Beyond Hollyweird

On October 20, 1996, upwards of 300,000 Belgians attended a massive rally in Brussels. This protest, later dubbed the White March, was a reaction to the arrest of Marc Dutroux. However, the protestors were not struggling to free a wrongfully imprisoned man, but to voice their anger at the government for not only failing to arrest him sooner, but also for not taking down the entire network which had enabled Dutroux and his accomplices to abduct, torture, and murder numerous young girls throughout Europe. If they did this, the government of Brussels, and perhaps the early European Union in general, would have turned the gun on itself, a tall order in in the triumphant “End of History” neoliberalism of the mid 1990s. Today, the Wikipedia entry for Dutroux labels any narratives suggesting we take seriously his own words, spoken under oath, that he had aided European politicians and capitalists across the continent in securing fresh young bodies, “conspiracy theories.”

This “White March” took place about ten months after I was born. Looking back on the first 28 years of my life, I see cases like Dutroux litter the landscape of my pop cultural consumption. Currently, P. Diddy, who produced and/or produced many of the biggest hits of my childhood and teen years, is on the cusp of being exposed as the next R. Kelly. Or, to use a phrase that has already become common parlance in mass media coverage of the scandal, Diddy seems to be the “Jeffrey Epstein of Hip Hop.” 

At the same time, a documentary series has just concluded regarding the long-running rumors about  Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider. It not only covers Scheider’s on-set emotional abuse of his stars and speculates on his alleged pedophilic proclivities, but also implicates the producer in the childhood abuse of teen idol Drake Bell, whose own career was recently ruined after several women came forward credibly accusing him of a plethora of abusive behavior, including sex abuse. 

Meanwhile,, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the only two serious Presidential “contenders” (Do we really have to pretend it’s still a competition?), have been repeatedly outed by survivors as rapists, a fact that keeps resurfacing yet nobody seems to care. One of these men was in the White House alongside the first black President for 8 years as myself and many others of my generation came of age in the ruins of the Great Recession. The other was the host of an essentially pro-corporate reality TV show which our parents tuned in to forget they had just defaulted on the futures they tried to purchase on cheap credit. 

As a tween, I watched  Diddy’s Making the Band, but what until recently was my fondest memory involving him was his role as Jonah Hill’s boss in Get Him to the Greek, one of the weaker films in Judd Apatow’s “hipster frat bro” extended universe. Diddy essentially plays himself and, like Trump in The Apprentice, it’s all very post-ironic. It’s a performance that, along with Russel Brand’s, paradoxically says that being an entertainment industry kingpin is very stupid and should be mocked, but also it gives you a license to indulge every last salacious desire you could ever possibly conceive of, and that this is cool. Both Diddy and Russel Brand’s characters are nothing but drug addicted psychopaths whose only goal in life seems to be widening the circle of underlings who beg to be whipped by them. But it’s cool, especially to the mind of a 14 year old in the beginnings of his own addiction and infatuation with rock n roll.

Fourteen years later, my therapist, who is helping me deconstruct my own experiences with abuse in my youth, recommends I watch a Netflix documentary where Jonah Hill and his therapist bullshit about their time together for the last 15 years and how it helped Hill process his trauma. It’s been years since I have paid attention to Jonah Hill. In fact, I know it’s been at least since The Wolf of Wall Street was released over a decade ago. I was a big fan of Scorcese’s fourth iteration of the Goodfellas format at the time. Me and my best friend, who was also an addict, used to always say he was the Jordan Belfort and I was the Jonah-Hill’s-Character of the local punk scene. Apparently being a punk rock anarchist is in the same ballpark as being a huckster and capitalist whose last moral inhibition was fried by a cocktail of narcotics. No wonder so many of my associates in the scene, including those who wrote “anthems” against things like Date Rape, ended up being rapists themselves. 

None of this is parsed in the Netflix documentary, but what is discussed I find enlightening and relatable, even inspiring. So I do a little research on Jonah Hill’s recent life and whaddya know…abuse allegations. On the one hand are the claims made by Alexa Nicolas, who starred alongside Jamie-Lynn Spears in Zoey 101, one of the many Nickelodeon shows produced by the aforementioned Dan Schneider. Nicolas claims Jonah Hill “forcibly” kissed her when she was 16 and he was 24. On the other hand, Sarah Brady, who broke up with Hill in 2022, has accused him of “emotional abuse” conducted by using the very “therapy talk” (Brady’s words) featured in the Netflix documentary I enjoyed. Disappointing to say the least, but then again “Hurt people hurt people.” Or something. 

