"There is supposed to be an esprit de corps between artistic colleagues."

Link to X.

What exactly did Arquette say? I found this paragraph, from 3 days ago, in the London Times, "Rosanna Arquette: ‘I paid a price for saying no to Harvey Weinstein’/The actress shot to fame 40 years ago alongside Madonna — and is back in a film, The Moment, with Charli XCX. She talks marriage, motherhood and surviving Hollywood":

In 1994 Arquette had a minor but memorable role in Pulp Fiction, playing the drug dealer Eric Stoltz’s wife and telling John Travolta why she’d pierced her tongue (“Sex thing. Helps fellatio”). “It’s iconic, a great film on a lot of levels. But personally I am over the use of the N-word — I hate it. I cannot stand that he [Tarantino] has been given a hall pass. It’s not art, it’s just racist and creepy.”

I don't think she's saying the whole film is "not art." She's rejecting the idea that the "n-word" can be used if only it's within what is genuinely art. She's saying it's still "racist and creepy" — even when the work of art was made at a time when the taboo on saying the word wasn't so strong. I note that Tarantino himself avoided any use of it in his last film, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019).

It's one thing to say that using the word inflicts harm and we ought to avoid it out of kindness and quite another thing to say that to use it at all — even in fictional character dialogue — is racist. Arquette got so harsh. She hates it, cannot stand it. Why flare up and call out Tarantino now?

Well, of course, Tarantino answers the question.

"Think of us as the 'Inglourious Basterds' of the House Democrats. We will do anything to win this."

"Trump has fundamentally changed the rules of political engagement in this country. If they attack, you attack back."

Said Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California), quoted in "Blue-state Democrats face hurdles countering Texas GOP’s new election map/Democratic leaders in California, Illinois and New York are exploring retaliatory measures to offset the creation of more safe red seats. Moving as swiftly as their GOP counterparts will be difficult" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I saw the movie "Inglourious Basterds," but I don't remember what the characters did other than that they felt justified in doing it because they were fighting the Nazis, so I sought out help from Grok —  How unscrupulous and awful were the Inglourious Basterds?

From Grok's answer:

A new chapter in The History of Ears.

I'm reading "From Van Gogh to Mike Tyson: a brief history of ears," a 2009 Guardian article, by Lucy Mangan.

Found after trying to think of a list of famous ears, a list to which Trump's ear will now take one of the top 2 spots. I think Van Gogh's ear still belongs in first place.

I'd thought of the ear Mike Tyson bit off but had forgotten whose ear it was. (It was Evander Holyfield's.)

I'd thought of a movie ear —

"His films are marmoreal, solid to the point of opacity, with more or less no offscreen aura; his images have a frame around them—one that is, in effect, black, like a funeral portrait."

Writes Richard Brody in "A Few Thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s Plan to Retire/The director has said that his tenth film will be his last. What does this mean for his cinematic legacy?" (The New Yorker). 

Marmoreal? It means "Resembling marble or a marble statue; cold (also smooth, white, etc.) like marble" (OED).

Quentin Tarantino's alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies.

From his new book, "Cinema Speculation" (boldface added):

[T]he Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage....

Bob Dylan's "The Philosophy of Modern Song" is out today.

Here. I've put it in my Kindle.

Also out today, Quentin Tarantino's "Cinema Speculation." I just put that in my Kindle too.

Is that too much pop culture to read all at once?  I guess I did not think so. Better to read whatever Genius 1/Genius 2 have to say about songs/movies than the last gasps of politicos hankering for next week's elections.

It's too late for October surprises. It's November — remember.

When Quentin Tarantino was 8 and his mother's black boyfriend took him to see 2 movies about black people in a theater with an all-black audience.

Great storytelling from Tarantino here: 

 

"The first movie is sort of a message-y movie... and the crowd hated it" — Bill Maher prompts.

Listen to the whole story, and you may be curious about this movie the audience jeered at, "The Bus Is Coming" (1971).

I went looking for something about it and easily stumbled into the entire movie:

I've only watched the first 3 minutes, and I won't presume to know what the crowd back then found worth shouting down for the entire length of the movie. Maybe it's just that it's slow-moving and un-slick, or maybe it's that it was just much more fun to talk back to the movie. Tarantino makes it sound very fun.

