UNWECLOME AND UNWANTED

Weinstein - villain of the piece

I saw Harvey Weinstein at Heathrow airport once whilst waiting to meet a group.  He is the only living film producer I would recognise – and I regard myself as a modest film buff – and the only producer whose name might have encouraged me see a film.  Others were just names at the start of the credits, money raisers, facilitators, maybe actors who had lent their name to a project and were being rewarded for their support before the really important person, the director, was acknowledged.  He (usually) or she (occasionally) was the creative force, the person whose skills might make you cough up ten pounds.

Directors themselves know it is not that simple.  They need producers to greenlight their projects and help realise their vision.  The producer usually stays in the background but almost invariably retains control over what is known as the final cut, what people actually see on the screen.  If the director runs off on a path which is creative but not commercial, it is the producer who reins them back in.  Occasionally these tensions explode and a director dissociates him (again usually) self from the end product.  Later a ‘director’s cut’ is released which is more in tune their vision, sometimes overlong and self-indulgent.  One of my favourite films Blade Runner can be seen in several different versions and its director Ridley Scott got himself a producer credit on the recent follow-up.  He knows that the director’s cut concept is often just another way to make money. It was probably a producer who thought up the idea in the first place.

All this makes producers powerful and sometimes tyrannical figures.  Weinstein, in my short moment of watching him, gave off the aura of someone who was entitled to respect and used to wielding influence.  This burly unshaven male, who did not need to dress to impress, was accompanied by a young ‘assistant’, attractive and obedient.  It did not come as a major shock when it was revealed that he did not take his marriage vows very seriously and had for decades been systematically sexually harassing and assaulting women who needed his help and approval.

In situations like this I often feel perversely sympathetic towards the man (inevitably) who has being doing the bad thing and disapproving of the women who have been done to.  This is often just sympathy for the mighty figure who has fallen into disgrace.  Weinstein’s wife has left him, his children probably despise him and the list of former associates, clients and ‘friends’ who have disowned him is stretching around the block.  When Woody Allen, whose career was rescued by Weinstein when he had sexual allegations of his own to deal with, used the word ‘sad’ in describing what he felt about the fate of his rescuer, he soon had to backtrack.  There is no mileage in anything other than joining the bandwagon at times like these.

Having said that, I would have wanted to thrash and castrate Weinstein if he had done even one of things he has been accused of to my daughter.  She is someone who can look after herself in most situations but this is easier said than done when your career is at the mercy of a powerful man.  Weinstein’s legal team seem to have become past masters at silencing people who have tried to expose him and he was ruthless in hindering and even sabotaging the careers of those who rejected him and refused his advances – or stood up to him in any way.  Some even decided that these advances were a price worth paying for his help and are now taking revenge.

What struck me in reading some of the lurid revelations was how unsatisfactory so many of these encounters must have been.  Most of us have experienced bad sex at some stage in our lives.  A combination of lust and loneliness, often fuelled by that inhibition remover alcohol, have taken us to places which we later regret going to and which we decide never to revisit, sometimes unsuccessfully.  Shakespeare, as usual, described it best in sonnet 129, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.  This poem is surely enough to confirm that the sonnets are based on personal experience and that the great poet was not a faithful husband to Anne Hathaway.  Like many young men he had gone into marriage in a blaze of lust and found himself trapped and left to look elsewhere when the passion curdled.

Will learned to live together with his wife despite the loss of lust and decline of love because the demands of both parenthood and respectability enforced it 400 years ago.  Weinstein lives in an era when a marriage is not expected to last beyond the willingness of both partners to remain in it, which is often quite a short period in Hollywood.  I am not certain that this freedom actually makes us happier in the long run but, equally, I am certain that it is not one which we are going to give up anytime soon.  While most people do not lead totally chaste lives, most of us eventually realise that love is more important than sex in the end. 

There was no love, however, in the various sexual encounters this powerful man instigated and carried out in various hotel rooms with the knowledge and connivance of people unable to stand up to his appetites.  While he might lay off for a little while if a revelation threatened him he always returned to using his position and power to exploit women with his unwanted and unwelcome advances.  What seems most chilling about these episodes was how he seemed to get turned on by the fear they generated in the women.  While they might not technically qualify as rape in a court of law, they give us an insight into the mind of the rapist, turned on by fear and power rather than tenderness and companionship.

So, another month, another sexual scandal. I felt that Mark Sampson, who I wrote about last month, had been harshly dealt with.  He was a successful coach with a taste for tasteless ‘jokes’ who had the genuine support of many of his players but fell out with one of them.  He may be able to rebuild his career, whereas Weinstein’s reputation is surely too toxic for a comeback now.  In fact, I would rather be almost anyone on the planet than Harvey Weinstein right now. Still, this has to be said despite his good work as a producer, it serves him right.

