Big Men

The multiplying sex harassment scandals directed at leaders in all areas of American and world business force one to question the ugly dynamics at work in countless workplaces and in modern capitalism in general. It almost appears that sexual favors with underlings have become one of the perks of American business, especially given the growing wealth-and-power disparity between corporate heads and average workers. The more dependent workers are on the favors of bosses, the more likely it seems that workers, especially females, will have to come across with favors of their own. This dynamic hits one hard with the reading of Ronan Farrow’s gripping narrative about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Catch and Kill, and the viewing of the award-winning documentary, American Factory. Both deal with “big men,” the one with Weinstein and the higher-ups at NBC, the other with the Chinese “Chairman” (Cao Dewang) of the new factory in Dayton, Ohio, Fuyao American Glass. 

            Of course, powerful men have nearly always displayed an appetite for taking advantage of whatever attractive women come within their field of influence. One has only to think of JFK and Marilyn, or Clinton and Monica, or even FDR and his longtime secretary, “Missy” LeHand. The similar scandals that have rocked congressmen in recent years could fill a small volume. And the mind-bending and costly accounts of Roman Catholic priests abusing young boys, and rich and famous TV ministers indulging in similar perversions, form yet another area where men in power extract ‘benefits’ from powerless underlings.

But what I would like to focus on here are the ‘big men’ and what they think they can get away with. That includes prominently, of course, our dear *president, who famously set out the parameters of what ‘big men’ think, and think they can do:  

“I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This seems to have been the attitude of Harvey Weinstein, the head of some of the largest and most successful production companies in Hollywood (Miramax and The Weinstein Company). Now, the perks of the ‘casting couch’ have long been proverbial in tinsel town. But Weinstein’s bull-like predations appear to have taken things to a new level. 

Let’s take just one case Farrow relates, that of actress Rose McGowan. She had grown up hard and poor, but sometime in the late 1990s, with her first directorial debut, thought her life was “finally getting easier.” Then McGowan’s manager set up a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, her boss, first at a restaurant, then switched to a hotel suite (this last-minute switching seemed to be a common pattern for Weinstein). He began by praising her performances in two films. But, as she relayed to Ronan Farrow on videotape,

“On the way out, it turned into not a meeting…It all happens very fast and very slow. I think any survivor can tell you that…all of a sudden, your life is like ninety degrees in the other direction. It’s—it’s a shock to the system. And your brain is trying to keep up with what’s going on…I started to cry. And I didn’t know what was happening…And I’m very small. This person is very big. So do the math.”

            “Was this a sexual assault?” I asked.

            “Yes,” she said simply.

“Was this a rape?” 

“Yes.”  (p. 61, Catch and Kill)

After much anguish, and on the advice of her attorney (she’d done a sex scene in a movie that would be compromising in court), McGowan decided not to press charges, and her attorney then brokered a large financial settlement with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). But non-disclosure was only the beginning. McGowan was then blacklisted and shunned by other industry power brokers, who she says were all complicit in her ostracism. “I barely worked in movies ever again” (62). And the first time she saw Weinstein again after the rape, she threw up in a trash can (63). 

            Ronan Farrow got as many as thirteen more women to recount their experiences on camera. And with one of them in particular, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a Filipina-Italian model, he managed to obtain a tape in which Weinstein is heard not only trying to get her into his room, but basically admitting to sexually assaulting her and many others. That is, when she asked him why he had groped her breasts the day before, Weinstein said to her: 

“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in. I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”

“You’re used to that?”

“Yes,” Weinstein said. He added, “I won’t do it again.” (89).

With this “I’m used to that” evidence, Farrow now believed he had a bullet-proof story and went to his bosses at NBC for approval and an air date. And here is where the proverbial ‘old-boys network’ kicked into high gear. Farrow had learned, both directly and indirectly, that Weinstein and his cronies had learned of his reporting and were pulling out all the stops to shut him down. This included having him tailed by what turned out to be two Ukrainians, and the machinations of an Israeli organization called Black Cube, made up of former Mossad spies and Israeli special forces. So alarming was this latter development that friends told Farrow to get a gun. This turned out to be not needed, but it attests to how serious were these attempts to kill the story (the title, Catch and Kill, by the way, is taken from a process employed by the National Enquirer of paying women, like Karen McDougal, for her story about her affair with Donald Trump, and then ‘killing’ it, e.g. never publishing it.) Still, at this point, Farrow was sure his own network would not turn down such a timely and sensational story. He was wrong. Apparently, Weinstein’s reach extended to the heads of both NBC and its parent company, Comcast. Suddenly, Farrow was being told to stop all interviews and all reporting on the case. His immediate boss, Noah Oppenheim, after letting Farrow know that NBC would probably not air the story ever, even suggested that perhaps he could get the story into some print medium—far less prestigious, in his eyes, than TV.

