If today’s society is more “correct,” does it make life more “enjoyable”? Not from what I can tell, unless by “enjoyable” you mean free to whine about anything that offends the ego. I mean life is so short, so why muck it up what you have to feel "bad" all the time? Life today is so damn boring compared to the “old” days, now filled with boring people who make others afraid to do something that will offend them (especially women). Myself being a “loner,” this is only troublesome when ignorant, self-involved, paranoid jerks make their business “my” business.” Why not just ignore the “feeling good about feeling bad” types and enjoy life for its own sake, and the people who don’t want you have “fun” know what they can do with their whatever. From a trailer for a Russ Meyer film:
Moviemaker Russ Meyer, the rural Fellini, serves up a simple homey tale of Olympian togetherness, faith-healing, bra-busting humor, jogging, hulking herculean masculinity…an all-out assault on today’s sexual mores, and more; an end-around attack on women’s lib, blasting through the male machismo syndrome, kicking the crap out of convictions, hang-ups, obsessions, the whole bag.
So recently we hear that a film production was shut down because of complaints about the behavior of actor Bill Murray, who apparently has a history of offending fellow actors on the set. We are told by the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser that the “#Metoo mob comes for Bill Murray and makes mockery of the movement,” and that
Another man is being #MeTooed out of existence — accused, convicted in the public square, soon to be canceled without a trial or so much as a finished kangaroo investigation. All because he pulled a pony tail or two, draped his arm around ladies without first obtaining explicit consent. Guilty — of being an old-fashioned flirt.,,Horrors…source says Murray “was very hands-on touchy, not in any personal areas, but put an arm around a woman, touched her hair, pulled her ponytail — but always in a comedic way.
Peyser has criticized the MeToo movement before; in 2017 she accused the “movement” of lumping the “trivial” with the “legitimate,” observing that Sen. Al Franken was put on the same plane as Harvey Weinstein. His “offense” was pretending to touch—his hands never actually touching—a sleeping former Playboy model’s breast as a juvenile prank from years ago on a comedy tour; Franken was pushed to resign his Senate seat because of it.
Peyser then accused Michelle Goldberg of revealing her bias against men in a New York Times op-ed when Goldberg claimed that she had thought that Franken was “one of the good guys” but now questioned if there were any “good guys,” which Peyser likened as further evidence “of a wider feminist War on Men. My fear is that the pendulum will swing so wildly out of control, the fight against genuine sexually based offenses will be delegitimized as much ado about nothing.”
Of course, the “response” to that is even “unconscious” or “innocent” behavior that offends women is still “bad” and the offender should be constantly aware of the fact that anything can offends someone who is just having a bad day or takes everything “personal.”
But back to Murray. OK, so he’s a jerk and has been for a long time, we are told. For example, we are told that he once threw an ash tray at Richard Dreyfus—who called Murray a “drunken Irish bully”—on the set of What About Bob? Dreyfus’ screen personality is one of those rare ones that are instantly recognizable as being his own, but would you want to be around that kind of character personality longer than necessary? A real person like that can be pretty annoying. In the making of American Graffiti documentary, Dreyfus recounts how a couple of his co-stars grabbed him and threw him into the shallow end of a pool, where his head was bruised after it hit the bottom. Decades later Dreyfus was still obviously “sore” about the incident, but it is perfectly believable to assume that it was done in response to a “personality” that was off-putting to some people.
Then there was incident when Murray and Chevy Chase got into a fisticuffs when Chase returned to host Saturday Night Live after leaving the show following the first season. Murray claimed that the encounter was inspired by lingering resentment by the other cast members who thought that Chase’s ego was a little too big to stomach; today, Murray claims that they are “friends.” Then there was the more widely-known incident involving actress Lucy Liu, whose head is probably on the inflated side too. There are two sides to that story; Liu claimed that Murray was making offensive remarks at her, rather than to her, and she “defended” herself; Murray would claim in a later interview that he speaks his mind if he thinks an actor is “unprofessional” and he is forced to work with them, implying that Liu was such a person.
However, shutting down the set of a film suggests something more serious, but other than what is currently being revealed, Peyser suggests that production in question, Being Mortal, was shutdown out of an overabundance of fear and paranoia. The film’s director, Aziz Ansari, was, according to Peyser, the victim in 2018 of “a woman engaged in a twisted kind of revenge porn aimed at him, posting a viral article online detailing her disgust" with an admittedly consensual “interaction” and that “The poor guy was stunned and slimed, his career, for a while, upended. Meanwhile, the lady hid behind a pseudonym.” The implication was that Ansari shut down the production from the fear of accusations against him being “insensitive.”
I frankly don’t know what to make of this world we live in today. At least I lived long enough for “toys” like cellphones and computers and digital audio and visual media to be a part of everyday life, but I don’ wish I grew up with them; I grew up in a time when you could actually live. As documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recently suggested in an interview, there is no “social” in social media, and people in a room are less likely like to interact with each other and “understand” where they are “coming from” face-to-face, but just bury their heads in their phones seeking out only what they want to know or hear. Increasingly, we are being forced to accept the “hang-ups” and “obsessions” of the minority of one side and abide by their rules. It isn’t so much about “unacceptable” behavior, but that no one knows what is “acceptable” anymore because no knows how to have “fun” anymore.
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