The Commissioner disappears

A campaign to condemn Hollywood actors who are accused of sexual harassment is a good reason to understand how such campaigns generally work.

The Hollywood sexual harassment scandal grows like wildfire: half a dozen new scandalous allegations emerge every day, the front pages of movie sites like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter consist entirely of harassment news (with the occasional sprinkling of box office statistics), producer Harvey Weinstein, from which it all began, at least multimillion-dollar lawsuits are waiting, the Los Angeles prosecutor's office is creating a special unit to investigate sexual harassment, and it is completely unclear whether this fire is subsiding or just flaring up.

Everyone is suspect

The British newspaper The Guardian published a chilling report this week from fear-ridden Hollywood: scared of the stars who are in danger of exposure, scared of the lower ranks of the studio, who could expose a lot of people, but are afraid to put an end to their careers. The interlocutors of the newspaper are afraid even to admit that they are afraid: they compare what is happening either with the “witch hunt” in the 1950s, or with the revolutionary terror of the times of Robespierre, but ask not to name them. And on every corner there are posters of the movie "Murder on the Orient Express" with the slogan "Everyone is a suspect"; Yes Yes.

All the Money in the World became the first Hollywood film ever to have to be re-shot due to an actor scandal, I Love You Daddy is likely to be the first film to be remembered only as a trailer because of such a scandal.

Even against this ominous background, the story of the revelation of Kevin Spacey stands out with particular ferocity. In general terms, already a dozen and a half young people accuse Spacey of touching them at different times or offering something. Well, this does not paint the artist. But in addition to the general condemnation, Spacey has already been deprived of all awards and, most likely, future contracts, filming of the next season of the series “House of Cards” was stopped halfway through (and Netflix removed the actor’s face from the cover of previous seasons), and most importantly, director Ridley Scott is going to cut all the scenes with Spacey from the already finished film "All the Money in the World", reshooting them with the participation of actor Christopher Plummer. Variety reports that new shootings will cost $ 10 million, but no one will stand up for the price: the producers believe that people simply will not go to watch a film with the participation of a compromised actor, and they will definitely not see Oscar nominations with such a performer. And this creates a precedent: there are quite a lot of middle-aged actors in Hollywood, their next films are being prepared for the release, you will never guess under which of them the next shell will explode. The premiere of “I Love You Daddy,” comedian Louis C.K.’s new film that The New York Times wrote about inappropriate behavior over the weekend, had to be canceled altogether: the producers might not mind reshooting it, but C.K. is acting here as the director and the lead actor, so there is no one and no one to shoot the movie again.

And this is an absolutely unprecedented story: "All the Money in the World" became the first Hollywood film in history to have to be re-shot due to a scandal involving an actor, "Daddy" will probably be the first picture that, due to such a scandal, will remain in history only in kind of trailer.

The stigma of absolute guilt

Twenty years ago, the British historian David King published The Commissar Disappears, a collection of photographs that retouched or cut out the faces of repressed Bolsheviks in the 1930s. For example, Stalin is walking along the embankment next to People's Commissar Yezhov, and a year later, in the same photograph, the Yezhov River is in the place. Yes, the analogy is lame: in the photographs of the 1930s, the faces of people who had already been shot by that time were cut out, for the guilty American actors, the cut out frames will remain the biggest nuisance. Yes, it is blasphemous to compare a national tragedy with Hollywood foaling - although for all the difference in scale, in both cases, people are charged without a statute of limitations, which cannot be proven and from which it is impossible to defend themselves. And yet, for all the dissimilarity of these two examples, there is something in common in these faces disappearing from the film: the stigma of absolute guilt, which forces contemporaries to erase a person from history, to make the former non-existent.

We are free to laugh at the Americans, who “have completely lost their minds with their harassment” - in Russia, even over the past five years, several such Absolute Accusations have been replaced, almost automatically including such condemning choirs

The main role in these stories, as in a Greek tragedy, is performed by the choir. People who demand to be shot like dogs of the Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors, to purge "sexual predators" from the film industry, or to shut up "their filthy mouths" of the liberals. People who raise their hands at meetings, sign collective letters of condemnation, apologize for old movie reviews that failed to reveal the true moral character of a decent-looking actor (naturally, this is happening in the American press now), or simply silently like » on Facebook. It is this choir, which replaces the divine and human judgment, that determines for each epoch and culture its own Absolute Accusation - which is always interpreted as broadly as possible, proceeds from the presumption of guilt and excludes any possibility of justification.

We are free to laugh at the Americans, who “have completely gone crazy with their harassment” - in Russia, even over the past five years, several such Absolute Accusations have been replaced, almost automatically including such condemning choirs (as in other eras and cultures, well coordinated by large media conductors). Five years ago it was an insult to the feelings of believers, three years ago it was an insult to the memory of veterans, today it is an insufficient manifestation of grief in relation to famous people who have passed away. In America, there are still commentators who believe that it is inappropriate to judge actors for the actions of thirty years ago, which then did not go beyond socially acceptable behavior - but the condemning chorus does not know halftones and does not know doubts about its own rightness. He demands retribution here and now: erased from photographs, deleted from lists, denied the right to exist.

So that in a few years, when the wind changes, with the same passion to stigmatize and be indignant for completely different reasons.

* Yuri Saprykin is a regular NT columnist.

The opinion of the editors of NT may not coincide with the opinion of the author.