Said Quentin Tarantino, accepting responsibility for continuing to work with Harvey Weinstein. Tarantino knew some — who could know all? — of what Weinstein did. He made choices that were in his self-interest at the time, and it has now become so obvious — Mira Sorvino was his girlfriend — that it's also in his self-interest to do a
mea culpa now.
Here's the article about him, in the NYT.
“I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said, citing several episodes involving prominent actresses. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”
“I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard,” he added. “If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”
Done the work? Is that psychotherapy talk or is he using the term in some other way? He admits that anything he says now sounds like a crappy excuse, so he knows "if I had done the work" is a crappy excuse.
I think, reading the article carefully, that "done the work" means that he should have taken the parts of the story he knew were real — Sorvino, Rose McGowan, and another actress the NYT doesn't name — and inferred the existence of "a larger pattern of abuse." I'm sorry, I don't believe that 3 solid data points plus all the rumors don't force an intelligent person to hypothesize that there is a
modus operandi. I think Tarantino would have had to have
done work to distance himself from the obvious and to view the 3 things he knew as isolated instances.
I put the right 2 sentences in the post title. He tells us the "work" he did: "What I did was marginalize the incidents."
When Mr. Tarantino read the articles about Mr. Weinstein, he was horrified by the scope and severity of the alleged abuse, especially the rape accusations, he said. But some of the accounts were deeply familiar to him. “Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of those incidents” chronicled in the first few articles, he said. “It was impossible they didn’t.”
Everyone who was close to Harvey facilitated him.
Now Mr. Tarantino said he regretted not taking the women’s stories seriously enough. “I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s O.K. That’s the egg on my face right now.”
Oh, please! He's talking about the late 90s,
four decades after the era of laughing at the image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk. The use of the corny old expression "egg on my face" is a tell. There's no way he wasn't up to speed on what sexual harassment and sexual assault are. I cared about his movies back then. "Pulp Fiction." "Jackie Brown." If I had thought at the time that he had the mindset he's now claiming to have had, I wouldn't have been interested in that idiot's movies. But he is not an idiot. He's a man who did what was in his interest then, and he's doing what's in his interest now.
Asked how the news about Mr. Weinstein would affect how the public views his own record and body of work, Mr. Tarantino paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t.”
It does.
"I hope it doesn't" is the last sentence of the article, and I wondered whether the NYT, having given the man a nice platform for his
mea culpa, was ending with a nudge to the reader to react the way I did:
This changes the meaning of your movies.
But one thing makes me think this was not the intent of the NYT: They've disallowed comments.
ADDED: The NYT does allow comments on its other big Harvey-Weinstein-related interview published the same day,
"Lupita Nyong’o: Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein."
Why doesn't Lupita Nyong’o get the same protection from comments undercutting her opinion that the NYT gave Tarantino? What bargaining goes on behind the scenes as these famous names give their stories to the newspaper? Maybe the difference is just that Nyong'o will be seen as a victim and the prediction was that comments will praise her for her courage in telling her story now, but Tarantino looks like a facilitator and there was a real risk that commenters would say things like what I've said here.
Nyong'o concedes that she was part of "the conspiracy of silence that has allowed this predator to prowl for so many years." Her excuse is that she "felt very much alone" and "blamed myself for a lot of it," but now can tell her story because she can see it and explain it as "part of [Weinstein's] sinister pattern of behavior."
Harvey led me into a bedroom — his bedroom — and announced that he wanted to give me a massage.... I began to massage his back to buy myself time to figure out how to extricate myself from this undesirable situation. Before long he said he wanted to take off his pants. I told him not to do that and informed him that it would make me extremely uncomfortable. He got up anyway to do so and I headed for the door... I opened the door and stood by the frame. He put his shirt on and again mentioned how stubborn I was. I agreed with an easy laugh, trying to get myself out of the situation safely. I was after all on his premises, and the members of his household, the potential witnesses, were all (strategically, it seems to me now) in a soundproof room....
I didn’t quite know how to process the massage incident. I reasoned that it had been inappropriate and uncalled-for, but not overtly sexual. I was entering into a business where the intimate is often professional and so the lines are blurred.....
[On another occasion, at some bar or restaurant in NYC] Harvey arrived and the assistant immediately disappeared... [H]e announced: “Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.” I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.
She declined, and he backed off, saying "Then I guess we are two ships passing in the night,"* an expression she'd never heard before. He told her to go, and she did. She worried that he would hurt her career, but she offers no evidence that he did. Not long afterward, Nyong'o appeared in the movie "12 Years a Slave," and she won an Oscar. She never worked on a Weinstein project. She adopted a "survival plan" of "avoid[ing] Harvey and men like him at all costs." And that plan worked for her, but now she wants to be part of "a sisterhood — and brotherhood of allies" that can outweigh the power of individuals like Weinstein.
I wrote all that before reading any comments. They do — as I think the NYT could predict — praise Nyong'o lavishly. The top-rated comment is: "What an incredible young woman who can say, 'I would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking...' This is exactly what a mother wants in a role model for her daughter. Absolutely brilliant."
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* Is this — like "egg on my face" — a Hollywood thing? When they need to get some distance, do Hollywood guys use corny clichés? Do they retreat into blatant uncoolness or is this some kind of ironic hipster pose? By the way, "ships that pass in the night" originates in a Longfellow poem,
"Tales of Tales of a Wayside Inn/Part Third/The Theologian’s Tale/Elizabeth":
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
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