Some people are probably
grieving for Dustin Hoffman:
He has a long career with
some great roles, which would be enough for many fans to not want this to be
true. Beyond that, there was this video which touched many hearts:
The top comment there is
that you can tell he's a good person. Hold on to that thought.
I was less surprised to
hear allegations of harrassment about Hoffman because I had read this article:
To be fair, even before
the article, I had already thought that "method acting" might only be
an excuse for abusing your co-stars. That was largely based on reading about
Jared Leto and Suicide Squad.
I don't know that all
method actors are abusive; some are probably just mildly frustrating. Hoffman
has had a reputation for being frustrating on set for a long time, though I
only learned about it recently.
Before the Vanity Fair article, the only reference I had ever heard
was the story of Hoffman staying up for two days before filming a scene for Marathon Man where his character was supposed to be
exhausted, and Laurence Olivier suggested that he try acting. Funny, especially
the way Steve Martin told it on "Saturday Night Live", but not
completely accurate either.
Choosing different ways
to provide an authentic performance is not automatically a bad thing. I can see
how arriving physically exhausted might keep you from being ready to do
multiple takes, therefore less ready to keep up with the rest of the cast and
crew. Of course, it might also make you more likely to nail the first take.
Those are probably good things to discuss with the director and rest of the
cast before going in.
For example, one thing
they did to help Justin Henry - the child star of Kramer vs Kramer - was
shoot the film in sequence, so he did not have to keep jumping back and forth
along the story arc to access the right emotions. For a child new to acting,
that is a logical way to get a better performance. That would also be something
that everyone understood beforehand.
It is questionable about
whether there was the same universal buy-in to Hoffman telling Henry things to
make him sad for real when he needed to be acting sad, as the article mentions.
It seems pretty certain that Hoffman did not have buy-in from Streep on
slapping her and goading her about her dead fiancé and the things he did to
improve her performance. She wasn't as well-established then as she is now, of
course, but I think there's a general acceptance that Meryl Streep does not
need unsolicited help in delivering a good performance.
Here's something
interesting: I was not able to completely track it down, but the origins of the
"Try acting" story may be that Hoffman insisted on having Olivier
doing a lot of improvisation and things that made him uncomfortable, and the
protest may have come from that.
If we think about this in
relation to sexual harassment and assault, notice the lack of interest in
consent. Notice the self-assurance that all of this domination is for the good
of the film; he's doing them a favor.
As a side-note, I have this
sentence in my blog drafting file - "I put off writing about toxic
masculinity" - because I had started writing one post, and that wasn't the
way to go so I paged up and started writing what really ended up being that
day's post and kept going. Several posts later, I still haven't gotten where I
meant to go, but in a way it feels like I haven't been writing about anything
but toxic masculinity (except maybe for Monday's post). It's everywhere.
Does that make Dustin
Hoffman a bad person? Well, how are you going to define that? He is probably
good to a lot of people. In the context of the wider discussion and the known
allegations, Spacey is worse and Weinstein is much worse, if you can get past the unhelpfulness of the gradations.
At the same time, that
for a moment Hoffman could get that men ignore interesting but unattractive women,
and feel how unfair it was, does not make him a good person. It's not enough to
see the inequality in a flash and then go right back to profiting from it,
whether that profiting is done consciously or not. You can choose to stay conscious
and work for something better, or you can choose to do what comes easily.
As far as that goes, in Tootsie a very difficult actor lies, sleeps with his
vulnerable student (because it's easier than being honest with her, even if it
can hurt her), uses information gained under false pretenses to make inroads
with an attractive woman, but still gets the funding he needs, accolades, and
even the attractive woman he wanted after one well-deserved punch in the
stomach. Plus the interesting woman was a man all along so he didn't need to be
attractive. I'm not sure that's the game-changer it's supposed to be.
Going back to the
original story, I can easily believe that Dustin Hoffman did not intend serious
harm to Hunter. Society has given many messages that young girls are hot and
flirting is cool and chick only resist you because they have to do that to be
lady-like. Going unquestioningly along with that happens. It doesn't feel good
for the people on the receiving end, but it's not particularly beneficial for
the giver either. It's not beneficial for society, though society's structure
backs it up.
As we navigate that,
there are decisions to make. They may involve people that you like a lot. It
can be helpful to remember that this character you like so much is a character,
and not the actor (though that can be so disappointing).
The answer isn't always
going to be to stop liking people because of the things they do, but it should
not be overlooking things they do because we like them either. It probably
helps if you don't idolize anyone too much.
Anyway, I think we are
done with Hollywood for a while. We are not done with abuse or
with the systems that encourage it. More on that next week.
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