MELANIE WILLIAMS
One of the things that is telling about the book-writing
process is what you feel anxious about having omitted or fudged once a book is
published and it’s too late to change anything, short of a second edition. With
my book on
David Lean it was my unwitting but still problematic editorial squeeze on
material I originally had in the book about Lean’s frequent recourse to work by
gay writers (Coward, Rattigan, Arthur Laurens, E M Forster) who used
heterosexual narratives as allegories or cover stories for exploring the
complexities of closeted gay experience. This ended up being reduced down to
one reference to Andy Medhurst's (excellent) article on Noel Coward's queer
authorship of Brief Encounter. But
you can’t encompass everything in a single book already straining at the seams,
you tell yourself, and so you move on, striving to be more carefully and thoughtfully inclusive in future
endeavours.
With my most recent book, Female Stars of British Cinema, published this summer, the post-publication
worries and regrets have been of a different order altogether. I am still very
proud of the book's detailed analysis of star personae and careers, and still believe
it makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of women's place on
British screens over the last 75 years. But... Weinstein. And everything that’s
happened since. If I had known then what I know now, I would have written an
altogether angrier book. Re-reading it now, its feminist critique seems too
gentle, tempered, modulated, careful: too bloody reasonable by half. At that
point – not that long ago at all – I was not apprised of the full facts about quite
how grimly sexist a place the film industry still continues to be for women, despite
guessing at those darker depths from time to time via allusion, anecdote, or
veiled inference. Although I had noted and critiqued the misogyny of the
critical commentariat and the vile treatment meted out by the press to many of
the stars I discussed, I was not as attentive to the toxic sexism in film
production itself, nor to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment within it. It
is impossible to inhabit that position of ignorance now, with the
revelations around the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein having had a domino
effect in exposing similar cultures of male entitlement and sexual violence not
only in film but in many other professions besides.
In the case of Weinstein, it was clear from Peter Biskind's book
Down and Dirty Pictures that the
producer had always been an obnoxious operator whose business ethics were
questionable to say the least but what hadn't been public knowledge (even if it
had been industry lore) was his status as a sexual predator. Listening to the tapes
of his intimidating, emphatic, relentless verbal bullying of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez as he attempted to
get the aspiring actress to come into his hotel room is a chilling experience. So
is reading the testimony of Rose McGowan, Asia Argento and a mounting number of
other women who accuse Harvey Weinstein of molesting and raping them; this is a
truly rotten, repulsive state of affairs. Understandably the lid was kept very
tightly shut, with NDAs
for all associates and employees of Weinstein, threats of legal action from
his crack team of lawyers for anyone who dared to speak out publicly, and even,
it seems, ex-Mossad
agents working to discredit any potential whistleblowers. But
simultaneously there was also a smokescreen put up of Weinstein being an
advocate for women: the very tactic he attempted to use, without success, when
he released his
initial sorry/not sorry statement about needing to undertake therapeutic
self-work to overcome his 'sex addiction’, in which he thought that setting up
a fellowship for women filmmakers at USC would be enough to get him off the
hook and make his mother proud of him again.
It was this same aspect of Weinstein, his desire to be seen
as a friend to women in the industry, that I referred to in my chapter on Judi
Dench in my book, noting that Weinstein had been a powerful advocate and ally
for Dench, and she not only credited him with kick-starting her film career but was also able
to indulge in affectionate practical joking with him. Quoted in innocence and
ignorance, that material now leaves a bitter aftertaste. While Weinstein was proselyting
for one woman's career, he was oppressing and attacking numerous others. An
earlier chapter of my book dealt with teen discovery Emily Lloyd's distressing
experiences of swimming with the Hollywood sharks in the late 80s and early
90s, drawing on material from her autobiography. But I wonder what she might
have said about sexual harassment in the industry if she had been able to write
without being in fear of litigation (especially since she was once up for the
role Uma Thurman ended up playing in the Weinstein-produced Pulp Fiction). Certainly
Hollywood as well as the British film industry found multiple ways to mistreat
Lloyd that are already well documented but it would not be surprising if a
whole further layer of foul behaviour now came to light. And in the conclusion to my
book, I discussed the barriers to British BAME actresses being accorded with
full star status and the repressive nostalgia of the dominant (white) English
Rose ideal but I had no idea how this was so tightly intertwined with the erotic peccadillos
of producers like Weinstein and their
own racist understandings of who could be considered sufficiently star-worthy,
i.e. ‘fuckable’. As Bim Adewunmi commented, ‘The next time you ponder the relative lack of black women
on your screens, consider that the casting process starts long before the
casting call goes out and can be debated, even when talent alone should have
secured the role, taking in factors like the preference of a producer’s sexual
desires.’
Concluding my book about the chequered history of women’s
place in the British film industry as actresses and stars and then pondering the
future for British female stardom was always going to be a big ask, and it proved so. There have
been advances in some areas but backward steps in others, and given the choice
between faith in gradual progress or despairing nihilism, I would always
choose the former. But admittedly it is hard to sustain one’s optimism in the
wake of such harrowing evidence; evidence of a media industry riddled with patriarchal
power at its most poisonous and malign, of which Weinstein is only the tip of
the iceberg. But I have to draw comfort from the female counter-history of rebellion
and survival against the odds I was able to trace through my research: the warm, witty endurance of stars like Jean
Kent and Diana Dors in spite of the reductive ‘bad girl’ label they had slung
round their necks; the fact that unorthodox female stars like Rita Tushingham
and Glenda Jackson bucked the prevailing trends of what a female star should
look like (and were both erroneously dismissed as ugly as a result) and
triumphed anyway; Emily Lloyd fighting against serious mental
distress, and managing to survive into adulthood. There is much to celebrate in the long history of women on film in
Britain and in the exhilarating possibilities created by its cultures of stardom,
often giving a tangible presence to new and liberatory kinds of feminine
embodiment. But there is equally a great deal to regret and to mourn, and to
get angry about. It seems that we are only at the beginning of knowing the
full extent of the masculine abuse that has delimited and defined the space in which
women have been allowed to operate. But equally it feels like we might be at a
crucial juncture for trying to change that culture forever – and we should
demand nothing less.
