I don’t know how I feel about Casey Affleck, and it has been stressing me out for months.
I saw Manchester by the Sea in December with three of my best friends while we were on break from school. During and after the movie, we all sat in awe of Casey Affleck’s performance as a grieving brother, father and newly appointed guardian to his nephew. The film is incredible and regardless of the rest of this article, I still believe Kenneth Lonergan––the director and writer of the film––deserves support and I highly recommend seeing this film.
Casey Affleck is portrayed as Ben Affleck’s kid brother; an awkward, vegan hipster who never intended to be famous. He’s soft-spoken, shifty and wears a manbun.
I was all gungho about Casey Affleck winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Leading Role and I was fully ready for him to win the Oscar in February. Even though I hadn’t seen most of the other leading performances at this point, I was more than convinced Casey Affleck deserved this award.
And then, the day after the Golden Globes, I was scrolling through Twitter and there was a string of tweets in the explore section containing tweets from female actresses and writers talking about how disappointed they were that Hollywood rewarded someone accused of sexual harassment. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. How could I be that in awe of someone accused of a sex crime?
Some backstory…
In 2010, two women accused Affleck of sexually harassing them on the set of I’m Still Here, a mockumentary about Joaquin Phoenix directed by Affleck. The women charging him worked on the film. Amanda White is a producer and Magdalena Gorka is the cinematographer. They both sued him for around $2 million, citing verbal and physical harassment. White claims, among other things, Affleck directed a crew member to pull out his penis in front of White. Gorka’s accusations run darker, citing an incident where Affleck showed up drunk in her hotel room and got into bed with her and when she woke up, “he had his arm around her, was caressing her back, his face was within inches of hers and his breath reeked of alcohol.”
The case was settled out of court, and at the time, Affleck vehemently denied the claims, even threatening to countersue before finally agreeing to settle. The case is murky; other women on set claim Gorka and White were making it all up, but that may just have been to protect their own careers. In addition, both the women and Affleck signed a nondisclosure agreement and are not allowed to talk about the case. That’s why in interviews, neither Affleck nor the interviewer brings up the case. I listened to Marc Maron’s podcast with Affleck and in Maron’s intro, Maron addressed the agreement as the reason he didn’t ask about the charges in the interview.
In addition, it might be good to note that Casey Affleck entered rehab for alcohol addiction after the filming of I’m Still Here in 2010. Coincidental timing, huh?
Do we need to talk about Nate Parker?
A lot of people have been decrying the treatment of Casey Affleck on the grounds of how the media shamed Nate Parker this year, which probably played some part in the failure of Parker’s film Birth of a Nation.
While attending Penn State in the late 1990s, Parker was accused of raping a female student with his wrestling teammate, Jean Celestin. The cast went to trial and Celestin was convicted while Parker was exonerated. (Celestin’s conviction was later overturned.) The woman who accused them of rape committed suicide in 2012.
Parker was absolutely shredded by the media last fall when Birth of a Nation was being released, but his case also opened up a lot of dialogue about how to separate art and artist, just like Mel Gibson, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski all have.
Some thoughts on these comparisons:
1) They’re not useful. It doesn’t make sexual harassment better because Nate Parker raped someone. It doesn’t. We shouldn’t use Nate Parker to excuse Casey Affleck.
2) Nate Parker is a scummy guy. The way he talks about the case grosses me out. I’ve watched interviews with him about it and it makes my skin crawl. But that is a key difference between him and Affleck: Nate Parker can talk about what happened. Affleck can’t.
3) Nate Parker went to trial and was found innocent––even though there is a lot of evidence that he probably wasn’t. Less than half of rape cases that are brought to trial end in a conviction, even though the rate of false accusations hovers at around 7 percent. However, Affleck’s case doesn’t even fit within these statistics because he settled out of court. Thus, there is no public record of the case.
4) A lot of people have been citing Parker’s race as a reason why his crime looked worse than Affleck’s, who is white. People have said the reason Parker got wrecked and Birth of a Nation failed is because he’s black; whereas, Affleck managed to avoid this damage because he’s white. I disagree with this. I’m sure race played some role in the media coverage, but I don’t feel it affected how the voters voted. Birth of a Nation has a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes; Manchester has a 96%. Manchester by the Sea is just a better movie than Birth of a Nation. And I certainly don’t think Nate Parker would have beaten out Damien Chazelle, Mel Gibson (um, hello? Let’s talk about scum here), Barry Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan or Denis Villeneuve for a best director nomination or Andrew Garfield, Ryan Gosling, Denzel Washington, or Viggo Mortensen for a best actor nomination.
“I believe that any kind of mistreatment of anyone for any reason is unacceptable and abhorrent, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect in the workplace and anywhere else. There’s really nothing I can do about it. Other than live my life the way I know I live it, and to speak to what my own values are, and how I try to live by them all the time.”
