Joan Didion, the Author Hollywood Fears:

Play it As it Lays, Harvey Weinstein, and False Progressive Values

Joan Didion in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park during the writing of her article “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in April 1967.

O n October 5th, 2017, Hollywood changed. Harvey Weinstein, one of the industry’s most powerful men, was the center of an examination executed by The New York Times. They revealed sexual assault allegations against Mr. Weinstein, spanning nearly three decades.

Mainstream interrogation of power has been the last decade’s theme. These inquiries used to be conspiracy theories, underground murmurs of vituperations. Instead, today, we watched with open eyes how too much privilege creates self-indulgence.

Liberal Hollywood contains a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract where actual and irreconcilable disagreement is taboo, a climate rife with an irony that allowed Harvey Weinstein to thrive unchallenged.

One of my favorite Joan Didion essays, On Self-Respect, contains words I keep posted on my wall:

“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with…