Many women who have held or want to hold jobs have a Letterman cracking jokes in the hallways of their psyches.
Like most industries, Hollywood is built on relationships. If you’re trying to make it, you’re constantly being told (reminded, warned, threatened) that you need to be meeting as many people as possible, that contacts are the only way forward, that it’s all just who you know. And that under no circumstances can you afford to jeopardize a relationship with a contact or future contact.
Fuck that. I’ve decided I can afford to lose relationships with a lot of people — people I have known. People I have yet to meet who may not approve of what I’m about to say. People who might circle the wagons against those who speak truth to power, whom they may perceive (rightly or wrongly) as troublemakers.
So the prevailing wisdom round these parts is you never ever burn a contact. You never stop pretending you like someone no matter how they fuck you. You never just draw a line in the sand and say here is my integrity. Anything you do that falls outside this line is something I’m going to have to call you out on. Because they might be willing to help you some day (though they never do, because a person who has acted badly just wants to forget about it and you). Or, God forbid, they might keep you from getting a job. They know people.
So you keep other people’s secrets for them. Because you want to work in this town, you want other people to like you. You don’t want their emotional failure or indiscretion or moral problem to reflect badly on you.
And you wonder if it wasn’t your fault.
Here’s how it goes down:
You get a job. Maybe it’s your dream job. There’s lots of competition, lots of back-biting, cattiness from other women, dick-measuring from other men. And then there’s one person there who’s like, the star. He’s the boss, or the team leader, or the cool guy, or literally, the star of the show. Everyone looks up to him, the entire focus of the operation revolves around him. His personal charisma drives the machine forward and puts food on everyone’s table. People get excited when he smiles or calls them by name.
And suddenly, for whatever reason, this star takes an interest in you. It’s not like you’re amazing looking — you’re just a nice girl from whereever you came from, and that’s what makes you fun. Because you’re unspoiled, because you’re still capable of blossoming under the light of a powerful sun, because he can still make his mark on you. He’s as good as married, or he is married, or it doesn’t matter, because he isn’t having a real give-and-take relationship with you. He’s giving you as little as he possibly can in order to take what he wants—he gives you crumbs of attention, charisma, the illusion that he cares.
He has a good time, and so do you. Or you think you do at the time. You’ll never be unspoiled again.
As the gnawing unease of what you’ve done sets in, you wonder how you caused this to happen. Was he responding to something he sensed inside you? You could have stopped it before it started, or before it got to this point, or before you did. And now, you won’t tell anyone — because you’re ashamed. And he’s your friend.
Most of us have some kind of Letterman.
Say you’ve just spent years writing your first novel only to be told by editors that if you revised it it might be published, so you’re fighting your way through clinical depression in order to make the revision, throwing two more years down that rabbit hole. Say you finally made your way out to L.A., say you don’t know many people, you’ve got no money whatsoever, all you’ve got is this novel you’re trying to revise and the fact you know it’s good and will be published because people said it might. Say you’re living on hope, literally living on someone’s couch. And say because you don’t have health insurance, you’re taking an experimental antidepressant that makes you gain thirty pounds. You hate the way you look; you feel dead inside. Say you don’t know yet that that novel will turn out great but will never be published in the end.
And then in the middle of all this, some Hollywood guy befriends you. He’s married, but that doesn’t matter, because you’re just friends, and you’re supposed to be developing industry contacts, right? In a very hard, lonely time, he gives you attention, support, advice, counsel. Career perspective. You sincerely believe it’s totally innocent, that you’re just friends and he has no intentions otherwise. You certainly have no intentions otherwise.
You gradually feel more dependent on him emotionally. He tests your boundaries. He talks often about how wonderful his wife is, how great it is to be married. Occasionally you do get those red flag feelings, but you dismiss them because he keeps throwing carrots in your path. How he can help you. Why it would behoove you to stick around. And because you’re in Hollywood, you’re surrounded by the relentless drumbeat: You need more contacts, more contacts, more contacts ….
