I’m by no means connected to Hollywood. However, even from my corner of the Australian industry, the current Weinstein saga comes as no surprise. In the aftermath of the firing, it’s easy to assume that the evils of Hollywood fall only so far as the shadows of the letters on the hill. However, when one looks closer, all signs point to an uneasy conclusion drawn across multiple disciplines and territories. The entertainment industry, built on the dreams of the naive and young, represents a veritable playground for the beneficiaries of a system skewed rich, white and male. Women, by virtue of their scarcity in positions of real and actualised agency, are rendered little more than onscreen accoutrements to a power elite pulling the strings. In a fickle and quicksilver industry in which careers are built on subjective relationships and nepotism, who you know counts. Importantly though, what you know can be the additional leverage needed to turn an acquaintance into an ally or a foe into a firm friend.
In this way, despite its espoused oppositional values and ethics, Hollywood’s easiest organisational forebear would be the Catholic church. Certainly, when analysing Weinstein’s alleged abusive behaviours, it’s clear he was endowed, by himself and by those around him, with God-like authority. Taking lessons from the last decade of commissions into the historical abuses perpetrated by men of the cloth, the issue never lies solely with the lone pariah. Underneath all abusers are layers of disciples complicit in blind or wilfully ignorant service to their deity, mostly in pursuit of singular or collective advancement.
Australia’s screen industry, much like our church, is not shielded from scandal despite our geographic isolation. Figures such as Tim Worner loom large, eerie spectres of an evident capacity to debase, deny and evade consequence for actions echoing a similar claim to aggressive patriarchal dominance and privilege. Contextually, a clear knowledge gap exists between lived experiences of victims and the outward reputations of the powerful, leading to a vacuum in which discriminatory and threatening behaviour is excused. From a federal policy level, the presence of aggressive sexism within the creative arts is surprisingly unacknowledged.
Screen Australia, in its 2015 Gender Matters report, listed five key factors in the statistical underrepresentation of women within the screen industry. Noting “male dominance” as possible rationale, the report stops short of naming explicit sexual discrimination or harassment, as if there are no cultural outcomes to gender over proportionality. APRA, in this year’s independent review of the rationale for single digit statistics of women in film composition, offered a welcome but sobering alternative. Finding one was “sexual harassment”, outlining qualitative examples of systematic physical abuse, verbal propositioning and overt sexism. While 36% of female respondents “strongly agreed” that harassment was a significant barrier to entry, this figure was almost exactly mirrored in male respondents who “strongly disagreed” with its presence. The researchers summarised the Australian landscape as one in which threats of sexual violence are either normalised or denied in favour of a pervasive culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Far from distinct to the data subset of movie music, APRA’s findings spotlight the incredible oversight of our lawmakers to interrogate the industrial effects of gendered dominance, let alone the cultural ramifications.
In moments like this, the personal is political; the anecdotal essential. I introduced myself as a professional director to the industry less than three years ago, and in that time I have been affronted by repeated instances of sexual misconduct. I was propositioned by the head of a relevant industry body in the back of a taxi as we left a meet and greet drinks, and he was on his way home to a pregnant wife. A crew member sent me a string of unsolicited, explicit emails. I was stalked by an extra. I have learned to routinely laugh off sexual innuendo, allusion and commentary as “harmless”, although it was, at one time, anathema. Recently, a friend and fellow director, after witnessing an exchange with an important industry power broker, cautioned me to rethink meeting him one on one, recognising ulterior motives in his actions that I had reframed as simply “locker room antics.”
This is the inconvenient truth of the global industry. Female creatives, be it actors, directors, or crew, routinely trade elevated risk for access, hoping for professional ingress but more likely receiving an unwelcome lesson in the enduring relationship between power and predation. As the next stage in the scandal unfolds, and more women come forward as undoubtedly they will, hopefully this will serve as a timely reminder of the inevitably of ousting those who have, like Weinstein and others protected by institution or imagined immunity, benefited from an unidentified but undeniable structural advantage. The walls, and the the women kept outside of them, have ears, eyes and after thirty years, voice.
- Sophie Mathisen is a writer and director of For Film’s Sake (FFS) festival. In 2016 she created the Aacta sausage party protest, inciting a policy overhaul regarding national eligibility criteria for female filmmakers