This quote is what Affleck told the Boston Globe in regards to the allegations after he won his Oscar at the end of February. It’s vague. A lot of people have been saying it’s not enough and it isn’t. It’s a very, very weak statement. But again, Affleck can’t respond to the allegations, and that’s the biggest problem for me when I’m trying to discern how I should feel about this case. We don’t know. If this case would have gone to trial, then we would have heard from White and Gorka. We could have seen if they’re arguments were substantial or if they really were just creating these allegations as a way to get more money from Affleck (there is concrete evidence they were not being paid equitably to the men who were working on I’m Still Here), or we could have seen that Affleck is a cold-hearted misogynist who doesn’t care about the way he treats women, like we’ve seen so many rapists and sexual harassers behave during their trials.
But we can’t. They settled out of court and can’t talk about it. And I really, really hate that. So we are left with this vague, wishy-washy statement.
Artist versus Art
So a question arises: since it’s pretty likely that, if Affleck was struggling with alcohol issues at the time and the instances of women falsely accusing men is very low, he probably did harass those women in at least some way on the set, how do we then approach the issue of him winning an Academy Award?
There are basically two camps. Fresh Off the Boat actress Constance Wu let out a series of tweets about the allegations, most prominently with a sarcastic tweet saying “Art isn’t about humanity, right?” Wu and many others believe Affleck should not be rewarded for his performance in Manchester by the Sea because regardless how good someone acts, we can’t reward sexual predators.
On the other hand, a large group of people believes that art is art and regardless of the character of a person, they deserve to be rewarded for it. This viewpoint essentially asks us to separate the art and the artist. There are some people in this group who also say that, in general, they don’t feel like this in cut-and-dry “they did it” cases, but because of the ambiguity surrounding the allegations against Affleck, they’re more than okay with him being rewarded for it.
Obviously, this issue extends to further than just Affleck. Mel Gibson was nominated for an Oscar this year and he’s reviled by a meaty portion of Americans. Recently, it came out that Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci did not warn actress Maria Schneider about the infamous butter rape scene in The Last Tango in Paris before filming it. And then there’s the whole explosion of rape allegations against Bill Cosby which rightfully wrecked his image of America’s dad forever.
And we struggle to figure out how we should feel about the things these sketchy men create. Should I not enjoy Annie Hall because Woody Allen was accused of child molestation? Should no one ever watch The Cosby Show again? Should I go buy every copy of Braveheart and just set them on fire? It’s a tricky line to walk across.
What many people claim is that it’s fine to enjoy Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea, but he just shouldn’t be rewarded for it and the award should have gone to someone like Denzel Washington, who hasn’t been accused of a heinous crime.
So how do I feel?
I. DON’T. KNOW.
It literally makes me sick to my stomach thinking about it because I honestly do think out of the five nominees, Affleck gave the best performance, but it does feel inherently wrong to give praise and the highest award in acting to someone who drunkenly crawled into bed with a woman.
I feel for Casey Affleck. From the fact he went to rehab and has been clean from alcohol for the past seven years, it shows me he is trying to be a better person. I do believe in second chances and I honestly think he’s trying to be a better person. But that certainly doesn’t absolve him of any ickiness if he really did force a woman to look at another man’s penis.
Two things enrage me about all of this. One, the fact that they settled out of court. I want to know and we should know what happened because as it stands, people are innocent until proven guilty in this country and right now, all we can do is presume guilt because he decided to settle out of court. I totally understand wanting to keep it out of the public eye, especially for the women, but now, the indefiniteness is causing a whole lot of trouble. And if––and this is a big, fat if––this case falls under the very small category of fake allegations, it sucks that this man’s name is being smeared on the Internet, like what happened to the members of the Duke lacrosse team in 2006. However, this isn’t to say I think he didn’t do it. The Duke case is clearly the exception to the rule, not the rule. If we follow the normal circumstances surrounding sexual assault and harassment cases, Casey Affleck is probably guilty.
The other thing that enrages me is that my sweet angel Brie Larson had to give Casey Affleck that award. Actress Brie Larson is one of the biggest advocates against sexual assault in Hollywood. Last year, after Lady Gaga’s performance accompanied by sexual assault survivors, Brie Larson stood and hugged every single one of the survivors as they exited the stage. Because she won both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress, Brie Larson has been forced to hand Casey Affleck an award, not once, but twice this season. I know it’s tradition, but they should not make a woman who won an award for playing a sexual assault survivor last year hand an award to an assailant.
And that brings me to the one concrete thing I do definitely know about all of this: Casey Affleck is not the exception to the rule in Hollywood. It would be lovely if Affleck, Polanski, and Allen are just rogue bad guys who made it into the Hollywood elite, but they’re not. Sexual assault is rampant in Hollywood and women are pressured into not speaking up because women’s jobs in entertainment are precarious. Only four women have ever been nominated for best director and only one, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won. (And after she won, Bigelow’s status as director James Cameron’s ex-wife was more discussed than her directing achievements.) Women in the other categories besides Best Actress, Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling and Production Design are few and far between. Thus, when a producer tells a woman she needs to sleep with him to keep her job, she isn’t likely to speak up. These occurrences aren’t relics of the past; they still happen.
I don’t know how I feel about Casey Affleck’s Academy Award win, but I do know how I feel about what he allegedly did and the problem of sexual violence in Hollywood: it needs to be put in the spotlight, it needs to not come with gag agreements and it needs to stop.
Image Credit: Featured Image, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5