American Babylon: A Profile of Sexual Assault Guilt
Over the course of the last year, Hollywood has seen over one hundred men publicly accused of inappropriate sexual behavior ranging from harassment, to pedophilia, to rape.
The most important thing to do at this time, is to support the survivors, and the movement to end these systemic abuses of power found in all hierarchical systems within our society.
That said, I believe this movement has created a dangerous situation. There is still a baby in all of this bathwater and it’s worth trying to save.
After all, Justice, as the supreme virtue, is the ultimate goal. So before we all start grabbing pitchforks and torches, I would like to establish how deep the evil goes, and how far the blame reaches.
Hollywood Babylon
First, Evil.
In 2012, I attended a screening of Hitchcock’s The Birds that was followed by a Q&A with the film’s lead actress, Tippi Hedren.
During the course of the conversation Tippi said that at one point, after he had made her famous, Hitchcock called her into his office and told her that he owned the contract for her next few pictures and that unless she performed sexual favors for him, he wasn’t going to allow her to work.
When she refused, he not only made good on his threat, but during the scene where she is attacked by live birds, he kept her locked on the set filming until she suffered a mental breakdown from the trauma and had to be hospitalized.
The moderator glazed over this.
As did hundreds of audience members.
Just as everyone had done for decades.
But this is only one story out of hundreds.
The Munchkins repeatedly sexually assaulted Judy Garland during the filming of The Wizard of Oz.
Maria Schneider was raped by Marlon Brando and a stick of butter on-screen during Last Tango in Paris.
Clark Gable raped Loretta Young while filming Call of The Wild.
Charlie Chaplin had several affairs with teenaged women and fathered multiple children with his mistresses.
Errol Flynn died at fifty while in bed with a 17-year-old girl he had been dating for three years.
Louis B. Mayer used to keep a village of ‘starlets in training’ under the pretense of making them movie stars just to send them out on “private business meetings’ with powerful men.
Howard fucking Hughes.
The list goes on.
Sexism. Sexual assaults. Abuses of power.
It’s not a few isolated cases, and it didn’t start with Harvey Weinstein.
It’s a institution. A system. It’s a central feature of industrialized culture, and it always has been.
Which begs the questions, who’s responsible for all of this, and who deserves to be punished for it?
Mea Culpa
Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince features Scorsese’s friend Steven Prince telling a series of incredible true stories on everything from heroin overdoses, to pet gorillas, to killing a man with a .44 magnum.
The opening scene of the film ends with the line, “We’re all guilty, God knows.”
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
While I was a student at the University of Virginia I read a short story called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
In this story, Ursula Le Guin, who died this week, creates a Utopia that posits an extraordinary moral allegory.
In Omelas, there is no suffering, no pain, no manner of sickness or scarcity. No evil or injustice of any kind, with one enormous exception.
Deep in a hidden dungeon, there sits one person upon whom rests all of the misery absent from the rest of Omelas. This forsaken person is dirty, starving, sick, wounded, and alone, but most importantly, as the author carefully points out, this person does not deserve this punishment.
It’s an integral part of the story’s pretense. Someone must bear this suffering in order for the Utopia of Omelas to exist. That’s the rule. That’s the price that must be paid.
And everyone in Omelas knows about it.
And most people are perfectly content leaving that person to suffer because they are out of sight and out of mind.
But the author concludes by mentioning that some people are not able to tolerate the proposition of living in this Utopia if the price that must be paid is the unjust suffering of an innocent, and so they leave Omelas.
The last line of the story is, “They seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
This story and its final line have stuck with me for years and guided the moral reasoning behind my actions on more than one occasion in my life.
And recent events have brought this story to mind again because I believe it’s relevant to understanding the response that we’ve seen to all the victims coming forward.
Because the key thing about everyone in Omelas is that they knew.
And we knew too.
#WeKnew
We all knew.
I knew.
You knew.
Meryl Streep knew.
Everyone knew.
Tiger Woods. Charlie Rose. Bill Clinton. John F. Kennedy. Michael Jackson. Cosby. Spacey. Weinstein. Allen. Polansky. Hitchcock. Lauer. Trump.
All of them.
We knew.
We all knew.
And that’s the problem.
Because if we knew, and we did nothing, then we’re all guilty.
We’re just like the ones who didn’t leave Omelas, except now the innocent victims of unjust suffering aren’t hidden away in some out of sight prison of silence.
They’re on the front page. They’re our friends, coworkers, and family members and they’re all right there in our faces plain as daylight.
Staring back at us silently asking, why?
Why didn’t you leave Omelas?
You knew.
And you stayed.
And so now the only way for us to deny being a benefactor of their abuse is to pretend that we didn’t know.
Because otherwise we must face the ugly truth that we all are living in Omelas, and we don’t have the moral integrity to leave.
