Armie Hammer speaks at a Comic-Con panel in San Diego, California, in 2015. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Kaveri Pillai ’23
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
As an outsider, the film industry represents the most glamorous and optimistic parts of reality. We go to cinema halls to escape from our ordinary lives — we obsess over celebrities and we dream of living a life with such opulence. Movies have proven to be the only permanence in this world of constant change or turmoil. But with the immense power to influence an audience comes the burden of social responsibility.
The Time’s Up movement gained momentum in 2018 after several sexual abuse allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein came to light. What started as a handful of women, dubbed “Silence Breakers” by Time magazine, coming forward has become a ripple effect in the sea of intolerable behavior in the film industry.
The latest figure to receive such attention is actor Armie Hammer, who made headlines at the start of the year for having been accused by multiple of women of intense physical violence, emotional manipulation and sexual abuse. While legal action against the accused is a matter of law, what the film industry may say about one of its members is what encourages us to ask: What is the film industry’s social responsibility when it comes to employing the accused?
The industry is infamous for its complicity when it comes to stars like Woody Allen, but its reaction to the claims made against Armie Hammer are telling. If anything, it highlights a newfound urgency and pressure for the industry to react to these issues and fulfill its social responsibility.
The idea of social responsibility comes from the identification of movies as instruments of social change. Cuban film director Julio García Espinosa, who wrote a manifesto for New Latin American Cinema in 1969, was one of the few of his era to push for film as a medium for sociopolitical change and for having the power to move and educate audiences.
Ever since the 1960s, with political instability and topics of neocolonialism and diaspora gaining popularity, directors from these once colonized countries in Europe, Central America and Africa have aimed to use film as the bridge between the common man and knowledge.
The film industry pushed the general public to engage with these real topics of class struggle and liberation on a bigger scale, a shift from the isolation they were far too familiar with. While this awareness of social matters hasn’t diminished, the directors’ articulation of these matters beyond the screen has. Espinosa echoed this in his manifesto when he encouraged directors to move away from film aesthetic value and to pour their personal stories into film as an act of social justice. Such an accessible platform, according to Espinosa, is a gift that cannot be misused. Because film was essentially pushed to be an anchor of revolution, filmmakers shouldn’t stop at showing the importance of change on the screen. They should go beyond and practice it too.
The importance of maintaining this social responsibility in the 21st century cannot be diminished. For too long, the film industry has housed, protected and praised sexual offenders and predators on the pretense of their artistry.
Allen, who was accused of sexually abusing and grooming his then-adopted 7-year-old daughter Dylan Farrow, is one such example. While Allen could not have dismissed the claims any faster, it is the celebration of a publicly accused director by a notoriously sexist and racist industry that compromises the promise to fulfill a social duty. Since the allegations, Allen has gone on to win an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an honorary Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. This revelation did anything but ruin his career in the film industry, which makes one ponder what privileges are at play here for a straight white man.
While this might have changed only a decade later with the Harvey Weinsteins and the Kevin Spaceys of the world, it is commendable to see what the film industry has done with Hammer’s case.
Ever since the accusations of abuse became public, Hammer has been forced to exit two upcoming projects: the romantic comedy “Shotgun Wedding” and “The Offer,” a Paramount Plus series about the making of “The Godfather.” Still, removing a cast member on the phone while being overtly silent on the trauma he has inflicted is nothing short of being silent to a crime.
While the future of his projects like Amma Assante’s thriller “Billion Dollar Spy” and Disney’s “Death on the Nile,” based on Agatha Christie’s book of the same name, are under consideration, the film industry has to vocalize the reason why such actors are being excused from film projects and should show that it will not tolerate such immoral behavior regardless of who partakes in it. It is about time that the industry goes back to spearheading conversations not just on the screen but in real life to global audiences about crucial social matters.