I shall turn 50 this year, which is not without its odd emotions and has got me thinking about being, well, old. I don’t mean decrepit, I mean not infantile, no longer so attached to things, no longer so concerned about what others think, no longer so anxious to prove myself – you may know the sort of thing I mean. It was rather a treat, therefore, to play what is – in a way – my first modern romantic lead in a film that is more romantic than comic (although it has very funny moments and is underscored with irony and subtle humour throughout) where I was not required to be stunningly attractive or in despair or in need of rescue, but simply an ordinary woman in her forties living a rather stale-looking life as best she can.

Along comes this rather brash American (Dustin) and he blows a great hole in her defenses (don’t you think we all build them for various stages in life and then FORGET TO DISMANTLE THEM when the danger is past or the trauma has been lived through?). So what you are watching is a sudden flood of real communication (how rare is that?), the sort of communication that shifts the emotional tectonic plates and provokes seismic movement in the soul…

When Emma Thompson starred in a movie with Dustin Hoffman as a romance, that was the limit with me. I mean, she was “hopeless-spinster” in her forties (at the time), and her only option was… dude in his seventies. According to her, this was the first time she ever got to play a romantic lead in her career. She should have more than a passing acquaintance with the patriarchy and identifies as a feminist, but somehow, I wonder if she is romantizing what happened. Maybe it was regretable party hijinks to her.

Can someone confirm Thompson actually saying or implying this? I’ve done a bit of searching, as this struck me, when I first read it, as an incredibly disingenuous thing for Thompson to say. As I dimly recall, she has almost always played the romantic lead or the lead’s gullfriend or ‘love interest’ or wife. I believe one of the first films in which I saw her is that Jeff Goldblum vehicle (Goldblum as an attractive, slightly melancholy aspiring comedian, second banana to a very narcissistic Mr. Bean, frequently engaging in long and loud bouts of aerobic sex) in which she plays Goldblum’s “love interest,” a nurse, if I remember correctly. She is also Kenneth Branagh’s “love interest” in nearly all of their films together, and didn’t she stand by Arnold when he and Danny DeVito made himself preggers in Junior?

Although it’s unfortunate, especially given that Thompson’s a very fine actor, the default position for all women in literature, art, and film is Love Interest or Crone, and her career no more or no less reflects that tendency despite the whitewash(?) sally reports above.

Nah, it’s because in Hollywood people use, um, “leveraged” sex as even more of a medium of currency than most other places do. It’s not just the “casting couch” thing but an outright demonstration of a combination of power, fealty, and “committment” to a person or project. Where it’s sort of a given that giving a producer a blowjob when it’s known you like giving them or even just don’t mind isn’t nearly as valuable as giving one when it’s the last thing on earth you want to do.

And so by that way of thinking, which I’m guessing Goldberg just sees as the cost of doing business, what Polanski did to a 13-year-old was just “over the line” and not “rape-rape.”

And I’m just thinking that unusual suspects are standing up for him not so much because they like the system or look forward to being on the receiving end themselves but because to acknowledge it in Polanski’s case would mean having to confront what they themselves have submitted to, or at least steeled themselves for in case they had to, as their own “cost of doing business” in Hollywood.

And by the way, that’s not to excuse the “rape as a plot device” business they grunt out on a daily basis. Quite the opposite. You see a lot of the same sordid plot devices in regular print and comic publishing, but you don’t see that “if you want it you’ve got to show me how badly you want it” sort of thing that goes on in Hollywood.

Bottom line: it’s not so much “rape-rape” culture as a culture of sexual harassment on an industrial scale. For an insider to stand up to it requires acknowledging that he or she has participated in, and possibly “benefited” career-wise from it, as aggressor or victim or both.

figleaf