I take it the mother's boyfriend — who, we're told, was an L.A. Rams football player — thought the "message-y" movie would be good for the boy, but Tarantino, like the rest of the audience, greatly preferred the second movie, a slickly entertaining film starring Jim Brown. Or maybe the football-player boyfriend wanted the Hollywood movie featuring a man like him to win young Tarantino's admiration. 

The anecdote comes from Tarantino's new book "Cinema Speculation." The link goes to Amazon, and I think I'll buy it. I'd like to hear the rest of the story. I'm guessing the "speculation" is about why the commercial Jim Brown movie is superior to the the earnestly arty "The Bus Is Coming."

"The same worlds where abuse was likely to have been taken seriously and codified during the rise of Me Too—cloistered, rivalrous, impossibly competitive, liberal-leaning zones like television networks, academia, and Democratic politics..."

"... are now the worlds in which the accusations are most easily weaponized by power players seeking an advantage. Zucker may be the most recent example, but he’s certainly not alone....  It is only by dint of the world taking sexual misconduct so seriously that it has become something to be cynically exploited, ironically enough. The Zucker affair is starkly similar to this month’s scandal at the University of Michigan. It was another situation where an affair—between the university’s president, Mark Schlissel, and an employee—was consensual, but the power dynamic made it against policy... [T]he people who actually seem most likely to turn Me Too into a targeted weapon are those who already have power, or are actively seeking it. 'It’s like the ending of Reservoir Dogs,' one TV executive said of the Zucker/Cuomo situation to Vanity Fair’s Pompeo, citing a movie that was distributed by Harvey Weinstein. Everyone leaving one another splayed out, riddled with millions of dollars’ worth of lawsuit settlements and exit payments."

From "Did Jeff Zucker and Chris Cuomo Make Me Too a Weapon in Their Power Struggle? The former CNN executive’s workplace romance sure doesn’t seem like the real reason he’s resigning" by Noreen Malone (Slate). 

Doesn't that seem as though she's saying that, in retrospect, the Me Too movement was a mistake, that instead of elevating the subordinated, it's made the powerful more intensely and chaotically powerful?

Isn't that what feminist theory would predict — that the patriarchy will endlessly reinforce the patriarchy? To expect anything else is naive feminism. For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication.

"Tarantino has turned his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, into a novel: messing with the timeline, cranking up the backstories, mulching up reality..."

"... and alt.reality pastiche, ladling in new episodes. The result comes packaged in something like those New English Library paperbacks that used to be on carousel displays in supermarkets and drugstores. In the endpapers he cheekily includes ads for old commercial paperbacks real and imagined, such as Erich Segal’s Oliver’s Story, sequel to Love Story ('Soon to be a major motion picture').... [T]he book is entirely outrageous and addictively readable on its own terms – even the wildly prolix digressive sections and endless savant riffs about movies and TV.... He’s maybe not in the Elmore Leonard league but, like Leonard, he’s refreshingly unconcerned with the literary mainstream. I read this in one sitting – just like watching a film."

From "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s debut novel shines/The director’s pulpy novelisation of his most recent film is entirely outrageous and addictively readable" (The Guardian). 

Here's the book, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel." I put it in my Kindle. 

I did not — as I usually do — add the audio version of the book. I listened to the sample and was sorry to hear that the narrator is a woman with creaky voice — an unusually heavy, perhaps intentionally exaggerated creaky voice. 

Who is it? Oh, it's Jennifer Jason Leigh. Sorry, I am not amused. I am annoyed. No way I'm plugging that into my ear.

"We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby... Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal."

Said Joaquin Phoenix, accepting the Oscar last night for his performance as a clown-faced murderer. As you can see in that short quote, he's expressing effusive empathy for his fellow creatures, but I wouldn't see his movie, because I believe there is something soul-damaging — something erosive of empathy — in watching the graphic depiction of murder. I don't know why Phoenix considered "Joker" a good place to put his talent, then lectures us about our insufficient love for the living things of earth. And I'm writing that as I drink my coffee with milk.



