who was enraged by his father’s alleged assault on his sister Dylan when she was seven and was now investigating the perverted appetites of the Minotaur of Miramax. writers covering the Weinstein case received the Pulitzer Prize for their work.
