5. Irony in a moral key
What maddened Rose McGowan wasn’t so much that Weinstein continued to wield power as the fact that he continued to be celebrated and embraced by folk who considered themselves principled people.
There’s a word in Ancient Greek, atē (pronounced “ah-tay”), that means a temporary insanity brought on by extreme moral outrage. Late in the Iliad, when Agamemnon tries to explain what led him to provoke the wrath of Achilles in Book I, he attributes it to Atē, “the accursèd elder daughter of Zeus who beguiles us all.”
Picture “Isabella moments,” then, as a form of atē that besets beings with less power than, say, an Agamemnon.
I used to have them all the time after I left The New Yorker. I’d have them when I went running. My thoughts would begin spinning in circles I couldn’t break out of, round and round, faster and faster, until I was running so fast that I’d trip over my feet and have to stop. Or I’d have to stop because I couldn’t stand thoughts that had turned suddenly violent. I had to abandon the music I’d always listened to, and instead started listening to hip-hop because for a while the beat seemed to help regulate my thoughts and the words to channel my rage, and the language gave me something to focus on. Eventually, though, I had to stop running entirely.
An Isabella moment is usually brought on by consciousness of some mind-bending irony or hypocrisy.
I think that a good deal of the MeToo movement was driven by women having Isabella moments. What kept happening that year was that men would make some public display of virtue or allyship or win praise as some sort of gift to womankind, and then some woman would feel driven to pipe up and say, “Uh-uh, you don’t get to get away with that.”
A Vanity Fair article from mid-October 2017 begins with a typical anecdote.
A week after The New York Times and The New Yorker ran back-to-back reports cataloguing Harvey Weinstein’s alleged serial sexual harassment of women in Hollywood, actress Selma Blair saw a story on HuffPost about writer and director James Toback’s new film that made her blood run cold. The piece, written by a female reporter who interviewed Toback at the Venice Film Festival, was titled “James Toback Gets us, He Truly Gets Us in ‘The Private Life of a Modern Woman.’”
Blair tweeted the story with a single word in response: “Ironic.”
I think a lot of women were having Isabella moments on the night of the 2018 Golden Globes. That was the night that Oprah Winfrey, with great fanfare, announced the Time’s Up initiative, an entity that was supposed to provide legal support to people who had experienced workplace harassment or assault. A lot of actors and industry figures were wearing Time’s Up pins that night, which in some cases raised a few eyebrows on Twitter. When Ally Sheedy posted a series of tweets about James Franco and then deleted them right away, I remember thinking: “Uh-oh, Ally Sheedy is having an Isabella moment!”
But people had noticed what Sheedy had said, although she’d deleted it so quickly, and within minutes every online site covering the awards ceremony had posted an item about it. And so, two other women, who were not famous, and whose comments about James Franco would have gone unnoticed had Sheedy not said what she said, also got written about. And in the end Franco and his business partner in an exploitative acting school they ran had to pay out $2.2 million in settlements to a handful of women.
Utterances that are prompted by Isabella moments tend to be crazy and sane at the same time because they’re formulated in a way that sounds addled but they’re fundamentally accurate and true.
I think the actress Rose McGowan was having an Isabella moment when she wrote a series of Twitter posts about the movie-making establishment in October of 2016, almost exactly a year before the New York Times and New Yorker articles that would unmask Harvey Weinstein.
“It is time for some g**damned honesty,” she wrote in the first one. “Because it’s been an open secret in Hollywood/Media & they shamed me while adulating my rapist.”
What’s interesting about that tweet is that it shows you the source of McGowan’s outrage. She was exercised not primarily about injustice but about hypocrisy, which is irony in a moral key. What maddened her wasn’t so much that Weinstein continued to wield power as the fact that he continued to be celebrated and embraced by folk who considered themselves principled people.
It’s possible that I’m projecting. I’m sensitive to irony because my own story is full of ironies—some so mind-bending they seem scarcely credible even to me.
There’s the fact that Isabella, in Measure for Measure, has been a literary heroine if mine since around tenth grade because she’s good with words and ideas.
Then there’s the idiotic fact that for much of the time I was being sexually harassed at The New Yorker, I was having to work on a piece about another play about sexual harassment, David Mamet’s Oleanna, which tried to discredit the whole idea of sexual harassment.
Then there’s the piece about acting training that I wanted to write, which by the fall of 1990 had become a book I was working on. Part of the impulse behind it was a conviction that the version of Method Acting which had dominated American acting training for decades was an invitation to a number of kinds of abuse—sexual coercion and harassment among them—because of the way in which it required students to make themselves emotionally vulnerable to an authority figure.
Then there’s the fact that the book I was writing culminated in a dispute over how to analyze a particular scene in Measure for Measure.
In the case of Weinstein, McGowan may have perceived some irony in the juxtaposition between his attempts to exploit and victimize women and his role as a movie studio head, given the history of Hollywood’s relationship with morality.
More than any other industry in America, Hollywood has long styled itself a guardian of public morals, beginning with the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930s, which determined what kinds of stories the American public should be allowed to consume. From the mid-1930s to the late 1960s, the Production Code sought to define immorality, blasphemy, and obscenity and to keep Americans decent by making sure that certain kinds of moral transgression were seen to be punished in the movies.
In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America instituted a ratings system which, rather than keeping an eye on moral values, clocked incidences of gore and obscenity, determining how much sex, nudity, violence, and bad language people could be exposed to and at what ages.
By now, though, Hollywood moralizing had taken on a more sophisticated veneer, with “message” pictures wooing the public towards progressive outlooks that socially conscious filmmakers wanted to see become more mainstream. Now it was individual moguls and producers rather than faceless studio bureaucrats styling themselves as moral arbiters. This was a much more serious and impressive form of moralizing and one that public figures and semi-educated people had to take seriously on some level.
And a few decades on, it gave someone like Harvey Weinstein—who palled around with liberal Democrats like the Clintons and the Obamas, and who produced or distributed consciousness-raising movies like Good Will Hunting (about sexual abuse) and documentaries like The Hunting Ground (about sexual assault in academia)—a patina of righteous high-mindedness that made him untouchable, so that he could rape and exploit women with impunity.
This was irony with the power to drive anyone round the twist.