- I'm heartbroken about Louis C.K.; I admit that, even though I saw the heartbreak coming. I thought his work was honest. I thought it made the world better. It's useful to realize that he — along with all these other small and grubby souls — may instead be responsible for an unfathomable diminution of what American art and comedy could have been. There's no knowing how many people have been sacrificed — along with their great and gripping work — to the cause of someone else's genitals.
So am I a bad person for still wanting to see the movie? edit: I am a bad person for still wanting to see the movie.
I mean, I've seen bits and bobs of Triumph of the Will. So have we all. Food for thought, though: Another performer, Abby Schachner, said her own inappropriate run-in with Louis C.K. discouraged her from pursuing comedy altogether. (As he himself put it in an apology released on Friday: “The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.”) Our assessments of men’s contributions to an art form ought to be informed by the avenues they have closed off for other artists. I love Blade Runner. I think it's a great film. But it includes this scene: Sean Young has said that she felt raped in that scene. She also auditioned to play the Replicant Pris but Ridley Scott refused to give her the part because she wasn't blonde (it went to Daryll Hannah). A few years later she was supposed to be the love interest/interior decorator in Wall Street but Oliver Stone took it away from her because she wasn't blonde (it went ot Daryll Hannah). Then she was supposed to be the love interest in one of the Batman movies but she broke her shoulder rehearsing a scene and the role went to Kim Basinger. "That night, I re-watch two of her other films, the ones that don’t get the attention of Blade Runner. In 1987’s No Way Out, she glints brilliantly in a Hitchcocky confection. In The Boost: she’s raw, compelling. Really, these past couple of decades, it’s Hollywood’s loss as well as hers. The play in Northport, I find, has been reviewed in the New York Times. Young, despite minimal stage experience, is said to “acquit herself honorably”." I'll say this: I've been in the sausage factory for ten years now and I'm ready to go vegetarian. I've written eight screenplays, optioned two and I mostly watch The Great British Baking Show. I've long since lost the ability to separate the art from the artist; I stopped listening to Laibach, Echo & The Bunnymen, World Party and VNV Nation when they were abject dicks to me.Men like Louis C.K. may be creators of art, but they are also destroyers of it. They have crushed the ambition of women and, in some cases, young men — boys — in the industry, robbing them of their own opportunities. The comedians Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov said that after Louis C.K. cornered them and masturbated in front of them at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in 2002, they feared that speaking out about the incident could risk their careers. While Louis C.K. felt free to flaunt the behavior throughout his comedy — in one scene of “Louie,” Pamela begs him not to start masturbating in front of her — the women were silenced. He took advantage of them, then took ownership of the experience.
My wife and I just watched Blade Runner for the first time a week or so ago so the Weinstein stuff was fresh in our minds, but I'm surprised I hadn't heard much about that scene beforehand. For years I had heard that I should see Blade Runner, that it was a cult classic, but for me that scene would have been a huge caveat to give. Other than that it was great, though.I love Blade Runner. I think it's a great film. But it includes this scene
Social progress is a funny thing - everybody alive thinks they're exactly as progressive as the world around them and the fact that the world is now more progressive than it was when they were younger does not mean that they were a backward part of a backward world, it means they were one of the enlightened ones. Blade Runner is so old that we live in the distant future it imagined. But a lot of us grew up in that distant past and it's normal to us. So anything that happened that was normal then must be normal now, right? This is why you have a racist grandma. Four years after Blade Runner: Four years after Blade Runner: It wasn't a caveat at the time. We were still agog over the brilliance of Last Tango in Paris.
I've thought a lot about Sean Young, specifically, when all this Weinstein-like stuff came out. People (white men) claimed she was "difficult", and "hard to work with", and I keep asking myself if she got that rep because she wouldn't sit on the casting couch. She has been an excellent actress. In the few things she was ever in. Now she is retired and lives in, Arizona IIRC, and has a ranch, I think? Another artist lost to dumb white men.
From the article linked above: Also from the article: Debra Winger is supposedly "difficult" too. I don't think the problem is "dumb" white men. I had a conversation with my wife last night when John Oliver mentioned Louis CK. I paused it and said "Something's been bugging me. A lot of these guys masturbated in front of women uninvited. We've known each other a while and it would not occur to me to masturbate in front of you. I'm well aware that men care about their penises a lot more than women do and I do not believe that my jacking off in front of you increases my amorous standing one iota. Am i wrong?" My wife observed that she certainly had no interest in watching me or anyone else jack off, and that in her limited experience with other women, she didn't think she was an outlier. It's like dick pics - nobody wants to see your junk. yet when I talk to women, they've all been sent unsolicited dick pics. If you walk around in a raincoat flashing women you're a pervert but if you do it in the halls of power you're "flawed" and we construct narratives about how the dynamic isn't entirely about power because someone's "advances" were misconstrued or some shit. But the reality of the situation is that women are about as interested in watching dudes play with their junk as dudes are in watching other people play with their junk. I've got a friend who was miking up a hollywood legend once. I could show you his picture and you'd say his name immediately. My friend walked over and started putting a mic on the guy, at the age of 25, and the guy reached into my friend's pants and grabbed his nuts, and proceeded to hold them the entire time he got miked up saying "be very careful." And that got laughed off because ha ha, hollywood, ha ha, legend, ha ha, obviously it wasn't sexual harassment because he wasn't into dudes or anything and besides it was the '80s. But it sure as fuck was about power. And I think that's why this thing isn't going to go away and why we're going to be disappointed no matter the outcome - it's 100% about power and we're simply observing a truly reprehensible way in which power structures are established, in which women have been forced to put up with the overwhelming majority of the abuse for the same reason we expect medical residents to work 30 hours a day: their superiors went through it so by damn it's time they got to inflict it on someone else. Somebody first clued Harvey Weinstein in on what he could get away with. He may be Patient Zero to us, but he sure isn't Patient Zero to him.She is now 55. Though she works regularly, her films rarely involve red carpets. In the past decade only one of her films has had a US cinema release: a low-budget rustic horror called Jug Face. Otherwise, the answer to the question of “where is she now?” is a rented apartment in Astoria, Queens. The play is a six-week run of the comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike being staged in a town called Northport, an hour’s drive from New York, population 7,401.
Admitting to an alcohol problem, she went into rehab. It didn’t take. Three years later, she appeared on a reality TV show called Celebrity Rehab. It was, she says, her personal low. “Except for the fact that I could retire on the money and I only had to work for 10 days: that part was good.” This is also underlined. (After the Oscar arrest in 2012, she insisted she was sober.)
What's the saying? everything is about sex, except sex - sex is about power.
It is the rare woman that wants to see a man's dick. Ever, really. Women are generally not wired up like men. Men prefer the visual stimulation thing, women prefer to be intellectually stimulated. Rash generalization, but apropos. And yet... men continually flash women, show them their johnson, and expect... well... what? I don't think men really expect anything. I think it is a dominance thing. I can behave THIS BADLY, and you can't do anything about it. In the end, it ain't about the dick. It's about the domination of another person. Too bad that in puritanical America, we focus on the dick, and not the underlying dominance problem. Maybe the new wave of awareness that is breaking over our shores, will help us address that deeper problem. Maybe.