Don’t Burn Kevin!

It has come to The Varnished Culture‘s attention that some Hollywood types lack the virtues of the Saints.  Well, fancy!  Turns out that getting drunk and a little ‘forward’ in the 1980s means you go to hell in the 20-teens. Kevin Spacey is getting the Harvey Weinstein treatment, with trimmings, because he not only failed to remember an inappropriate pass from long ago (and thus he must have dunnit) but he formally ‘outed’ himself at the same time, thereby cheapening the sanctity of such a rite of passage (apparently).

So forget all about his stage work, or Glengarry Glen Ross, Swimming With Sharks, L.A. Confidential, even, we guess, American Beauty.  Kevin’s phone has stopped ringing, except for the wrong reasons, and he’s been consigned to Dante‘s 9th Circle of Hell.  Our new theocracy begins to smell a little like the good old days of Salem and the witch trials.

Maybe there’s no room for virtue in Hollywood – but there’s plenty of room for virtue-signalling.  We hear that Nicole Kidman is now requiring a female director on an affirmative proportion of her new projects. We can laud ‘our’ Nicole for her work in The Others, To Die For, Birthday Girl, Dogville, and Dead Calm, but we’re not going to cheer the torch-waving, smug-as-a-bishop sanctimoniousness of her and her ilk.