Sorkin and Rudin

I feel like “sorking” and “ruding” should maybe be words? We know what “rudin” would be. In a nutshell, “rudin” is behaving like an evil cartoon film producer of the most cliched kind; it’s related to “weinsteining” but doesn’t necessarily involve rape, just non-stop verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Some might suggest that “sorkin” might mean “to disavow any knowledge of a former colleague’s abusive behavior” while cutting all ties with them. Lot of that going around.

We like to say about abusers like Weinstein and Rudin that “everybody knew” and enabled the behavior. There were many enablers and, yes, no doubt some of them had direct knowledge or at least heard direct allegations from victims. To behave as if this set of people was the same as “everyone,” though, is a convenient fiction. It’s convenient, not only because it gives us secondary and tertiary villains to roast in our righteous anger, but also because it helps paper over our own complicity with evil.

How do we know that “everybody knew?” Because every one of us has, at one time or another, become aware, or at least suspicious, that someone we knew was behaving badly. Not always to the level of abuse, but just behaving in a less than ideal way all the way up to actual crimes. When we hear from famous people, like Aaron Sorkin, who have worked a lot with the abuser, in this case, Scott Rudin, and they say, I had no idea he was doing this stuff, but I’m glad they caught him, we immediately connect with it. We say Of course you knew, how could you not know, because we knew, too, or we feel we should have known, or should have spoken up, or should have left that job or that friendship. But we didn’t because, much like Aaron Sorkin, we are people and people are incredibly good at pretending they didn’t see something they didn’t want to see. Famous people who “must have known” but didn’t act must also be punished because they are us. They are bystanders who put blinders on.

In the excellent, chilling film The Assistant (2019), written and directed by Kitty Green, a young assistant in the office of a powerful Hollywood mogul (based on Weinstein) begins to understand that the boss is an abuser of women and that she, and all of the other workers, are meant to keep silent about what they observe. The thing is, most of them don’t “know” anything. They don’t actually see the abuse and they don’t hear about it directly. All of the signs are there, but that’s not “proof,” so they manage to ignore it. This is the exact position most people who work with abusers are in—if they are not direct victims and do not see the abuse themselves, they don’t “know” and so they can deny what’s happening, even to themselves. There is always an amount of bad behavior that people are willing to take, whether directed at them or colleagues. It’s easy to imagine decades of Rudin’s colleagues who were never directly confronted with evidence of his worst behavior that they were aware of his reputation as a “tough” producer, or even as an asshole human, but nothing they saw or experienced rose to the level where they felt like they had to destroy their relationship with him. Yes, this is self-serving and unethical, but welcome to fucking the entire human race. We all have done it in one way or another, every last one of us, and we feel guilty about it sometimes. Thus, the ire at Sorkin’s sorkining.

I have bad news for those who would like to “cancel” the people who have worked with abusers without whistle-blowing. If your sense of outrage (which is actually about you and your own past failings) requires you to dismiss or even erase the works of these supporting characters, the movie vault, for one, empties out very quickly. Do you know what movies Rudin produced? Here’s a very partial list—think of all the artists involved:

The Addams Family (1991), The Firm (1993), Clueless (1995), The First Wives Club (1996), The Truman Show (1998), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Zoolander (2001), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Hours (2002), School of Rock (2003), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Frances Ha (2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Captain Phillips (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Steve Jobs (2015), Lady Bird (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019).

This is only a fraction of the movies he directly produced. If we added in films he executive produced (e.g., Sister Act, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and There Will Be Blood, among many) the list of beloved and popular films made by the some of biggest directors and stars in the world gets even longer. If all of the people who contributed to these films were somehow complicit in Rudin’s abuse and ought to be held accountable for it by the dismissal of their work, well, you might as well not watch movies anymore. It’s not safe. In fact, considering that Rudin’s behavior was legendary enough to possibly inspire a movie as far back as 1994 (he’s widely believed to be among the inspirations for Swimming with Sharks), maybe everyone who has watched and enjoyed the above movies is also complicit?

Which is the real point: WE ARE ALL COMPLICIT. The condemnation and preening on social media and in the entertainment press is pure vanity. Even the victims, in some cases, sorry not sorry, display a staggering spinelessness in their failure to respond ethically to the abuse. Their silence—which, sorry not sorry, has much too frequently been a craven attempt to place their personal careers ahead of their own, and many other people’s, well-being—allowed some of these abusers to continue for years without consequence. I know, it’s verboten to ever blame the victims—and I am not blaming them for the abuse they suffered, nor do I fail to understand how trauma affects people, and in the case of extreme abuse (such as rape and similar sexual violation), obviously the trauma can be overwhelming and coming forward has too often yielded no punishment—but some of them were just cowards.

Being a coward is not a crime. But when your boss smashes a computer monitor on your hand, necessitating a trip to the hospital, and neither you nor anyone else in the room smashes his face to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp, or at least calls the police or sues the motherfucker, what is the calculation there? No one is allowed to even yell at you at work. You never have to be treated like that. If you just quietly accept horrible abuse, take money and go away—or continue working for the guy—what kind of fucking person are you?

So where is your personal line? How many times have you looked the other way? Who have you allowed to treat you badly? Why have you allowed it? You have reasons for allowing it. Are they good reasons?

People don’t change abusive behavior, if they ever do, unless they are forced to do it. That is everyone’s responsibility; if you choose your career over that, whether anyone blames you for that or not, you are helping the shark and all the future sharks.