But regardless of what anyone says, regardless of who’s wearing a little pin that says TimesUp or who’s donating their salary to charity, it’s all a facade to alleviate our own guilt.
Because we knew.
All of us.
And if you’re reading this right now and saying to yourself “I didn’t know”, then I’m glad you’re here because you’re exactly the person I wanted to speak with.
And what I want to tell you is that you’re a coward and a Goddamn liar.
If you’re telling me you’re an adult living in America and you’ve never heard one story about a powerful person abusing their position, then I’m telling you you’re either a liar or willfully ignorant.
And ignorance, as Socrates says, is the supreme vice.
The Elephant
As Sarah Silverman pointed out when she addressed the stories about her dear friend Louis CK, or as she so eloquently put it, “the elephant masturbating in the room,” these abuses are not limited to Hollywood or Washington.
They happen in banks, bakeries, and in almost every corner of our society.
And the point I’m trying to make is that we must confess this.
We must all admit to ourselves, and to each other, that we don’t want to leave Omelas.
The smartphone in your hand is only possible because of resources unjustly taken from third world countries at a high cost of human death and suffering.
You know that. I know that. Both of us feel guilty about it whenever it comes up, but we’re not going to do anything about it.
And if you listen you can almost hear the voices of all the bodies you and I have put into unmarked mass graves asking the same question.
Why?
And the answer is simple.
Welcome to Omelas
It’s because we like it here.
We like living in Omelas.
The problem is that we’ve all been caught.
Because now the suffering innocents aren’t faceless minorities on the other side of the world or fictional characters in a short story I read in college, but they’re real people who are supposed to be part of our moral community.
And now everyone else knows that we know. We can’t act like we were surprised to discover this.
We’ve all been wearing masks, pretending to be righteous, and since no one knew any better, we could wear the masks and believe each other.
But now all the masks have been pulled off and people are getting very uptight about it.
No one likes knowing that everyone knows they’re willingly benefiting from the suffering of others.
And so people are all tripping over each other scrambling for some kind of moral high ground.
But there is no moral high ground in The City of Omelas.
American Boys
But as for me, I haven’t any such instinct.
I’ll tell you right out, even though I might be the only one who has the balls to admit this, I want Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and Louis CK and Roman Polanski and Woody Allen to keep working.
I want their abuses of power to stop and justice to be done to whatever extent it can. That is paramount. They should be publicly punished, and their behavior needs to be corrected, and if they’re guilty of crimes, they should go to prison, or therapy, or whatever the courts of law and public opinion decide they must pay as penance, but after all of that, when it’s all finished, even if it takes years, I want them to keep working.
I want more of their art.
Just because the rest of you want to suddenly pretend you have scruples doesn’t mean that I’m ready to give up the best artists in the world.
Fuck that shit.
I’m Spartacus
And that’s another thing, perhaps the most important thing, I don’t want their work boycotted and taken off the market.
Because it’s become part of my identity. Our identity.
Yes, Harvey Weinstein is a terribly wicked man, but Pulp Fiction is still in the Library of Congress.
And it’s still in me.
And you.
And all Americans for all time.
It’s part of who we are now and no amount of hashtags or Oprah speeches can change that.
Because I am Woody Allen, and Louis CK, and Harvey Weinstein.
And so are you even if you don’t have the guts to admit it.
It Was a Pleasure to Burn
And besides all that, if we’re going to start throwing out all of the art by any artist who’s ever done something that was morally reprehensible then we might as well just burn the whole fucking canon right now.
But where would that leave us?
How are we going to fight darkness if we put out all the lights?
If we burn Omelas to the ground, does that equal justice for the innocents who suffered so it could be built?
Will it do society any good?
Will it do you any good?
Ethical consumption is impossible in the global economy, and we can tell ourselves we’re going to change that, but that’s a lie.
It’s not going to change.
We’re just going to keep filling graves with more poor people and sexually abusing each other.
It’s true this movement will help change the culture, but only partly, not all the way, we’re always going to have some kind of inequity in our society.
Jesus said the poor will be with you always. We will always be benefiting somehow from the unjust suffering of innocents.
So what are our options?
Hermitage?
Suicide?
Well, yes, I suppose one could argue that, but, if I may, I would like to show unto you, a more excellent way.
Saul of Tarsus
In The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, there is an account of a man named Saul of Tarsus.
Saul was a student of Jewish law and a zealous persecutor of Christians. He went from province to province seeking out Christians so he could have them horribly killed in public.
While riding to Damascus, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and Saul was struck with blindness.
He went on to Damascus and joined the Christians there.
And these people had a choice.
They had, in their hands, Saul, who had slaughtered so many of their innocent Christian brothers, and he was now defenseless and blind.
They could have crucified him if they wanted to, but they didn’t.
Instead, these Christians did a very strange thing.
They forgave him.
They forgave him and welcomed him into their community.