These days, there seems to be no shortage of mass media exposés on the sickening behavior of the bourgeoisie, State bureaucrats, religious institutions, and so on. In 2020, Netflix produced and distributed an adaptation of James Patterson’s nonfiction work on Epstein, Filthy Rich. Around the same time, the documentary Athlete A, which explores Larry Nassar’s sex abuse of Olympic gymnasts, was also released by Netflix. In 2019, the year of Epstein’s mysterious death, HBO released Untouchable, which covers the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Three years later, A&E released Secrets of Playboy, which heavily emphasized the allegations of abuse by Hugh Hefners and his large network of Hollywood acquaintances.

While this seeming willingness by mainstream media may seem like a positive development in the way abuse is treated at a “systemic” or “institutional” level, I would argue that it represents an opposite development. That is, such media does little to interrogate how the culture of abuse reproduces itself through the institutions of AmeriKKKan culture and government. Instead, it reroutes the critique of this phenomenon into “true crime” narratives that either isolate the events to powerful individuals-and thus preclude the possibility of viewing the enterprises systemically-or implicitly state that insofar as a cultural and institutional phenomena of self-perpetuating abuse does exist, its within self-contained networks of a certain personality type. The net effect of this form of coverage is to leave its consumers with the impression that if we could simply subtract certain people and level certain “power dynamics” in society, the abuse would stop or at least be significantly diminished. That is, we don’t have to fundamentally challenge the system that enables this type of enterprise, but merely focus on individual psychological profiles and specific networks that function according to particular systems.

This should come as no surprise. After all, one of HBO’s current cash cows is the show Euphoria, a remake of the Israeli miniseries of the same name.  Whatever one thinks of the quality of Euphoria, it can’t really be denied that the driving force of the show is its sex scenes of adult (in some cases, barely adult) actors pretending to be minors. In this way, the show is not unlike pornography that claims to show “teens” engaging in sex. One could argue this latter comparison is excessive or perhaps even moralistic, but I would ask those who make such arguments how they respond to the fact that creator Sam Levinson cast a pornographic actress who starred in a porn parody of the show in its second season, seemingly for no reason other than he saw her in the porn and thought it would be provocative to do so. In any case, there is also the fact that Sam Levinson’s other HBO show, The Idol, is literally a pornographic portrayal of a celebrity being slowly psychologically manipulated and repeatedly emotionally abused by a Hollywood scumbag (played by pop star The Weekend no less) that seems to center the abuser’s feelings rather than the victim’s. 

HBO is itself a creation of the porn industry, as well as the intelligence community, and was spawned as a byproduct of representatives of those two forces meeting specifically to update the propagation of imperialist propaganda (including pornography). This may seem like an incredible claim, but there is a myriad of evidence proving it. For instance, Chinese-American businessman Paul Sie, who was involved in the creation of HBO and later founded its competitor Starz, has said on camera that Barry Zorthian, who joined with cable porn pioneer Paul Klein and executives from Time Inc. to help devise the network, “came out of the Johnson administration and was doing CIA work in Vietnam.” A few years later, as the Soviet Union was destroyed alongside Tito’s Yugoslavia, Paul Klein would help Mark Palmer, an American diplomat who was a member of the early neoconservative think tank the Committee on the Present Danger, and Ronald Lauder, a billionaire Zionist who was good friends with “sexual blackmail” pioneer Roy Cohn, Epstein mentor Leslie Wexner, and Epstein friend Donald Trump, create a broadcasting empire in the former Eastern Bloc. 

Unsurprisingly, pornography overwhelmed former Soviet and former Yugoslavian countries in the harrowing 1990s. Playboy, in particular, was: “Part of a tidal wave of pornography that flooded the former Soviet Union after it collapsed in 1991 — along with many other hitherto hard-to-find consumer goods, from bananas to Pepsi to punk rock…Playboy tried hard to play up both its associations to the Soviet past & its potential as a herald of freedom and independence…they sought to represent the magazine as a mainstay of Russian maleness, a totem that had been smuggled in and passed among the elite for decades.” A Russian libertarian “dissident” named Vasily Aksynov wrote a preface to the first issue of Russian Playboy, which was published at the peak of Russia’s economic implosion in the mid-90s. Askynov taught Russian Literature at the Koch Brothers-funded George Mason University and  worked for Radio Liberty, a Cold War psychological operation controlled by the CIA. A survey conducted in the early 90s found that “Muscovite” men owned 50% more pornography than their counterparts in Britain or the United States.

Gay porn, in particular, was used as a weapon of imperialism, as queer filmmaker Willam E. Jones pointed out in his 1998 work The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography. As Jones explained at the time, the appeal for viewers of these films was “part exoticism & part poverty fetishism…the former glory of the Eastern nations as an emphasis on their subsequent fall. To put it simply “Western audiences were turned on by the idea that the performers were under some form of duress.” Westerners liked, “the ostensibly straight man either consuming their sexuality through the guise of pornography, or in the case of several scenes, the performer showing visible discomfort at either the sex or the presence of the camera.” Jones concludes: “The films are low budget, low production value & low brow by intention, rather than necessity…the developing Eastern European sex industry, with the influx of Western producers & a Western market in mind,could be seen as an indicator of fertile ground for fascist ideologies.” Indeed, in Russia and other Eastern nations, the consumption of porn was outwardly celebrated as “liberation” even as it implicitly presented this fascist messaging; “The first issue of homegrown men’s magazine Andrei was introduced in 1991 as ‘essential today…the psychological freedom [of men] is a prerequisite for the emancipation of society from the crushing complexes of a distorted era.'”

