America
worships success -- money, power, fame, the ultimate three-legged
stool of achievement.
More
than that, we love "success stories", people born into humble
circumstances who, through hard work and smarts, through good ol' fashioned
grit, gain that aforementioned stool. ("Jenny from the Block",
etc.)
Nobody
in NYC personified that success story more than Harvey Weinstein.
Born
to the children of Jewish immigrants escaping European anti-semitism, Harvey
grew up in a housing project in Queens. He went to college in Buffalo and did
something brilliant: in the 1970s, he got into the music scene there and
brought acts like the Rolling Stones to perform. He learned the
nitty-gritty of show business, how to market, how to promote, how to woo
talent, how to produce, how to get stuff done. He then moved back to NYC in the early 1980s and got into the movie business with his brother Bob. Their company, MiraMax
(sweetly named after their parents, Miriam and Max) became a powerhouse of
independent cinema. Harvey was a genius at recognizing talent, cultivating it,
and getting the world to see and reward it.
Remember
all those great movies? sex, lies, and videotape? My Left Foot? The Crying Game? The
Piano? Pulp Fiction? The English Patient? Good Will Hunting? Chicago? The
King's Speech? (Among many others.) Harvey Weinstein made them
happen.
He
built the careers of great directors and actors (there'd be no Quentin
Tarantino or Gwenyth Paltrow without him), his movies won Oscars,
and, of course, he made money -- tons of money. At a time when the movie
business was becoming more corporate, more boring, more "safe", more about sequels and
franchises and figuring out how to generate theme park rides or toys
to be included with fast food deals, Weinstein was saying "No! We stand
for quality! Originality! Artistry! Groundbreaking films! And we can get rich at the same time!"
In many ways, Harvey Weinstein saved the commercial viability and artistic
integrity of cinema at a time when it was under threat. He made movies matter
again. For that, we owe him a debt.
Of
course, now we all know that it came at a price -- a horrible one. While
Harvey was producing great movies, he was also terrorizing women. He
harassed them, raped them, demeaned them, and, if they didn't submit to his
desires, he ruined their lives. He used his power and wealth to shield
himself from the consequences of his behavior for decades. His awfulness was an
"open secret" but it didn't matter -- his success let him get away
with it. (I know someone who worked at MiraMax in the 1990s, and Harvey's
yelling and screaming was, like Trump's daily Tweet awfulness, such a
daily occurrence that it became normal. Harvey would explode at people for the
simplest, smallest things -- things most normal people wouldn't even get upset
about it).
Harvey
Weinstein epitomized the success that America worships and that NYC
facilitates. And he personified its dark side. The grandson of people
escaping terror became a terrorist himself.
One
of the reasons people strongly desire success -- and will go to
great lengths to achieve it -- is because they believe that
success means, "I can do anything I want! I can have anyone I want!
Nothing will stop me! I am invincible!" It is, they believe, the ultimate freedom, the ultimate promise of America.
Sex
and revenge have always been the phantom legs of the three-legged success
stool. Yes, money means a wonderful material quality of life, fame means
getting invited to any party, and power means getting stuff done -- but
what's the point of all that, a lot of people (i.e. men) think,
"If I don't also get laid? A lot! With lots of people! Lots of different hot
people! And if I can't get even with the people who done me wrong?"
Women,
and lots of them, are the ultimate prize, the ultimate accomplishment, the
ultimate fuel for ambition, the ultimate reward for great success --
especially for guys like Harvey who couldn't get them based on their looks or
personality alone.
But
here's the catch: women still don't want these guys. These guys may have
scaled the heights, they may have transcended their humble origins into great
success, they may have "made it" -- but not really. They're
still ugly and gross, they're still "Jennys from the
block", the kids who got bullied in the schoolyard.
These
guys know it -- and it fills them with rage. It fills them with hatred towards
women. Everything's worthless if all their success can't buy them genuine
desirability. And the dark side in them, their demons, are unleashed to
horrifying effect. They want revenge, they want to hurt these women who will
never want them. And everyone suffers for it.
It's
so sad that it's come to this. Harvey Weinstein is, in many ways, an extreme
and high-profile example of this problem. Success means everything but it's
nothing if it doesn't make you the kind of person you always wanted to be. And
that's a humbleness you can never transcend or buy your way out of. You never
stop being who you really are, no matter how much you achieve.
There
are so many interrelated tragedies to this whole thing. There's Harvey's
victims, first and foremost. There's Harvey, the man, a man who reached the
heights only to fall back down to earth hard. There's the movies, the great
movies he brought into the world, forever tainted now by their association with
him. And this man, once upon a time one of NYC's favorite sons, is
now its greatest villain since Bernie Madoff.
So
often we like to say that successful people's lives have had "fairy
tales endings" -- but it's never that simple. It never ends until, you
know, the end. And sometimes the fairy tale is very, very dark.
Harvey
Weinstein's story would make a good movie that he probably would've
produced.
Postscript: I
remember the summer of 1998. I was spending the summer at college, far from
NYC, dreaming about coming home as soon as I graduated the next year.
Fortuitously I found a copy of New York magazine at the place I was
working, a special 30 anniversary issue, that featured interviews with
prominent New Yorkers. One of the interviews was with Bob and Harvey Weinstein.
They recounted their humble origins, what made them become such big successes,
their love of movies, and why they'd never leave NYC. Their short interview was
memorable because it reminded me of why I desperately wanted to come home and
what the city was all about.
Harvey
said in the interview: "I love New York. We
can go to the grocery store and not bump into guys who want to do a
three-picture deal." That's what I loved about NYC too, then and now: we
can be anyone and do anything and yet have another life completely. (Harvey had
another life, as we discovered, another scary one). So perhaps it's not
surprising that Harvey also said, "there are no limits. If you follow
your heart instead of your head, you can do incredible things."
Harvey didn't believe in limits, as we know all too well now,
but he did incredible things and horrible things at the same time (thus the
duality of man). And the humble kid from Queens has been humbled once
again.