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Today - 31st October 2017 - is the 500th anniversary of Luther's famous proclamation which started the Reformation.  No more sex scandals - I will write about this next month.

Edwin Lerner

SAINTS AND SUCCESS

Female player - black

Male coach - white

I wrote a letter to The Guardian last year, one which they actually published.  It was a short caustic note about how England had scored a hat trick of failures by being knocked out in the first round of the last three world cups – at soccer, rugby and cricket.  It later received a reply by a woman who wrote to say that, actually, the female teams had done pretty well in their world cups. Even if they had not won, they had gone much farther in the competition that the men.

My instinct was to reply to this reproof that the female versions of these sports don't really 'count'.  Our national success – or humiliation – is measured by how well the men do and we would be scraping the barrel to take consolation from the fact that the women did better.  A Neanderthal part of me will always think that but I must admit that I have, particularly since that riposte, been showing a closer interest in the female game, although I have not yet gone to the trouble and expense of actually paying to see a match, or even watching one all the way through on the television.

Sport seems to play such an important role in our lives, I believe, because it is such a masculine activity.  Not a male one, in the sense that women can take part as much as they like, but a masculine one in that it reflects the codes held dear by men. Basically, a game of rugby or soccer is twenty to thirty people dressing up in uniform and kicking the sh!t out of each other for an hour and a half, then shaking hands and jumping into the bath together, a quintessentially male activity.  It's a substitute for war, that other masculine pursuit, as George Orwell famously said.  We still fight today but these are waged by highly-trained professionals killing or wounding people they often cannot see.  Soldiers are like professional sportsmen, paid to do a highly skilled job and maintain the national honour.  It is no coincidence that there are such strong links between the military and the sporting establishment, the Football Association going to great lengths to defy the world footballing authority in their determination to ‘allow’ (oblige in practice) players to wear the poppy on their shirts in defiance of FIFA’s no political symbols rules.

The same FA has been in trouble recently over their hiring of a male coach for the women’s team. Mark Sampson has since lost his job for ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in a previous role, whatever that is (probably something sexual – although nobody has made any formal complaints against him). Sansom may be the only coach to have been fired shortly after achieving a 6-0 victory and having lifted the team he managed to third in the world rankings, but that is not enough nowadays.  As well as being a success you have to be a saint these days, as the last men’s soccer team manager Sam Allardyce found out when he was unwisely frank about how it was fairly easy to get around certain rules in a conversation which was secretly recorded.  

Sampson’s real crime was to fall out with Eniola Aluko, a striker who had scored a lot of goals for club and country, but who did not take kindly to some comments he is alleged to have made about Ebola and family members being arrested.  In the male game there might have been a row and it may or may not have been patched up but the ethos there is that what goes on in the dressing room stays in the dressing room and you do not complain in public about the boss – or ‘gaffer’ as he is quaintly known – to the press.  Aluko did not sign up to this respectful code and complained about Sansom’s supposed comments, which she was expected to dismiss as harmless banter. This was a classic tale of two cultures clashing - a predominantly white working class one in which you roll with the punches and a less respectful one in which you kick back against stereotyping.

I quite admire Aluko’s feistiness and wonder if our mediocre male team could do with a bit more of it. However, Sampson surely has to take some of the credit for moulding the team and bringing it more success than it enjoyed before under female coaches.  Inevitably he has been replaced by a safe (and female) pair of hands but whether she brings the success he enjoyed is doubtful.  Brian Clough was acknowledged by virtually all male professionals as the best manager in England, yet he was never given a crack at the England job because he was not a diplomat.  He might have helped the players at his disposal to achieve their potential and exceed expectations rather than constantly get an attack of the yips which makes England such a frustrating team to support when it comes to international football tournaments, male ones at any rate.

We live in an age when parity between men and women in the professions is expected – if not always achieved – but this does not happen in sports because men are as a rule stronger, faster and more skilled than women in most disciplines, as well as being more battle hardened.  The one exception to this, curiously, is equestrianism, a very traditional sport with behaviour and dress codes which enforce its establishment ethos.  However, men do not enjoy any advantages over women when it comes to getting a four-legged beast to do their bidding. There is no distinction between men and women in show-jumping simply because women do it just as well as men.

This is obviously not true in other sports.  Serena Williams was miffed when John McEnroe, who was promoting his book at the time, said that she would rank about 700 if she played on the men’s tour, yet significantly she did not disagree with him in factual terms, just asked him to respect her privacy (having recently completed a phot shoot showing her naked and pregnant!).  Most Englishmen take some comfort in the fact that, even if their male national teams are rubbish, they would still beat the female ones.  Some consolation - but not much.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com            Edwin Lerner