Here's the full transcript, worth seeing in text, because the actorly performance of the text makes it harder to understand the rationality of it. It feels like an emotional cascade. You get caught up wondering how does he feel and does he really feel what he is expressing and what is he really saying and is he coherent and is coherence necessary?

I’m full of so much gratitude now. I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love...

This speech will also end with "love" — "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow" — and we just saw a montage of the nominated actors that ended with Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce) saying "Remember, truth may be vital, but without love, it is also unbearable." But the love in question at this point was:

... the love of film. And this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know where I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it’s given me, and many people in [this industry] is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.

Oh, no! It's going to be a political speech. The Oscars got off to a bad start with Brad Pitt — who won the best supporting actor Oscar — saying he only had 45 seconds to speak, "which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week" and maybe Quentin Tarantino could do a movie about the impeachment where "in the end the adults do the right thing." Tarantino has been doing movies based on historical events where the good guys win in the end, and the movie Pitt won his Oscar for is one of those movies, so his line was well-crafted, but I hated seeing one political side given precedence. The show was just starting, and he was telling half the country their perspective on the world is not valued. Ah, maybe not. His remarks are focused on the desire for witness testimony in the Senate, not the quest to be rid of the President. That puts him in the Susan Collins position, which isn't all that divisive. But it rubbed me the wrong way. Me — and I'm not a Trump voter — I'm just someone offended by the 3 years of disrespect shown to the people whose candidate won an election.

But Phoenix didn't go into partisan politics. In fact, he is trying to pull people together:

I’ve been thinking about some of the distressing issues that we’ve been facing collectively. I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.

That's the opposite of divisive.

I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.

We're called back to nature, away from the disconnection. If we put milk in our coffee, there is — somewhere out there — a cow that was used. Phoenix doesn't go from there into a PETA lecture. He gets back to human life:

We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.

That's almost right wing. It's at least inclusive of the right. The environment matters, but we can go for innovation and technology and find solutions. It's not about giving things up. Then comes another right-wing-friendly idea, personal responsibility:

I have been a scoundrel all my life, I’ve been selfish.

This reminds me of Trump, last Thursday, going on about his impeachment acquittal: "We went through hell, unfairly, did nothing wrong, did nothing wrong, I've done things wrong in my life, I will admit, not purposely, but I've done things wrong." Oh, Trump couldn't confess "I have been a scoundrel all my life," but he did confess "I've done things wrong in my life."

I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with, and I’m grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for our past mistakes...

A clear statement against the cancel culture.

... but when we help each other to grow. When we educate each other; when we guide each other to redemption. When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said: "Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow."

The brother, River Phoenix, died in 1993, when he was 23. He wasn't rescued or educated or guided. Joaquin Phoenix was 19 when he lost his brother, and now he resurrects that brother's spirit in a simple call for love.

A+

Anybody want to talk about the Oscar nominations?

They just came out this morning. Here's the list.

I haven't seen much of that stuff, but I did see "Rocketman," and Taron Everton (who played Elton John) did not get a nomination. And I recently streamed "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" on my TV and then restreamed it the next day. Thought that was good, obviously, or I would not have rewatched. It was great for rewatching, because there were lots of details — like the different flavors of Wolf's Tooth dog food (rat, raccoon, etc.) — to pay attention to at your leisure without the distraction of thinking about what's going to happen next.  "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" did very well, with lots of nominations, but I'm in no position to say whether Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt were better than the actors in movies I did not see, and, really, it doesn't matter.

Did you know the New Yorker film critic, Richard Brody, called "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" "obscenely regressive"?

Tarantino’s love letter to a lost cinematic age is one that, seemingly without awareness, celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command) at the expense of everyone else.... ...Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie, complete with a nasty dose of white resentment; the only substantial character of color, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), is played, in another set piece, as a haughty parody, and gets dramatically humiliated in a fight with Cliff [Brad Pitt]....

“Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” is about a world in which the characters, with Tarantino’s help, fabricate the sublime illusions that embody their virtues and redeem their failings—and then perform acts of real-life heroism to justify them again. Its star moments have a nearly sacred aura, in their revelation of the heroes that, he suggests, really do walk among us; his closed system of cinematic faith bears the blinkered fanaticism of a cult.