Playboy being at the forefront of this assault is not so shocking. Hugh Hefner was, after all, not so different from Jeffrey Epstein, as he allowed an archipelago of “shadow mansions” which mimicked his own notorious “Playboy Mansion” and were almost all operated by shady characters with ties to AmeriKKKa’s criminal underworld to proliferate. These “shadow mansions” were sites of sexual abuse of the women who occupied them and possibly nodes of a larger human trafficking network. Jennifer Saginor, the daughter of Mark Saginor, who was Hugh Hefner’s personal physician and best friend for 40 years, told the crew of A&E’s recent Playboy special:

“My father and the inner circle from Playboy created clones of the Playboy Mansion on a smaller scale to sort of lure these young girls in. It was very predatory. These young girls have no idea what’s gonna hit them next…By shadow mansion, I mean that these men in Hef’s inner circle would try to emulate what he created in his own empire at the Playboy Mansion…And they would have smaller versions of the Playboy Mansions, which I would refer to as mini-mansions. They would house these young girls who would come to Los Angeles looking for opportunities to become actresses or models…”

One “shadow mansion” proprietor was financial wizard and career criminal Bernie Cornfeld:

“Bernie, he would go prowling at night. He’d go prowling up in the dormitory and be having sex with the girls up there. I realized that the modeling agency apparently fronted for Bernie’s sexual appetite. So, if you moved into the house, you became prey. You became one of his next conquests…I just remember walking in on them and being, like, horrified. These girls were clearly drugged and not coherent. Maybe they would also have somebody, like, videotaping them, and then that videotape could be used as blackmail, so they wouldn’t tell anyone or so that they’d sort of fall into this underground system of being available. Basically, any powerful, wealthy man in Los Angeles who was on the guest list to attend the mini-mansion parties was given an opportunity to spend time with particular girls. ‘Spending time with her’ is code for ‘Having sex with her.’ I think many of the girls stayed in the mini-mansion system because they were scared of being blackmailed with videotapes.”

The involvement of Cornfeld-who was a close friend not only of Hefner but also convicted child rapist Roman Polanski-in this alleged racket is significant. Cornfeld started a bank with Mossad agent Tibor Rosenbaum, who was also an associate of notorious Mob kingpin Meyer Lansky. This bank, along with Cornfeld’s “Investors Overseas Service”, was at the center of one of the most notorious Ponzi schemes in the history of the United States: 

“Bernard Cornfeld lured many an investor to the insurance and investment fund he launched in Paris, registered in Panama and ran from Geneva, ultimately scamming hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. His fund Investors Overseas Services (IOS) originally pitched itself at European based American GIs before going wide and employing thousands of door to door salesmen who competed with one another to earn overseas trips, bonuses and if really good, visits to their bosses homes in the French Riviera and Beverly Hills. Essentially an elaborate pyramid scheme, the people on the top were paid by those lower down who had to work doubly hard to find new clients. An epochal story cites one of his salesmen caught in the Belgian Congo during a coup. Cornfeld receiving the hapless salesman’s telegraph and reading, ‘Insurrection, sadism, rape”, simply replied, ‘OK, OK, but is he doing any business?…

As with all Ponzis, this scheme eventually imploded on itself, but not before helping the aforementioned Rosenbaum send innumerable sums to Israeli militants from both the IDF and the Mossad to aid their perpetual settler-colonial war on Palestinians. The money Cornfeld siphoned from his fundamentally criminal business is what he used to purchase his “shadow mansion” and surround himself with throngs of women, including an underage Heidi Fless, who he coerced into sex while she was still 17. Fless went on to operate a massive prostitution ring which serviced a plethora of Johns with prominent jobs in Hollywood. 

It is apparent that abuse is not only a matter of a certain “personality type” enabled by “power” that leads to the formation of various similar but technically distinct cultures of abuse in a multitude of related but technically separate AmeriKKKan institutions, but that abuse is itself an institution under a capitalist mode of production. It also interlocks, specifically in the United States and its predecessors in Europe, with the various other bourgeois institutions imperative to the reproduction of capitalism/imperialism. In this scenario, the abuse is not only an institution among “the powerful” but is an aspirational desire among a plurality of subjects of an imperialist State, including its proletariat. In turn, the perpetuation of this desire to abuse among the lower classes ensures its reproduction as an institution controlled by the bourgeoisie. 

