Hollywood and Catholic priests
I live right up the hill from Rick Warren’s megachurch, right in the heart of Orange County. As Southern California goes, Orange County is an unHollywood place to live. We’re famously conservative (though I’m not particularly so), while Hollywood, we’re always told, is liberal (though the people from Hollywood who go on to elected office tend to be Republican). I do think all of Southern California has a certain degree of appearance consciousness to it that you don’t find so much in, say, rural Maine, and of course we have more or less the same weather and set of natural disasters, but otherwise, not so much overlap between Orange County and Hollywood.
Still, the entertainment industry flits across my life in various ways. Several people I knew from high school and college (knew anywhere from barely at all to quite well) have gone on to acting or producing – is that pretty much true for everyone, or do I, with my New York City suburbs to Stanford trajectory, know more of those people than I would if I’d always lived in Kansas? (Either way, the number of actually Wikipedia level famous entertainment industry people I’ve ever known in real life is small.) And I run across people now who have had various small or behind the scenes roles in “the industry,” as it’s called in LA. There’s Joel’s cousin who does make up, the guy I know who’s done film editing, various aspiring actors and screenwriters, at any stage from study to actually getting parts. I go to one computer professional event and talk to a guy who wrote pension software for actors (software that, he tells me, was complicated by the fact that cartoon actors were paid separately for each cartoon voice they did), go to another and wander onto the set of a TV show that’s being filmed near the hotel where the conference is held, and wind up talking to the extras about gossip and how they get their work (through a company in Burbank, as I recall).
Now, in the wake of the arrest of Roman Polanski, people are talking about a different face of Hollywood, a face that involves powerful people petitioning to get a break for one of their own.
Some years ago, I sat in the church near my mother-in-law’s house, and listened to the priest deliver the obligatory plea for donations. The church was an ordinary one, a small church in a working class part of San Bernardino, with services in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The plea was an ordinary one, which many of us have heard in one church or another. The circumstances were not so ordinary, for the members of the church had recently learned that their church had the bad luck to have had one of Boston Archdiocese’s most notorious predators sent to work in their church, without being informed of his history.
When scandals hit, people often argue them on conservative vs. liberal lines: it’s conservative prudery and repression (if you’re talking about the Catholic Church) or liberal depravity (if you’re talking about Hollywood). And, it might be true that in each case we’ve seen fracturing and failures of certain attitudes particular to that institution. Maybe there are ways that celibacy is entangled in the Church’s failure, both in the sense that some people are drawn to it more to resolve their own troubled sexuality than out of a real vocation, and because, if you develop a habit of setting a demanding standard and ignoring all the ways your priests fail it, that habit can carry over to graver offenses. And maybe Polanski’s defenders in Hollywood reflect some failing in Hollywood sexual culture, the casting couch gone wild.
But, seeing that the “conservative” Catholic Church and “liberal” Hollywood show the same failing, I have to suspect it’s mainly something that transcends conservative vs. liberal divisions; tribalism, privilege, the ordinary human tendency to want to defend and excuse People Like Us, ones that perhaps you know personally as way too congenial to have done the awful deed (or, if they’ve done the awful deed, not to be judged as somehow very different from anyone else who might have done that awful deed). Natalia Antonova, in a post critical of Polanski, writes
I know two people who have known him since he fled to France, and they all describe a charming and intelligent man who does not strike you as the type of dude who could drug and sodomize a little girl. “He has changed,” people say. He’s married to a woman whom he, by all account, loves. They have two children together. One of those children is a daughter.
Isn’t that how it always goes, when the person accused is someone you know to be charming, or want to admire? Who wants to see a friend as a rapist? Add a dose of power and privilege, and the results can look pretty ugly. Whether you’re a Catholic cardinal or a famous producer.
Some people have been collecting lists to counter the list on the pro-Polanski petition.
Valerie Meachum’s list of entertainment industry professionals who disagree with the folks calling for his release.
Melissa Silverstein’s list of women in the entertainment industry who have spoken out about Polanski.
chrismm’s more comprehensive list of public figures.
Also, the screenwriter blogger I follow most regularly, Steven Barnes, has come out in favor of arresting Polanski.
Tonight or tomorrow I’ll blog some more about the coup in Madagascar.