            Ronan Farrow eventually did get his story run by The New Yorker, and its impact turned out to be shattering. He also found out about some of the depradations of higher-ups at NBC, including Matt Lauer, all of whom are eventually outed. But these revelations are really only part of the larger story. That story is that sexual abuse is ubiquitous at the upper echelons of American business, and that the tentacles of the enabling and then the covering it up extend very far indeed (Weinstein is also one of the major donors to the Democratic Party). And that, in turn, is because the money and the power at the top flow so liberally and are used with such abandon that they usually succeed in keeping the dirty secrets from coming out.  

            Usually. But not this time. Thanks to Ronan Farrow, and David Remnick at The New Yorker, the piece that Farrow had assembled ran there on October 17, 2017 and blew the elaborate cover machinery out of the water. And the reader of Catch and Kill is finally satisfied that not only the serial rapist that is Harvey Weinstein faced his accusers and justice (he is currently on trial), but that the enablers at NBC were outed as well. Including the star Today show host, Matt Lauer. 

            American Factory reveals a related but different story. There, the ‘big man’ seems incidental to the main narrative, which is to expose the problems in American factory closings of recent years (the plant that Fusao takes over was a General Motors plant that went belly up in 2008, costing thousands of Dayton workers their jobs), and the need for American companies and workers to compete with cheap labor in China and elsewhere. The Chinese bosses show their contempt for ‘soft’ Americans who require coffee breaks, lunch hours, and weekends off. American workers, in turn, complain about the low pay (one worker notes that he was paid $29/hour at GM, and $14/hour for a similar job at Fusao.) The Chairman expresses doubt that the Americans will ever be able to keep up with Chinese worker zeal and willingness to sacrifice for the good of the company. So to help “train” the Americans in good worker practice, he sends a delegation of workers to China to see how things are done. This becomes an eye-opening journey for both the workers and the film’s audience. 

            We see constant reinforcement of the idea that Chairman Cao has become a god-like figure, at least according to the songs and dances and constant adulation that is heaped upon him. Children dance and sing and hop about with great joy and precision, and adult dancers sing “happy happy” with abandon. All is done to express the great happiness that is brought to the underlings by the Chairman. His beneficence knows no bounds (even though what really happens is that both men and women leave their families in the countryside for years for the ‘opportunity’ to work at Fusao in the city). In this ‘brave new world’ in China, it seems the required posture is smiley dancing workers, unable to contain their joy about having been allowed to work themselves to death eighteen hours a day, including weekends. And hovering over it all, smiling benignly (one knows there is an iron fist beneath the grin, for it comes out when raking over the lazy Americans, and excoriating their temerity in calling for a union), is the great Chairman, strolling proudly through his factories, decked out in celebratory ribbons and oozing the fat satisfaction of the global billionaire. 

            In short, Cao Dewang, the great Chairman, is another of the world’s ‘big men.’ And he reveals that, like his American counterparts, he will brook no refusal on the part of workers to sacrifice all for his enterprise. When the workers try to lobby for the ‘right’ to have a union, he calls in a major union-busting firm to spread as much disinformation as it takes to crush it. And crush it he does: the workers vote against allowing union representation, i.e against their own self-interest. Then, of course, he fires those who have been the main proponents of the union, including one female forklift driver, who has just managed to get herself a real apartment (she had been living in her sister’s basement). She is the most charismatic figure in the film, but she suffers for her courage in trying to better the lot of herself and her fellow workers. In the global marketplace as it now exists, unions are characterized as halting progress—e.g. manufacturing that can compete with the poorest laborers on the planet.  And they therefore must dance and sing their gratitude to the ‘big men’ who allow them the opportunity to live, if only barely. Anyone who objects, who tries to speak up and organize for better conditions, is, one way or the other, quickly dispensed with. 

            We in America have grown used to the idea that somehow the little guy always gets a chance, that the equality and fairness and justice of the overall system wins out over greed and cruelty and power in the end. But the story of ‘big men’ and what they see as their divine right to do whatever they choose and be revered for it, should provide a counter-narrative to this nice story. Vigilance is required; vigilance and organization and courage are always required to keep the bigs in check. For when they are not, the outcome is always rape, in one form or another. 

Lawrence DiStasi