Take, for example, the 2012 film Compliance. The film is about a manager and franchise owner of a fast food chain restaurant based on McDonald’s (where the real-world event the film is based on took place). The manager receives a phone call from a police officer who states that a young female employee is a suspect in a drug case. The manager and her husband are instructed by the police officer to administer a strip search of the employee and, eventually, a cavity search. It is revealed that the “police officer” was in fact a lone pervert who gets off on deceiving the owners and operators of various fast food businesses to molest their employees. By the time the manager and her husband are made aware of this, it is too late; they have dutifully followed the instructions of this pervert to the point of repeatedly violating the employee and all it took was the dual threat of telling a cop “no” and not servicing the customers during a lunch rush.

The real world “incident” which this film adapts with a 98% accuracy rate was only one of 70 such acts perpetrated by the same individual. In nearly every case, the managers followed the instructions of the faux police officer to the point of committing sexual assault and could not seem to explain why they never once asked for the officer to present himself in person or even just provide proof over the phone that he was indeed a cop. But this begs the question, even if he had been a cop, does that mean it is right to violate the employee? Apparently a majority of AmeriKKKans believe so! Why is this? Could it possibly be because, particularly in its neoliberal period, capitalism has successfully inculcated large numbers of people with the idea that abusing others, even children or their coworkers, is desirable? That engaging in such acts or patterns of behavior is a way to sublimate their disdain for their class position or lack of authority within their life under capitalism into the violation of their fellow humans? 

These are the questions that are often not parsed, even by critiques of “systemic/institutional abuse”, the Nuclear Family, or Patriarchy, because they lead one to the conclusion that it will take a lot more than consuming True Crime media about individual abusers and posting about it online to fundamentally change the cultural phenomena and material incentives that create and perpetuate the institution of abuse (not “institutional abuse”). In other words, they lead one to a revolutionary perspective on the question of widespread abuse in AmeriKKKan society and “Western civilization” writ large. One ceases to view the question as a matter of influencing legal or even cultural approaches to “handling” individual “scandals” or “incidents” and starts to instead understand that it is the system as such that drives the large-scale tolerance of abuse that people are finally beginning to form real resistance to. However, it is clear that if this resistance remains wedded to petit-bourgeois liberal notions of “justice” through purely legal or moral channels, nothing will fundamentally change even if a handful of vile men (and the women who help them, such as Ghislaine Maxwell) go to prison or have their careers ruined. 

The movement against the institution of abuse that we are seeing emerge in real-time must become more radical going forward. It must challenge at a fundamental level the logic of capitalism as such. If it doesn’t, all we will have is what the White March mentioned at the beginning of this post turned into; an annual ritual which turns what was once a clear-cut challenge to the system into a self-gratifying and performative spectacle. And is it not in the realm of “spectacle” that the most exemplary cases of what we are fighting against have so often emerged? 

Recently, I read former iCarly star and country musician Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. The media has responded to this work, which describes McCurdy’s own repeated abuse at the hands of her Mormon mother and the numerous producers, studio executives, and other celebrities she worked with, primarily by picking apart its references to “The Creator”, which is widely speculated to be iCary creator and aforementioned abuser Dan Schneider. However, while obviously seeing the influence of Hollywood parasites upon the childhood and teen years of McCurdy, I found more poignant and important the passages regarding her mother. As McCurdy writes in the book’s final chapter, where she goes to visit her dead mother’s grave as an adult:

“My mom didn’t deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family. My mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me…Her death left me with more questions than answers, more pain than healing, and many layers of grief—the initial grief from her passing, then the grief of accepting her abuse and exploitation of me, and finally, the grief that surfaces now when I miss her and start to cry—because I do still miss her and start to cry….

…Sometimes when I miss her I start to fantasize about what life would be like if she were still alive and I imagine that maybe she’d have apologized, and we’d have wept in each other’s arms and promised each other we’d start fresh. Maybe she’d support me having my own identity, my own hopes and dreams and pursuits. But then I realize I’m just romanticizing the dead in the same way I wish everyone else wouldn’t. 

Mom made it very clear she had no interest in changing. If she were still alive, she’d still be trying her best to manipulate me into being who she wants me to be. I’d still be purging or restricting or binging or some combination of the three and she’d still be endorsing it. I’d still be forcing myself to act, miserably going through the motions of performing on shiny sitcoms. How many times can you pratfall over a carpet or sell a line you don’t believe in before your soul dies? There’s a good chance I would’ve had a complete and public mental breakdown by this point. I’d still be deeply unhappy and severely mentally unhealthy.

I stand up, wipe the dirt off my jeans, and walk away. I know I’m not coming back.“

It’s time for us to leave the capitalist graveyard of the AmeriKKKan empire with no intention to return.