A man lost his job to a rape joke, are you cheering? A man lost his job to a rape joke, are you cheering? By Laura Kipnis If women are demanding an end to sexual allusions in
jokes, even the mildest specimens, shouldn't the
assumptions behind the claims of harm be made
explicit?'
Hooray for our side: another privileged old white guy
chopped down, career in tatters. Hear us roar! Speak
truth to power! In this case the malfeasant was film
critic David Edelstein, who made a stupid, quickly
deleted, misfired "joke" on his private Facebook
page, regarding the death of Last Tango in Paris
director Bernardo Bertolucci. Posted Edelstein: "Even
grief is better with butter," accompanied by a still
of Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando from the film -
yes, the infamous and now controversial anal rape
scene.
Edelstein had been doing movie reviews for the last
16 years on the National Public Radio syndicated show
Fresh Air, hosted by the much revered Terry Gross.
He's also the chief film critic for New York magazine
and appears on the CBS Sunday Morning show. He's what
you might call "an influencer", and his 2,091
Facebook friends include many well-known feminists.
One of them apparently took a screenshot of the post
and circulated it or, as another of his Facebook
friends put it, "narced to the universe".
(Disclosure: I'm among those friends, though have
taken no screenshots.)
What was Edelstein thinking? You can hear him
straining and failing to find the joke, a condition
that afflicts many who spend too much time on social
media and get addicted to those endorphin-boosting
likes. You need another fix and "edgy humor" is a
good way of maximizing your response rate - as
technology critics have lately informed us,
Facebook's algorithms favor posts that produce the
most "emotional engagement", positive or negative.
In this case, actress Martha Plimpton, herself an
occasional NPR host (on the New York affiliate WNYC)
and in receipt of the screenshot, quickly tweeted it
to her 196,000 followers along with the demand: "Fire
him. Immediately." Which happened the next day: Fresh
Air and NPR announced that they were cutting ties
with Edelstein because the post had been "offensive
and unacceptable, especially given Maria Schneider's
experience during the filming of Last Tango in
Paris".
The backstory: in a 2006 interview Schneider said
that the filming of the scene had left her feeling
humiliated and "a little raped". The rape itself was
in the script, but the butter wasn't; Bertolucci and
Brando had manipulated her by springing it on her to
get a more spontaneous performance, or that was their
line. (There seems to have been confusion in the
social media response to Edelstein's firing about
whether Schneider was actually raped; she wasn't.)
The butter reappears in a later scene where
Schneider's character Jeanne uses it to anally
penetrate Brando's character. Jeanne also tricks him
into getting an electric shock and later shoots him.
At the time the film was regarded as a masterpiece;
Bertolucci and Brando were both nominated for Academy
Awards.
These are, of course, different times. Very
different! In fact, it's not an overstatement to say
we're in the midst of a cultural revolution,
prompted, of course by #MeToo, along with the fact
that more women are in positions of cultural and
institutional power, or certainly cultural influence
- vestigial patriarchal elements are being weeded out
and replaced with new values. Sexual scumminess is
one of those elements, though arguments remain about
what is and isn't scummy.
One part of me cheers - bring the clueless fuckers
down, let heads roll. Men: stop being gross! Another
part of me wonders about the expansion of employers'
power over workers' leisure time, among other qualms.
So let's briefly pause and examine some of the tacit
assumptions and values that Edelstein's firing brings
to light, especially regarding conditions of
employment and inadvertent offense-causing.
As I read it, the first unstated rule would be that
there's nothing inadvertent about inadvertent
offense: jokes and flubs will be treated as
diagnostic instruments, like those personality tests
sometimes administered to prospective employees, and
revelatory of the true character of the flubber.
Corollary: a clear soul will be required to remain
employed.
The second unstated rule is that causing offense is a
permanent mark against you, however apologetic you
might be. One flub and you're out. An unthinking
social media post will outweigh a 16-year track
record. Corollary: there's no "off the clock" - it's
company time all the time.
A third unstated rule is that men need to prove and
re-prove that they understand rape is bad, and take
it seriously, not unlike signing a loyalty oath to
demonstrate you're not a communist. Failure to keep
re-proving it implicates you in crimes against women.
Edelstein was seen as being insensitive about rape -
well, not rape per se, but Schneider's account of
feeling a little raped. He said he was unaware of
Schneider's interview, but that was either not
believed or didn't matter. Corollary: men are not to
be believed, they will say anything.
It was once argued, among a certain style of
feminist, that when women came to power the world
would be a more humane place because women's style of
rule would be different than men's - more peaceable,
more fair and collaborative, perhaps even a more
moral style of power. To some extent this may prove
to be true: certainly there will be less
transactional sex in post-patriarchal times; likely
less groping and leering. But will there be a more
humane treatment of the workforce?
No doubt many will see the evolution of gendered
management styles from "Give me a blow job or I'll
fire you" to "Don't tell a joke I don't like or I'll
fire you" as preferable. Personally, I think they're
both encroachments. Meet the new boss, same as the
old boss.
By the way, academia too has had its failed joke
episodes. Earlier this year Richard Ned Lebow, a
political theory professor at King's College London
who had said "Ladies lingerie" when asked what floor
he wanted while on a crowded elevator at an academic
conference, was found guilty of "offensive and
inappropriate" remarks by the International Studies
Association (ISA), which had sponsored the
conference. A gender studies professor lodged a
complaint about the remark, the ISA demanded that
Lebow apologize, he refused. Lawsuits are being
threatened. Not all of the old guard are going down
without a fight!
If women are demanding an end to sexual allusions in
jokes, even the mildest specimens, shouldn't the
assumptions behind the claims of harm be made
explicit? Are jokes to be taken entirely literally,
rather than, for instance, sometimes meaning their
precise opposite (as a Freudian might interpret)? If
so, what's being demanded is a rather large-scale
cultural and psychological overhaul - perhaps of the
entirety of mental life.
I asked Vanessa Place, author of a tiny new book
called Rape Jokes: You Had to Be There, what she
thought about Edelstein being sacked from Fresh Air.
Place is a criminal defense attorney who represents
indigent convicted sex offenders in appeal cases;
also a writer and performance artist. The book, a
compilation of, yes, rape jokes, is the text version
of a live performance piece.
Place saw Edelstein as a proxy for anger at
Bertolucci - a relatively marginal player on whom
anger and frustration can be displaced - the anger
being that Bertolucci, via Brando, had sexually
aggressed against Schneider. But the larger
objection, Place surmises, is that we liked watching
- and may still like watching - scenes of sexual
humiliation. "To take this even a step further,
perhaps the current cultural guilt lies in our
ability to enjoy both the humiliation in the film and
the humiliation of the critic. There's nothing better
than being shocked by pornography, or retweeting an
offense." She also pointed out the irony of it being
a movie star, Martha Plimpton, humiliating and
bringing down a film critic. I replied, perhaps a
little meanly, that this was a star of declining
wattage.
The exchange with Place made me understand a little
more what I had found disquieting about this episode:
so many subterfuges about power, so much veiled
aggression, so much obfuscation about motives. So
little reflection.
Maybe it's time to stop hiding behind the "speak
truth to power" mantra, when women have power aplenty
- we can wreck a guy's career with a tweet! Let's
stop assigning all the aggression in the world to
men, and own ours, rather than masking it behind a
scrim of trauma or sexual ethics. If you're going to
bring a colleague down for a deleted social media
post, or fire a longtime employee for a flub, I say
own it. If we're retaliating against millennia of
male power one film critic at a time, let's at least
be honest about the enterprise.
|
Popular
SPORTS NOTES
TRADE NOTES
|