While Harvey Weinstein Is on Trial, Louis C.K. Is on Tour
Who really faces consequences in a post-#MeToo world?
Who really faces consequences in a post-#MeToo world?
This past weekend, comedian and nonconsensual exhibitionist Louis C.K. performed a stand-up set in Akron, Ohio. Apparently his performance, held at the 1,458-seat Goodyear Theater, went fine. Next week he’ll be in Reading, Pennsylvania. Then Alabama. Tickets to see him perform run between $37 and $112.
Akron didn’t sell out, but the show in Reading has. There haven’t been any big, news-making protests outside of his shows yet. There might not ever be. He’s carefully selected cities where he believes he won’t face a harsh backlash, places very unlike New York, where he lives. In a recent appearance, he said he’d rather perform in Auschwitz than New York.
I’m not surprised C.K. still has fans in Akron or Reading, or anywhere, really. #MeToo happened, then the backlash happened, then the backlash to the backlash. In the end, people ended up believing whichever accusations they found easiest to believe, right up until they were confronted by misconduct that they found impossible to accept. Then, they declared this whole movement had gone too far. Sometime later, the accused all came back out of the woodwork, with new TV shows, stand-up sets, and media properties for their devoted fans to consume.
Several female comedians came forward in 2017, accusing Louis C.K. of cornering them in hotel rooms and coercing them into watching him masturbate. He joked in his comedy routines about his own masturbatory habits for years before these allegations came to light; realizing that his jokes were covert admissions of guilt has been jarring for many of his former fans, myself included.
However, for some fans, the Louis C.K. accusations represented a step too far. Those supporters didn’t want to part with this particular pop-culture security blanket. They didn’t want to wonder if they had ever left somebody feeling cornered and scared. All of that feels really bad. We’re all just trying like hell to feel reasonably okay these days.
Louis C.K. is fresh off the heels of a European tour. It went pretty well. In Rome, he got a standing ovation. During that set, he described how his victims tended to react when he masturbated in front of them as he blocked their exit. He said: “Women have a skill, pretending they are fine. To assume she likes it is like seeing slaves singing in a field and saying, ‘Oh, they are having a great time.’”
They laughed at that line in Rome. They probably did in Akron, too.
We all have a skill for pretending we’re fine. Survivors, victims, fans of problematic people, predators — all of us. We do it every day that we drag our lifeless corpses to work while feeling that the world is burning. We do it every time we ignore a problem that hurts too much to face, or spiral around it with vague apologies, performing our guilt. Even the quintessential villain of the #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein, is surrounded by allies who continue to justify and explain away the horrific things he’s done.
On January 6, the disgraced film producer’s trial finally began in New York. Weinstein is facing five counts of predatory sexual assault, criminal sex acts, and rape. His tally of accusers is closer to 80. He faces two other charges of rape in Los Angeles.
Weinstein’s team has spent the past year sowing public doubt in his accusers, secretly sending journalists a bizarre, sloppy, 57-slide PowerPoint presentation titled “The Proper Narrative for Addressing the Harvey Weinstein Case.” This document has been circulating privately among journalists of all stripes since July, though only a handful are now publicly acknowledging it.
The PowerPoint is by all accounts an incoherent, unprofessional, and offensive mess. The document includes track changes, strike-through text, and comments in the margins that were clearly not intended for public consumption. One comment asks, “Did Harvey Weinstein actually meet [this accuser]? Seems likely.”
The presentation is also both noxiously petty and laughably galaxy-brained. One slide claims that a victim must be lying because there is a photo of her greeting Weinstein at her apartment while wearing a nightgown. “Her nightgown suggests that this was consensual,” the PowerPoint reads, “and that her current version [of events] is revisionist.”
People love weaving elaborate, confused belief systems around their load-bearing loves.
On slide 10, the presentation posits that the entire #MeToo movement might be revisionist. “Given the pressures that many women today feel from the various laudatory movements against workplace imbalances,” it reads, “the notion that consensual relations are being reinterpreted cannot be overlooked.”
The scary thing about this PowerPoint is that we’ll never know how many people took it seriously. The only reporters who’ve even mentioned receiving it are the ones who found it laughable. It’s tempting to think it was laughable to everyone.
It’s likely there’s some secret Weinstein stan out there who took solace in reading the document. It’s comforting to tell yourself fictional stories about why victims are just deluded and hypersensitive, careerist revisionist frauds. Even if that story doesn’t quite add up, people will want to believe it. People love weaving elaborate, confused belief systems around their load-bearing loves.
I fucking love Kill Bill. It’s Quentin Tarantino’s best movie, gripping and violent and packed full of strong female characters. It’s not exactly a feminist film, but it connected with teenage me in the exact right way, at the exact right time. It means a lot to me. When I watch Kill Bill the frantic, racing dissatisfaction that always lives inside me goes quiet for a while, and I’m happy.
Horrible things happened to actress Uma Thurman, both on the set of Kill Bill and during the film’s press tour. Weinstein is one of the people responsible for that.
I’m glad I know the truth of what happened to Uma Thurman. I keep it in mind every time I watch the movie that used to give me uncomplicated joy. The joy is more complicated now. I kinda hate how there is almost no show or movie I can mention liking these days without having to throw out a placating aside that yes, someone associated with it was a bad person, and I’m sorry for my guilt by association. But I still have emotional needs, I still have nostalgia, and a need to be distracted. So yes, I still like the media, and I’m sorry, and I know I am imbued forever with sin. And I hate how I believe, on some level, that all my performative self-flagellation makes it all okay.
Weinstein is so obviously, egregiously bad. But who is our bridge too far?
We all have this coping mechanism. War, climate change, obliterated species, partisan infighting, bitterly cold winds, suicidal queer teens — there’s so much to worry about. We just want a distraction. We believe that we deserve, once in a while, to feel good without guilt.
I imagine predators feel similarly entitled to pleasure. I imagine each of us has a line in our minds that, when crossed, makes us explode in outrage or abandon apologies and claim that we are the real victims because we’ve been made to feel bad. I think for each of us, there is a pop-culture security blanket we would not easily let go of.
For most of us, Weinstein is so obviously, egregiously bad, and so artistically tertiary to the films that we love, that it is easy to wish him the worst possible outcome. But where does Louis C.K. fall on the spectrum? Who is our bridge too far?
Aziz Ansari? Al Franken? Junot Díaz? David Bowie? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Matthew Weiner? Dan Harmon? Sherman Alexie? Melanie Martinez? Elie Weisel? Stan Lee? Asia Argento?
I wonder what we’ll all pretend is fine next. What shitty PowerPoints we’ll create in our minds to assuage our guilt.
This piece was originally performed live at The Paper Machete, Chicago’s live magazine.