19. Parallels

Whatever else you can or can’t assume is authentic in “reality television,” it shows you what people are willing to be seen doing on camera.

“The information that is everywhere and nowhere. The facts that hang in the air, not quite touching the ground,” wrote Megan Garber in a history of the phrase “open secret” that appeared in The Atlantic the second week of October 2017.

That was the week that everyone was either declaring themselves shocked and distancing themselves from the Weinstein scandal or else getting scolded for not declaring themselves shocked and distancing themselves. People seemed to be focused less on what Weinstein had done than on the revelation that so many had known what he was doing and done nothing.

Though what people were supposed to have done about him was not clear. There was a lot of finger-pointing and reproach. Rose McGowan tweeted to the “Ladies of Hollywood” that their silence was deafening, and the next day in an opinion piece in the New York Times Lena Dunham directed the same complaint at the men of Hollywood. Archives were searched for photographs of people who had been captured on film standing with or next to Weinstein, at some point over the years, and looking pleased or ecstatic or grateful. And Meryl Streep got accused of complicity for having joked about Weinstein in her 2012 Academy Award acceptance speech.

It was hard to know what the people pictured with Weinstein were being criticized for. (Not being caught scowling at him?) Similarly, no one explained what they thought Streep might have done about Weinstein’s predations or why putting a stop to them was her responsibility. It was the concept rather than the mechanics of complicity that people were focused on.

After all, major news organizations had tried and failed to report on Weinstein’s abuses of power before. As Garber wrote in that same essay:

Weinstein went on as he did for so long in part because of journalism’s reporting standards, which are in turn connected to legal and cultural standards: If something can’t be proven, it would be irresponsible and reckless to publish it. It’s perhaps no accident that “open secret” as a phrase exploded in popularity in the U.S. during the mid-to-late 1800s—a time that also witnessed the rise of the telegraph and the penny press, and a time in which secrets themselves could newly operate at scale. The phrase declined sharply in the early 20^th century which is also the time the American press began professionalizing.

I’ve said elsewhere that everything reminds me of everything. All the same, I don’t know that I would have made a connection between sexual harassment and police brutality if the phrase “open secret” had not dominated the media throughout most of October 2017 and if I had not spent so much time fixated on the tv show Cops.

As it was, catching up with the Weinstein scandal, I was overwhelmed with a sense that I was looking at the same thing I’d been looking at for months but in a different sphere of action. What Weinstein had done, everyone kept saying, had been going on for three decades; and everyone had known what he was doing, so that in a sense his misdeeds—the abuse of women, the assaults and attempted assaults, the attempts at extortion—had been going on in plain sight. To me that wasn’t so different from a popular television series that filmed agents of law enforcement casually assaulting citizens and violating their civil rights all across the country for almost 30 years.

Whatever else you can or can’t assume is authentic in “reality television,” it shows you what people are willing to be seen doing on camera. You can wonder if this or that incident really unfolded the way it’s been made to appear or whether this or that confrontation was scripted or provoked. But the agencies allowing their personnel to be filmed on the job kept returning on Cops, episode after episode, season after season. So presumably they liked the way their representatives were being portrayed. No one had said to the producers, “You cannot show our people doing such things.” The result was a portrait of law enforcement that often seemed synonymous with casual brutality. ¹

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of watching my parents watching footage of the police riots of August 1968 during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were newspaper readers and never paid attention to broadcast news, so it was pretty dramatic to see them standing grim-faced before our old black and white set shaking their heads as members of the Chicago PD and the National Guard swarmed protestors in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, beating and tear-gassing people. My parents had been to the University of Chicago, and my mother was from there, and she said that Mayor Daley was turning Michigan Avenue into a police state.

I was slow at eleven, and as that famous chant—“The whole world is watching!”—went up, I asked whether the police knew there were cameras there. When my father answered caustically, “Well, they do now!” I thought that would be it, that the police would have to stop doing what they were doing.

But they went right on brutalizing people.

The law enforcement personnel in the episodes of Cops that I had been watching for months had also brutalized people despite being aware of the cameras. In fact, here the cameras were the whole premise—so this was next-level transgression in plain sight. The cops on Cops weren’t just okay with being caught on camera throwing people to the ground or sticking foreign objects in their mouths or tasing someone who was already helpless and convulsing. They were happy to be seen doing these things. (And if this was what they were willing to be captured doing on film, what were they doing when the cameras were off?)

The Weinstein story and Cops were both about people abusing their power more or less openly because they could. It was the same flex I’d seen from Mr. New Yorker Writer with his disingenuous “confession” about leaking my copy in our first-ever conversation. In all these cases, the point wasn’t so much the transgression itself as an ability to transgress with impunity, knowing that nobody could or would do anything to stop you. It was a sense of power over society that these people were getting off on.

One more parallel seemed painfully obvious: the lies we were all used to hearing about sexual harassment were the same lies we had all been hearing for decades about police misconduct: that it was just a matter of “a few bad apples.” Here was America blowing its mind over the discovery that sexual harassment didn’t just exist but was pervasive and ubiquitous, that the system knowingly protected abusers, and that it was part of a whole cultural mindset.

And it was awful, just awful, what kept happening as the weeks rolled on and October turned to November and more and more stories of harassers and abusers came to light. The way these men were being dealt with was harsh, for sure. All the same, there was a “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” feeling to it all:  seeing male careers being derailed for once and men of influence and stature being held to account, men whose very sense of their own exceptionalism and importance had led them to believe that they could do whatever they liked to women they had deemed disposable and generic.

What was really happening was that we were watching the world wake up to the fact of how generic and interchangeable these very men themselves were, some of them—men who had been lionized and made into stars simply because they were men. The world went on without Matt Lauer, who after all had merely read the news on camera, and without Charlie Rose, who after all had merely interviewed people on television. We were watching society suddenly taking the measure of these men in real time.

With louse after louse making statement after statement about how much respect he had for women and about regretting any offense he might have caused and about just being a big clueless well-meaning over-friendly oaf, I found it tonic watching the world trying to process its sudden discovery that men are every bit as dishonest, predatory, and scheming as women have always been portrayed as being. I also found there was an eleven-year-old somewhere still alive in me who thought that if Me Too went on long enough, people would begin to figure out that all those things were also true of people whose only real accomplishment is that they carry a badge.

1. In 2019, “Running from Cops,” the third season of Dan Taberski’s podcast Headlong, established that the law enforcement agencies that collaborated with Cops had complete control over what footage got shown on the series.