Hollywood Flattery Culture Cloaks Reality
Positive testimonies of onscreen sexuality, part 3
Over the years, I have spilled a significant amount of digital ink on actors’ negative experiences filming nude and sex scenes. Even so, I’ve acknowledged that not all actors have the same perspective:
In reality, it is true that not every actor experiences shock or shame when faced with nude/sex scenes. These experiences, while not universal, are prevalent. That has been my point. . . .
Not every actor feels violated by these situations, but a significant amount of them do. There’s a difference between all and many. In focusing on the experiences of the many, I do not mean to imply that it is the experience of everyone.
Even though they haven’t been historically prevalent, there are positive actor testimonies out there. For example, Shailene Woodley says she loved filming her first sex scene, saying “It’s my favorite scene in the whole movie!” Some actors may even say things like, “I love sex scenes,” or, “A lot of my costars have been sexy guys my age who are really respectful and cool.” In reference to filming a particular scene of intimacy, actors might even use descriptions like “so lucky,” or “a privilege,” or “liberating.”
How do we rightly handle testimonies like these? This particular blog series is my attempt to answer that question. And such an answer requires examining at least five relevant factors:
Hollywood flattery culture
Industry peer pressure
The context of actor interviews
Contradictory testimonies
Last time, we looked at the first reason. Today, we’ll look at the second: Hollywood’s flattery culture.
When Flattery Flourishes, Honesty Atrophies
The entertainment industry is highly competitive. The Harvard Business Review points out how domains like Hollywood, Washington, and Silicon Valley involve “lots of extremely smart and ambitious individuals vying for just a few top slots.” As participants work their way up the totem pole, “the margin for error is much smaller, and the competition intensifies. This winnowing process means just a handful of people will attain prominence or success.”
This atmosphere affects how people work together, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
In other industries, the workplace is often a communal hub. In Hollywood, it’s too frequently the core of a maelstrom that pits one individual against another. . . . Transience is the very essence of the entertainment business, unpredictability its warp and weft.”
As one might suspect, such working conditions affect how friendships play out. The article continues:
A friend in Hollywood is an ally, a fellow traveler, someone who doesn’t pose a threat, at least not an immediate one, though that can change in the blink of an eye.
In this transient and unpredictable climate, actors must do their best to both advance their own careers while at the same time avoiding the appearance (if not the reality) of tearing down someone else’s. This leads to what is called “ingratiatory behavior”—that is, behavior designed to please others and curry favor for oneself. A biblical term would be “people-pleasers” (Eph. 6:6; Col. 3:22).1
As Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian once noted, Hollywood is one of the centers of ingratiatory behavior, “where flattery is not only the coin of the realm, but even when it’s an obvious counterfeit, is still valuable to the recipient.” Flattery is exchanged like money in the relational economy of Hollywood. And while flattery may sometimes include shades of truth, its existence doesn’t tend to foster a sense of transparency and honesty.
This is not to say every word of praise between Hollywood persons is patently false. There are, to be sure, numerous actors who praise their coworkers for genuine reasons. Common grace exists in every sphere of life, and even in a cutthroat environment it is possible to find something praiseworthy about practically anyone. Besides, there is wisdom in the saying, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”
There is, no doubt, genuine praise dished out in the entertainment industry. It’s just mixed in with a heaping does of disingenuous praise as well. And that makes untangling the two rather difficult.
With Friends Like These, Who Risks Honesty?
The point is not that positive testimonies of onscreen sexuality should automatically be rejected as falsehoods. Rather, the point is that the social and relational climate of Hollywood makes it incredibly difficult to air complaints and concerns about one’s coworkers, employers, and overall working environment. Burning bridges is the last thing an actor wants to do. The best way to keep one’s options open is to keep one’s mouth shut—when it comes to criticism, that is.2
So when an actress demonstrates a nonchalant—or outright positive—attitude toward filming hypersexualized content, she may be telling the whole truth.3 With Hollywood being what it is, however, at least some of those positive testimonies aren’t going to be entirely—or even remotely—genuine.
On the flip side, when an actress shares distress over performing scenes of sexuality, it may not automatically make her more trustworthy, but it does give a ring of authenticity. She’s not just going with the flow. She’s not just trying to bolster her career. She’s not bending over backwards to keep from rocking the boat.
The bottom line is this: not everyone who says they’re fine shooting hypersexualized scenes is being honest. In a world where flattery reigns supreme, honesty may feel like the worst policy.
Previous entry: “Margot Robbie and the Slippery Slope of Moral Compromise”
Next entry: “The Massive Weight of Industry Pressure”
The definition of the Greek word behind “people-pleasers” is as follows: “studying to please man, courting the favour of men.”
When actors criticize how they’ve been treated during the filming of sexualized content, that criticism often isn’t shared until years after the fact—and even then, it can still remain rather vague (in that they don’t accuse any one person in particular). A couple examples include Evangeline Lilly and Salma Hayek.
Although, as we looked at last time, such testimonies might be the sign of a seared conscience rather than a clear conscience.
These are some apt points. I've seen the kind of culture you've described in Hollywood as also existing in the music space and the fiction publishing space. Unfortunately, because of how much more collaborative film needs to be, this dynamic seems to create more incentives for moral compromise than is the case in other artistic spaces