Terry Gilliam, Sarah Polley, victim blaming and young women in Hollywood
The other day, Terry Gilliam threw out an opinion no one asked for; that the #MeToo movement has become âmob ruleâ . âIt is a world of victims. I think some people did very well out of meeting with Harvey and others didnât,â he added. âThe ones who did, knew what they were doing. These are adults; we are talking about adults with a lot of ambition.â Gilliam also claimed that some of the women didnât actually suffer, but used Weinstein to further their careers, and that he knew women who walked out of meetings with the mogul before getting sexually abused.
In light of this garbage hot take, itâs interesting to consider an interaction he had with actress/director Sarah Polley in 2005.  He and Sarah had a history- they starred in a movie together when Sarah was very young.  In 2005 he was about to make another movie with another young girl and Sarah wrote him a letter detailing some of the struggles she had during the movie she and he had filmed in hopes that it would make him more aware of and sensitive to the ways that the entertainment world can steal agency from young actors, especially young girls and women.
Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went off relatively close to me, etc. I remember running through this long sort of corridor where explosives went off every few feet, things were on fire, etc. I cried hysterically in my dadâs lap and begged him to make sure I wouldnât have to do it again, but I did. I think I did it quite a few more times. I remember the terrifying scene where we were in the boat and the horse jumped out and ended up surfacing a plastic explosive that went off right under my face. I remember being half trampled by a mob of extras and then repeating the scene several times. I remember working very long hours.
So hereâs my point: who knows whom youâll cast and what their parents will be like. My suspicion is that you might need to be constantly analyzing whether you would put your own 9-year-old in the positions youâll be putting this kid in. Because itâs entirely likely that the childâs own parents will be (for whatever reason) incapable of making the right call. This is a huge responsibility but Iâm starting to think (from watching other kids and parents) that this is a fundamental part of the job when youâre working with kids who should really be in school anyway.
She went on to offer him some advice on how to recognize and address ways in which a child actor might be put in frightening and uncomfortable situations and how he might better address them. Â
Gilliamâs response foretells his current views on the ways that Hollywood steals agency from the vulnerable. He tells Polley, rather patronizingly, that she was never in danger rather than acknowledging the validity of her feelings and the imbalance of power that made her unable to advocate for herself. He tells her that she was âtoo valuable to the productionâ for her to have met any real harm instead of giving her the respect she deserves as a coworker and as a human being.
Thereâs no question based on this and his current stance on #MeToo that he trades heavily in victim blaming and paternalistic gaslighting .  But itâs too easy to see him as an outlier.He is far more emblematic of larger issues that have sparked the #MeToo movement.
One of the big concepts he seems blissfully unaware of is the concept of power structures and how they might come into play. How an adult man in a film production might have all of the power when it comes to voicing his discomfort whereas a child might be afraid to speak up or more likely to be ignored.
How someone just starting in the entertainment industry might, when coming up against a Goliath like Weinstein, be all too aware of how easily their career (and indeed their life) might be crushed should they choose to speak out about assault or abuse.
The tendency to gaslight victims, the imbalance of power that is an industry standard, the legacy of abuse that is upheld and excused without question; these are problems that go way beyond the entertainment world. These are the problems that we need to address and the systems we need to dismantle. We need to listen to the Polleys of the world. We need to shout down the Gilliams and we need to elevate the voices of the powerless so that we can fix what is broken.