I don't agree with much of that, but I won't bore you by explaining why. Instead, here's Brad Pitt feeding his pit bull (Pitt bull) Wolf's Tooth dog food:

"We ate their lunch!"

Exulted Nancy Pelosi, quoted in "‘We ate their lunch’: How Pelosi got to ‘yes’ on Trump’s trade deal/After tough fights, the speaker cut a deal that unions, the president and Democrats all like."

ADDED: I did some research into the idiom "ate their lunch," because I was just talking about last weekend's SNL skit showing Trump getting bullied by the popular kids in a school lunchroom. I said it makes me sympathetic to Trump to see the smug "cool" kids doing whatever they could to humiliate him, so it was interesting to me to hear Nancy Pelosi triumphing in a way that I thought evoked schoolyard bullies who steal lunch from their victims. But is that the source of the phrase "ate their lunch"?

Researching, I see that "ate their lunch" is a popular idiom in business. Investopedia says:

Eating someone's lunch refers to the act of an aggressive competition that results in one company taking portions of another company's market share.... This can be achieved through the release of a better or newer product, aggressive pricing or marketing strategies or other competitive advantages...

That doesn't explain the origin of the metaphor. What are we talking about? Next, I notice the very similar phrase: ate him for lunch. Are these 2 phrases of the same lineage? If so, which is the corruption?

I saw this at Urban Dictionary and thought it was very funny:

Many don't believe me, but in March of 1967 a buddy and I were sitting in a local bar. Something was said about lunch, I responded by saying, "I'll eat your lunch". All laughed and went on. The group that was there started using that line. Next thing I know everyone is using it. Believe it or not.

Looking for another way into this problem, I try googling "did the phrase eat your lunch originate in a bully who steals other student's lunch."

"Tarantino’s love letter to a lost cinematic age is one that, seemingly without awareness, celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command) at the expense of everyone else."

"... Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie, complete with a nasty dose of white resentment.... 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' is a tribute to the people behind the scenes and below the line, the ones who secretly infuse movies with their practical knowledge, life experience, and athletic feats..... Cliff’s unhappy marriage isn’t depicted as a site of conflict but as his endurance of the shrill and belittling rage of a shrew.... The movie’s most prominent female character, Sharon Tate (Robbie), is given even less substance; she is depicted as an ingenuous Barbie doll who ditzily admires herself onscreen.... There’s a peculiar sidebar, when Cliff picks up a teen-age hitchhiker who calls herself Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), who’s actually a member of the Manson Family, and...  when she offers Cliff a blow job—and Cliff distinguishes himself from Hollywood predators by asking her age, demanding to see proof of it on her driver’s license, and gallantly declaring that he doesn’t intend to go to prison for 'poontang.'"

From "Review: Quentin Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties in 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" by Richard Brody (in The New Yorker).

I haven't seen the movie (yet), but I can't understand the assertion that the director's vision is regressive. Characters do all sorts of things in movies. How do you decide to attribute their failings to the moviemaker? Also, when does a regressive vision become obscene? I guess — as Justice Stewart said about pornography — Richard Brody knows it when he sees it.

Hey! "I know it when I see it" has its own Wikipedia article.

The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

I like the "see also" list there. It includes "Duck test":

The duck test is a form of abductive reasoning. This is its usual expression:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck...

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote:

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.

A common variation of the wording of the phrase may have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist:

I can't prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks—I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck.

The term was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala in 1950 during the Cold War, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he's wearing a label or not....

Douglas Adams parodied this test in his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands....

The Liskov Substitution Principle in computer science is sometimes expressed as a counter-example to the duck test:

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but it needs batteries, you probably have the wrong abstraction....

"The 'Kill Bill' script called for Uma Thurman to be spit on by co-star Michael Madsen, but Quentin Tarantino was the one who did it."