Saul became the Apostle Paul, author of most of the New Testament and the most important evangelist ever.
Mercy
Justice is a strange thing. It’s rightly held up as the highest aspiration of human virtue, but it has been the history of human beings to dwell in inequity.
Omelas.
And so the Christian tradition offers an individual relationship with God through Grace.
Mercy.
Forgiveness.
Atonement.
For whatever you think that’s worth, that’s what it claims to offer.
And it’s a good thing too, because, as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
Clarence Darrow
In August of 2017, just a few months before the story broke, I saw Kevin Spacey give a performance of Clarence Darrow in Arthur Ashe Stadium out in Queens.
He filled an entire stadium to do a one-man play about America and Justice.
Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy named Robert Franks in May of 1924.
They confessed and Leopold told his lawyer, “The killing was an experiment. It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin.”
Loeb’s family retained Clarence Darrow for their defense.
The newspapers called it the trial of the century, but since Darrow had the boys plead guilty, there was no trial, just a sentencing.
Darrow’s 12-hour closing statement at the hearing is one of the most influential speeches in legal history.
He criticized capital punishment as retribution rather than transformative justice.
At the end of the speech, Darrow said, “You may hang these boys…[or]…you may save them and make it easier for every child that some time may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”
“I would be the last person on earth to close the door of hope to any human being that lives.”
And the judge agreed.
The boys got life, instead of hanging.
But Clarence Darrow is not appearing for the defense of Kevin Spacey.
Crucify Him
Just like Dickens’ Madame DeFarge, we’re all looking for who to put under the guillotine next while trying to convince ourselves that it won’t be us.
As far as I can tell, no one has even mentioned redemption as a possibility for any of the names on the #MeToo hit list.
They’ve all been condemned and their work has been scrapped without anyone saying anything about forgiving them or welcoming them back someday after they’ve been rehabilitated and done what they can to atone for their sins.
But I had to do this for all the people who have sexually assaulted me in my life.
It’s happened many times. Men, women, older, younger, you name it. It’s happened on public transportation, it happened when I was a boy, it happened when I was camping as a teenager, it’s happened at work a handful of times. I’ve never been raped, but there have been a couple of times where if I hadn’t resisted so quickly and forcefully I would have been.
But Jesus forgave me, so, in time, I forgave them.
I wonder how long it will be before we forgive Woody Allen?
He’s still one of humanity’s great geniuses even if we don’t.
But what if we just forgive his movies?
Because even if no one else can forgive him, I’m not giving up Stardust Memories or Pulp Fiction, or any other movie for that matter unless Jesus Christ himself comes down from Heaven and personally orders me to do so.
And even then, he’s going to have to answer a lot of questions first.
Consider This
A.O. Scott said in The New York Times that it was time to reconsider Woody Allen’s entire body of work.
Which is like saying let’s all reevaluate our spines.
It’s impossible to reconsider Woody Allen’s movies because what has been seen, cannot be unseen.
Also I’d invoke Barthes’ principle of the death of the artist here to argue that Woody Allen doesn’t have authority over his movies after they’re released.
They’re mine now.
And if you want to come at me with that shit about not being able to enjoy the work anymore because you can’t separate the art from the artist then my answer is it’s not my fault if you don’t have the cognitive power for complex thought and if you want to try and pull a moral guilt trip on me then you can start by throwing out your cell phone and all your money and going to live off the grid like a fucking hermit.
And then once you’ve done that you can walk back to civilization, without using any roads built by sinners, and tell me that Woody Allen shouldn’t be allowed to make movies anymore and we’ll settle it with a fistfight, or pistols at dawn, or whatever happens to be your pleasure.
Schmuck.
Man in White
Johnny Cash, The Man in Black, wrote one novel in his life which was given little attention at the time and has largely passed into obscurity now.
Man in White is a novel about Cash’s favorite Biblical character.
The Apostle Paul.
As far as I can find, there is only one copy of the novel available in print on the entire island of Manhattan.
So if we do decide to burn Omelas, that’s what I’m going to save.
Conclusion
Even though the pursuit of Justice for the survivors of sexual assault and the dismantling of the systems that allow these kinds of abuses to take place should be the most important focus following the #MeToo movement, it is still terribly important that in so doing we do not decimate our own culture and eradicate from our society the very virtues we so zealously seek to defend.
Hope.
Mercy.
Compassion.
So you may hang these American boys, or you may save them.
But if you do decide to hang them, I would follow Jesus’ advice on that too.
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.”
Maybe I’m wrong though.
Maybe the rest of you aren’t sinners like me.
Maybe you’re all justified in damning all the art and artists to the hellfire of your righteous anger.
Maybe you should be allowed to sacrifice our entire culture in the name of protecting your own egos.
But as for Saul of Tarsus, Johnny Cash, and myself?
We’re all guilty.
And God knows.
