A Hollywood Tragedy's Rules of Engagement
We've fallen apart — again. Thoughts for how to fight without burning the industry to the ground
The Israel-Gaza conflict debate’s Hollywood front is settling into a depressingly familiar pattern; well known to anyone who’s lived here and dodged the social media wars of the past decade (with some twists this time).
The standard playbook is genuine outrage about some event, statement about whatever, quick morph into a meta-finger-pointing about who expressed enough outrage, expressed it loudly enough, who is being oppressed for expressing their outrage, whose outrage is allowed, whose isn’t — and then a general discussion of the nature of Hollywood outrage, with each side calling the other fascists and waves of enlightenment and understanding sweeping over the land.
The difference in this round is that there are two sides actually on the field and playing both sides (outraged and oppressor). In the usual way of these things, there’s one side pointing fingers and the other side, more or less keeping its head down or arguing, if anything, that the finger-pointing and “canceling” is going too far. In the case of the Harvey affair, there wasn’t a team on the field arguing out loud that, “Well, he’s just misunderstood, look how much he’s given to the community.” Not after a day or two anyway.
This time however, you do genuinely have both sides of the conflict represented, and both sides feeling like its side isn’t being heard, respected and tolerated by the other side. The use of the most loaded of words, “genocide”, and what people mean by it or don’t mean for it, and what consequences should be upon those who use it has become a flash point (as outlined in this piece).
As the conflict trudges on with no end in sight, in our local theater, the positions are hardening, and along with them assertions about who is allowed to speak, who isn’t, and what is the meaning of free speech in and out of our corporate culture. Very quickly we’ve gotten ourselves miles away from talking about the issue itself — let alone forging any understanding — and deep into arguing about arguing, a debate that gets grim, depressing and deeply idiotic for all involved.
So without getting into the fundamentals of Mideast relations, I wanted to offer some ground rules to navigate our conflict about the conflict, as this fight isn’t going away anytime soon.