Tuesday
New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino recently applied the Booker-award-winning novel Disgrace to the rape trial of film producer Harvey Weinstein, set to go to the jury today. South African author J. M. Coetzee, she says, understands at a deep level how white men in positions of power simultaneously believe that they have become disenfranchised and that they have a sense of entitlement to a woman’s body.
Having been fired from a university for “what he regards as a lusty affair with a student” and for what she “regards as coercion, perhaps rape,” David Lurie is unashamed:
[T]here is an icy near-clarity to the way he experiences the act of overpowering her. When he calls Melanie on the phone, he hears in her voice “all her uncertainty. Too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something.” He shows up at her apartment, uninvited, and Melanie is “too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her.” Her limbs crumple, and she struggles, tells him no. But “nothing will stop him,” and Lurie carries Melanie to her bedroom. “She does not resist,” Coetzee writes. “All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. . . . Little shivers of cold run through her. . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration. . . . So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.” After it’s over, she asks him to leave, and in his car Lurie has “no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. . . . running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker.”
How Melanie feels, Tolentino observes, feels “immaterial” to Lurie:
If his desire is real, how could it be wrong? When, later, he recalls the university’s investigation, he identifies his age as the real crime, and his decaying body the punishment. He believes himself guilty not of raping a student but simply of growing old, becoming one of those men from whom a prostitute might shudder “as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night.”
Tolentino reminds us of the case against Weinstein:
He’s the disgraced producer, the disgraced mogul. His sexual-assault trial in New York is completing its fourth week. Six women have testified that he assaulted them. The defense’s first witness, a friend of Weinstein’s, was confronted in court with texts he’d written to Weinstein saying that there was “likely a bunch of truth to the claims that you behaved like a cad and more,” and that, if “a lot of these girls had been my daughter, I would have wanted to beat the shit out of you.”… Outside the courtroom, the verdict has already been handed down: a hundred women have accused Weinstein of assault or harassment, ninety-four of them on the record.
Weinstein sounds somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock in that, according to people who know him, he is filled with “self-hatred, that he thought of himself as a deeply unattractive man and was tortured about that.” Hitchcock made actresses pay in his movie plots (think of Janet Leigh in Psycho or Tippi Hedrun in The Birds) whereas Weinstein did so off set. As Tolentino observes, “A man fixated on the supposed injustice of his own lack sometimes concludes that he is entitled to what he doesn’t possess.
A teacher of Romantic poetry, Lurie finds Weinstein-like justification in Lord Byron. This allows him to draw a sharp contrast between his own behavior and that of men who, later in the novel, rape his daughter:
After [his daughter] Lucy’s rape, he muses that among the “legions of countesses and kitchenmaids that Byron pushed himself into there were no doubt those who called it rape. But none surely had cause to fear that the session would end with her throat being slit.” That sort of thing, done at knifepoint, is real rape, he—like Weinstein’s defenders—implies.
Tolentino concludes,
Lurie is a more readily visible figure now. He is the man who frets about the overreach of #MeToo while demonstrating the tenacity of the attitudes that make such a movement necessary. (In Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, published in 2018, the narrator describes a character as “one of several Lurian friends I’ve known: reckless, priapic men risking careers, livelihoods, marriages—everything.”) Lurie believes that he is the victim of a purge.
We’ll see if the jury buys Weinstein’s defense.