"He didn’t trust anyone else to spit right. 'I’m the director, so I can kind of art direct this spit,' Tarantino told Deadline on Monday. 'I know where I want it to land. I’m right next to the camera. So, boom! I do it.'... And the choking? Tarantino claims it was Thurman’s idea to have the chain — which in the movie is thrown at the Bride by Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) — actually wrap around her neck and choke her. 'Not forever, not for a long time,' he said of how he did it. 'But it’s not going to look right [without really doing it]. I can act all strangle-ey, but if you want my face to get red and the tears to come to my eye, then you kind of need to choke me.'"

Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?

Yesterday afternoon, I put up a post about the first half of Maureen Dowd's article about Uma Thurman, which is about Thurman's accusations against Harvey Weinstein, but I only flagged "the strange story about the car crash."

Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information. This article is especially puzzling. First, why didn't Dowd stick with the Harvey Weinstein story? Dowd mentions at one point that she's talking to Thurman at 3 a.m. on the second day of the interview. What didn't make the cut? In yesterday's post, I highlighted quotes from Thurman that showed — even though the headline called Thurman "angry" — that Thurman had "complicated" feelings that included what sounded to me like guilt over allowing other women to fall into Weinstein's clutches. Where is the depth of analysis on this subject?  

Halfway through, the article switches to the topic of a car crash that occurred in the making of the movie "Kill Bill." Here, the villain is Quentin Tarantino (whose name does not appear in the article title or subtitle, which promise to give us the story of Thurman's outrage at Weinstein). The problem with Tarantino has nothing to do with sexual harassment or even anything personal. It's completely professional: Tarantino the director was a taskmaster who talked her into driving a car down a dirt road at 40 miles per hour when she wanted a stuntperson to do it:

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

There is embedded video at the link — film shot from the back of the car — showing Thurman attempting to control the car and driving it into a palm tree.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Clearly, Thurman had grounds for a lawsuit, and we're not told when Thurman got a lawyer and how the lawyer initially interacted with the production company Miramax. Dowd employs a jump cut, straight to this:

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

So there's already a lawyer. It's 2 weeks later, and they'd like the footage, but everyone knows of the potential for an expensive lawsuit (and the need to keep Thurman on board finishing the movie and promoting it).

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Signing a document and paying a settlement? Obviously, the footage is evidence in the lawsuit, so if the lawsuit is not settled, the footage will come out in discovery, so what happened? Dowd says absolutely nothing and just makes it sound as though Thurman and Tarantino had a long personal struggle:

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled??? There was a lawyer in the picture. When you're suing somebody or threatening to sue somebody it's not a matter of a rattling mind meld! Rattled mind meld sounds funny, and tort lawyers in car-crash cases sound dull. It's like Dowd is swerving us into a palm tree because continuing to drive at 40 miles an hour down the dirt road isn't interesting. But what the hell happened? A lawyer dropped in, but get that guy out of here! Bring back Tarantino! Here's an exciting sceen: Soho House, shouting, a fateful fight!

Lest you think about the boring lawyer, here's a very long sentence. See if you can read it. It may cause you not to think about the other question that could be nagging you — why does Thurman's old grievance about a moviemaking car accident and a mysterious settled/not-settled lawsuit belong in an article about what Thurman knows about the sexual harassment reckoning and Harvey Weinstein? Here, read:

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

Dowd's answer to my question is: The Reckoning reminded Thurman of this other dispute she has with Miramax. It can be portrayed as similar because it happened to her body, but one story is about a man who (she says) intentionally imposed sexual violence on her body, and the other is about a different man who (at most) meant no harm but was a link in a causal chain that ended with her crashing a car into a tree.

I would add that the stories are also similar in that evidence remained suppressed for years, but one involves Thurman herself declining to go public with accusations (and herself becoming causally connected to the sexual abuse of other women), and the other involves film footage that was relevant to a subject that Maureen Dowd is hiding from us: the at-least-threatened lawsuit over the crash.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

Atoned? I'm assuming Miramax suppressed it as the lawsuit progressed — "permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees" means, in lawyer talk, very high damages. Thurman had a lawyer, threatening a lawsuit, so it wasn't a personal relationship anymore.

And I wonder what's going on now. Is Thurman still trying to collect damages and using Dowd and the NYT? Is there a pending lawsuit? Why didn't her lawyer get the footage years ago in the normal (and very boring!) process of discovery?

