Posted on 04/26/2023 11:58:38 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Molly Ringwald thinks cancel culture is an "unsustainable" response to the issues that arose with #MeToo
Molly Ringwald is still best known for being John Hughes’ leading lady, but she’s also a singer, writer, Riverdale mom, real mom, and a French translator. Her latest work is translating My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider. Inevitably, that’s led to Ringwald contemplating the violation Schneider experienced on the set of Last Tango In Paris and how their parallel roles as highly visible film stars differed.
“In a way, my experience was the opposite of Maria’s,” she tells The Guardian in a new interview. “The way she was thought of, this wanton muse, this louche character; that’s what was expected of her. It was the very opposite of me: I was projected as this perfect, sweet American girl next door. Which wasn’t me, but I was figuring out who I was, too. I was pretty young.” ]= Nevertheless, Ringwald’s famous movies were not free of misogyny and sexualization of female characters (as she thoughtfully wrestles with in a 2018 New Yorker essay), and behind the scenes, she also experienced unwelcome advances from older men (as she details in another New Yorker essay in 2017). Attitudes have changed in the years since, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, but Ringwald wonders now if the industry has really undergone true, systemic change. “It’s like bullying in schools. They say: ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy.’ After that, it still exists, but it goes a little bit underground,” she says. “It’s a bit harder to get caught. It gets harder to say: ‘Is this bullying or not?’ It’s a bit like that with #MeToo.”
“I don’t think a Harvey Weinstein situation could exist now. But, again, a lot of people have gotten swept up in ‘cancellation’, and I worry about that; it’s unsustainable, in a way,” Ringwald asserts. “Some people have been unfairly canceled and they don’t belong in the same category as somebody like Harvey Weinstein.”
Before we get bogged down in the mire of “cancel culture,” a nebulous concept often leveled in bad faith to spur disingenuous “culture wars,” Ringwald makes a fair point that the notion itself is a distraction from real issues. “What it ends up doing is make people roll their eyes. That’s my worry,” she says. “I do want things to change, for real. Workplaces should be places where everyone can feel safe—not just in Hollywood, but everywhere. Particularly Americans. We can never do things incrementally; we’re so binary, so all or nothing. We’re basically a bunch of puritans.”
How come the women who sold their souls and took the part and money are not penalized? Only the buyers are penalized.
Yikes. She looks like a dude now.
She really did become Clair in real life. A fat girls name.
Waaaaaayyyyyy too much Botox.
“What’s happenin’ hot stuff?”
-Long Duck Dong
They were not blackmailed. They traded sex for money and fame. All they had to say was “No” like some of the others.
Either you do this or else something unpleasant will happen to your career.
The ones that said "no" had unpleasant things happen.
They learned the brutal truth that it wasn't their career. They also learned the ugly truth about themselves about what they were willing to do because they didn't want any other career.
They learned that they didn't have family nor friends who would have steered them away from that path, starting when they were very young. How many mothers, knowing what the casting couch was, still sent their daughters into Hollywood?
Historically, society looked at actors and actresses the same as prostitutes.
I guess I don’t think actor or actress is really a career one can plan on.
Yeah, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I wouldn’t call that a career either, but to each their own.
oh, goodie.....another has been c-list actress who was paid to read lines written by other and told where and how to deliver those lines by others tries to enlighten us on what to think.
Or something.
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