One day he calls to say he’s in your neighborhood and wants to take you to lunch. He’s at your door, then somehow, he’s in your apartment. Then he’s pinning you to the wall, he’s kissing you.
You feel gross and guilty and excited at once. Betrayed. So, so confused. This was someone you looked up to like a father. You thought you could trust him. You’re shocked, frankly, that he would do this—you’re also very naive. You feel humiliated, like you did this. Like you were some kind of cocktease, spending months leaning on someone emotionally … what the hell did you expect? And you’re excited too. Because here’s a man who is interested in you, despite what a mess your life is, despite how fat you are, despite everything you’ve revealed to him. And who are you not to repay him for his months of investment, if this is what he was doing it for? He’s been so kind.
I sucked his dick. The whole thing took less than an hour, and it’s haunted me for years. That was the only time—we didn’t see each other again. I get a knot in my stomach every time I think about it. Because before that moment I never ever thought I would do something like that. I’ve felt very ashamed of it ever since it happened. But I’m talking about it now, this publicly, because I’m tired of guarding myself, monitoring that everything I do and say is okay. Fact is—everything I do and say is okay. I have nothing to hide, and the more open I get, the more connected I am to the world.
I seriously hesitated to write this post, afraid I would alienate a whole lot of people. People who could hire me or get me work. And I didn’t want to sound like a victim or like I was blaming someone else for my mistakes. But you know what? We’re all going to get a lot further a lot faster if we tell the truth. And not just individually, but as a gender. As an age group. As an industry. As a people. We’re all in this together, and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you’ve been doing. You can start now and decide to get honest with yourself and free yourself of the daily psychic burden of carrying your own secrets and those of other people.
I want to speak out for other women who don’t feel ready. For all of us who want jobs and are afraid that if we tell the truth, it’ll reflect badly on us. That no one will hire us. Because each one of us that does it makes it a little more okay for the next and the next. That’s how we help each other.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my blocks–what stops me up emotionally, what keeps me from writing, from relating to other people, what keeps me closed and afraid and frozen. What keeps me telling myself “I can’t,” “I won’t,” “I shouldn’t.” My blocks are mostly made of secrets, and shame, and fear. The fear of being found out.
But I’m a writer. I want to be found out. That’s what I wake up and do, every day. That’s what I strive for. So this is me, narcing on myself.
This was one of my Bad Secrets. The kind of thing I had only told a therapist. Until here now, where I’m telling the world. And ever since I started contemplating this post roughly a week ago, I’ve felt a little freer, a little less blocked. Just the thought that I could tell everyone something that previously I had told no one made me feel pretty okay.
The lesson here is this: I don’t like people who mess around with married people. I haven’t liked myself because of this incident. But your main character doesn’t need to be likable. Just tell your audience enough about her so they can grip emotionally. We don’t have to relate to what we find out about her — we can know a lot and not relate to a character. But knowing more sometimes helps us understand and at the very least helps us care about what happens next. We don’t need to like her, we just need to want to know more about her. And the more we know, the more we want to know.
Letterman played us like a fiddle in his series of apologies — wry and jokey and just a good old Indiana boy, mugging for the audience’s sympathy in finding out he’s a normal guy with flaws just like them. And that’s another strategy for selling an unlikable character: give him charisma, the power of persuasion, the ability to sell a crowd on the idea that despite his larger-than-life intensity and flaws, he’s really just like them. This is what makes us want to know more. Letterman’s apologies were a master class in how to develop an unlikable character that an audience would … like. But let’s not be duped by the charisma of a master showman who has spent a lifetime learning how to read and play on an audience’s sympathies.
Everyone made pains to point out that Letterman’s relationships were consensual. My relationship was consensual as well. And while I have no interest in outing or humiliating that man, I believe there were many factors that made us un-equal. The experience has been a deeply troubling burden I’ve carried ever since.
But now, having spent about a week digging around in this painful little place, probing it and really learning about what’s there, I like myself more.
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Tags: Hollywood, Letterman, unlikable characters