This drama about Tarantino atoning himself — unrattling the mind meld — by turning over the footage is offered for our amusement, but to me it's ridiculous, because I'm seeing this phantom lawsuit and wondering whether that's the main thing going on now.

As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.

“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

So there's Dowd, lured into Thurman's "elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side" by the promise of a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse (and, perhaps, Thurman's complicity in the abuse of other women), and what Thurman wants is something else entirely — to go on about a tort case.

“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

"I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover, so that’s a super weird split to have."

Said Uma Thurman, quoted in "This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry/The actress is finally ready to talk about Harvey Weinstein" by Maureen Dowd in the NYT.

"The complicated feeling I have about Harvey is how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was,” she told me one recent night, looking anguished in her elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side, as she vaped tobacco, sipped white wine and fed empty pizza boxes into the fireplace.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”

Much more at the link. Don't miss the strange story about the car crash.

"What I did was marginalize the incidents. Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse."

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."

______________________

* 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.

What if the NYT put up a fawning acknowledgment of Kobe Bryant's retirement announcement, replete with his “Dear Basketball” poem...

... and all the commenters wanted to do was trash him for that rape he was never convicted of?

Highest-rated comment:

A vile, horrible man. I never fail to marvel over how the rape accusation simply disappeared into thin air--once the alleged victim (who received numerous death threats, and, it's rumored, cash from Kobe) withdrew her charges. It was never again mentioned by the Times or any other media outlet, in what seemed an Orwellian silence. Apparently his ability to shoot balls through a hoop is far more important than his treatment of women. I hope he burns in hell, along with all those who think that making money is more important than stopping rapists.

The Kobe Bryant arrest predates this blog, so I have nothing in the archive about it. Most of what I know about Bryant comes from this excellent New Yorker article from March 2014, "The Fourth Quarter/Kobe Bryant confronts a long—and possibly painful—goodbye":

“I was stubborn as a fucking mule,” he said.... He was the Black Mamba, a nickname he gave himself after watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” in which the snake, known for its agility and aggressiveness, was used as a code name for a deadly assassin....

The adoption of an alter ego was a way of coping, Bryant now admits, with the fallout from his arrest for sexual assault, in a Colorado hotel room, in the summer of 2003. The charges were later dismissed, and a civil settlement was reached with the alleged victim, but Bryant struggled with the perception that he was damaged goods. “After the Colorado incident, I had every major sponsor drop me, except for Nike,” he told me. “So I’m sitting there thinking, What am I going to do now? My vision was to build a brand and do all these things.” (Bryant was born a brand, named after the Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.) “Now everybody’s telling me I can’t do it,” he went on. “The name just evokes such a negative emotion. I said, ‘If I create this alter ego, so now when I play this is what’s coming out of your mouth, it separates the personal stuff, right?’ You’re not watching David Banner—you’re watching the Hulk.”

"In Baltimore, they call it a 'rough ride'... a dark tradition of police misconduct in which suspects, seated or lying face down and in handcuffs in the back of a police wagon, are jolted and battered by an intentionally rough and bumpy ride..."

"... that can do as much damage as a police baton without an officer having to administer a blow. The exact cause of the spinal injury that Freddie Gray, 25, sustained while in police custody in Baltimore before his death April 19 has not been made clear. The police have said that he was not strapped into a seatbelt, a violation of department policy. That has led some to wonder whether he was deliberately left unbuckled, reminiscent of a practice that while little known has left a brutal, costly legacy of severe injuries and multimillion-dollar settlements throughout the country."

From a NYT article titled "Freddie Gray’s Injury and the Police ‘Rough Ride.'"

My son Chris says that the descriptions of what may have happened to Freddie Gray remind him of a disturbing scene in the Quentin Tarantino movie "Death Proof" (originally part of "Grindhouse.") Here's the scene:



"Hey, Pam, remember when I said this car was death proof? Well, that wasn't a lie. This car is 100% death proof. Only to get the benefit of it, honey, you REALLY need to be sitting in my seat."

"I don’t believe you should stay on stage until people are begging you to get off."

"I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game and I like the idea of an umbilical-cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard...."

Said Quentin Tarantino.