Connecting Success With Abuse...my takeaway from this year's movies

I've been gorging myself on all of these Oscar nominations and as I watch them so quickly and in such rapid succession that connections begin to form in my mind. I've seen movies such as Rocketman, Judy, Bombshell, Two Popes, Parasite, Ford V. Ferrari, and Harriet and I'm starting to see no distance between success and abuse.

This all started as I watched the Golden Globes. I was happy to see Elton John and Bernie Taupin win a Golden Globe for their song-writing efforts on Rocketman and listen to them talk about their collaboration of over 50 years. I said to my good friend, M, “How lucky for them to have sustained a friendship and work collaboration of such a long time! How do you suppose that was even possible?” And she replied to me, “I think Bernie Taupin just didn't like himself enough to say no to the abuse.”

My brain blew up. Not at all the answer I expected! (Don't you love a friend who can shake up your whole thought process like that? Thanks, M!) Of course, I have no idea if there is any truth to that answer and I don't even care to research it to find out. For all I know, after rehab Elton John did a remarkable job of making amends with Bernie and everything is truly peachy between them. I mean, that's definitely what my admittedly romantic brain wants to be the case.

But her incisive comment got me thinking. What happens to the people who like themselves too much to put up with the abuse? Because let's be honest, Hollywood, is a system pretty much based on abuse. Ricky Gervais hinted at as much in one of his controversial jokes that same evening. He said something about Harvey Weinstein that made the whole room groan with disapproval and then he said, “What? You all worked with him! I didn't.” And he's right! Anyone who has been in Oscar contention over the past 20 years or so has probably worked with or tried to work with Weinstein. Not every single one of them knew what he was up to, but we now know that many of them did, either by direct experience or rumor. I'm not suggesting, like the joke may have implied, that everyone at the Golden Globes is at fault or complicit. Many have gotten lucky along the way and skirted the very worst that the system has to offer. But the system of abuse in Hollywood is widespread and long established and it requires a lot of people to play their part. Many are willing to do just that because of the desire for and promise of SUCCESS.

Harvey Weinstein thrived as an abuser by being successful enough that people were willing to stay silent for him, or look the other way, or simply assume that he was in the right and then not bother themselves about it any further. There are only so many roads to success in Hollywood and for a while a major highway went through Weinstein. If you wanted to stay in that game, you might find yourself needing to accept the abuse.

The movie about Judy Garland proved that it's nothing new. Judy couldn't have been a starker example of a studio using abusive language, practices and pharmaceutical addiction to control the life of a child that they saw as an asset. She could not enjoy her “successful”career, nor could the studio enjoy the success of her pictures without entering into that contract of systemic abuse. Sadly, she was never able to recover from those beginnings and establish solid control over her own life.

It's not just a Hollywood problem. Bombshell showed me the same truth about Roger Ailes at Fox News. The road to conservative news ran straight through Roger Ailes and it took a lot of silence by a lot of people to keep his system in place. What would have happened to Meghan Kelly if she had spoken up about Roger Ailes immediately? She would have never moved up the news ladder and been able to claim success as her reward for both her talent and her silence. She felt comfortable being silenced because she assumed the best about Roger Ailes for as long as she was able to do so. Other women were trampled under his system of blackmailing and humiliating women who wanted to work for the most successful conservative news outlet on the planet.

Two Popes demonstrated that the Catholic Church valued its own “success” in terms of how many followers they had. That number was more important than honestly helping victimized children and led to a tragic system of forgiving and enabling countless abusers in order to not compromise the success of the church.

In the movie Parasite, we see a couple blinded by their own success. Because they assume that their status makes them inherently better than everyone else, they are unable to see what is going on, quite literally, right beneath them. Anyone who wants to work for them is forced to lie about their own success and status to be seen as worthy. The servants must engage in a hidden cut throat world of abuse, lying, grifting and stealing just to try and survive. They need the good opinions of the successful, clean and beautiful family, even as that family judges them as lesser, expendable and even at times, downright disgusting.

Early in Ford V. Ferrari, there is a scene where Henry Ford, Jr. bellows at all of his employees, even on the factory line, that anyone who doesn't come up with an idea to make the company more successful will be fired. He is grumpy and bombastic and my only thought was that I would walk out and never come back. I'm not wasting my time working for some egomaniac that thinks he can yell at me because of his problems! Of course, many of those people needed those jobs, and so you learn to stay silent and be yelled at form time to time. Or, if you really want to rise to the top in the corporate environment, you find a way to pass along the abuse to others, like one character does in the movie.

Harriet tells the story of the brave and amazing Harriet Tubman who fought hard to free people from the original example of a perfect success-by-means-of-abuse system. Slavery requires a group in power to dehumanize another group in order to degrade them, abuse them and profit from their pain. Our nation couldn't let go of it based on the argument that success would be impossible without it; that our country would crumble. It makes me wonder if the problem is that our nation was founded on this system. We built our whole understanding of society on that premise and never truly took the time to heal ourselves from that mindset. Maybe that explains why this system of achieving success through abuse is still prevalent in entertainment, news, churches, corporations, etc.

I have worked as an assistant editor in Hollywood. I remember being told by the entire crew at a mix stage that Michael Bay required that no one look him in the eye. My thought was, “Forget that guy! I won't work with people like that!” As it turns out, I didn't. I never rose to success. I started a family and worked on tiny independent projects from time to time. However, even at my level, when I lose a collaboration with someone, it stings. There are just not that many opportunities for moms juggling career and family. It's hard not to convince yourself to hold on to every possible collaboration, even when it makes you uncomfortable. It's hard not to keep yourself quiet in order to keep a job, to keep hustling.

The whole culture of success sort of seems to demand your discomfort, your buy in, your "pay your dues" grit to crawl through the muck for the carrot on the other side. Because for every Roger Ailes, there is also a Kayla who accepts the system and permits the abuse. Let me be clear, I don't mean to victim blame Kayla. I don't know what I would have done faced with the choice to gain entrance into a studio editing job if I only showed my panties to one old perv. It's a terrible position to be put in and there's no right answer in that moment. But the efficiency of this system that equates success with abuse is that if you buy in, even a little, you begin to like yourself a little less. And once that happens, you no longer have the strength left in you to demand better.

So here I am, film lover, movie blogger, Academy Awards enthusiast. I can't wait to watch every film and then tune in every year to see the best of the best gather for their accolades. The Oscar winner, in some ways, is the very pinnacle for success in the industry. But when I tune in this year, it's going to look a little different to me. Instead of only seeing who IS in that room, I'm now also going to be seeing who is NOT in the room. I'm going to be raising a toast to all the people who were talented and fierce and visionary and motivated but who somewhere along the way had to face a difficult choice and liked themselves too much to accept the abuse.