A friend and I the other weekend sat down to watch Disney's largely overlooked and forgotten contribution to the L. Frank Baum expanded universe, Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco in the title role.
It took about five minutes into the film before I realized this movie could only have been made before #MeToo.
The lead character is portrayed as a serial seducer who tells lies about his personal life to a succession of women—most of whom work for him as his stage assistants—in order to sleep with them.
Instead of this setting him up as the villain of the film, it is portrayed as a charming and amusing personal trait. Oz is a lovable rogue, whose capacity for charlatanry he ultimately manages to harness for good.
Of course, even in the pre-#MeToo age, this "playboy" character in films ultimately had to redeem himself through "settling down" with "the right woman" by the end of the film. This could be seen as the tribute vice pays to virtue.
But notice how even this concession preserves the sexual double standard. The playboy's earlier career as a grand séducteur is part of his rakish charm. It is not to be held against him indefinitely.
The burden of redeeming him, then, must fall to women. The problem is not so much his character, as that he simply has not found the right woman yet.
The other women he had been "seducing" along the way, then—by a combination of guile and fraud, implicit promises of career advancement and economic pressure (he is employing these women, after all)—must have simply been unworthy—cheap hussies.
And therefore they deserved this treatment.
Oz: The Great and Powerful follows all of these tropes to a T. The "right woman" in this case is Glinda, whom we recognize as such immediately thanks to her blonde hair. This distinguishes her as virtuous from the earlier succession of brown-haired women Oz "seduces."
The film is a relatively late and egregious example of these tropes, to be sure. But for a long time, every show on TV had a version of this same character. Every sitcom had its "playboy" member of the crew who was sleeping with a different woman each week.
And if you are willing to plumb the depths of off-brand films, you can find even worse uses of the trope in the bargain bin.
For well over a decade, a friend and I have made a weekly habit of seeking out bad films too watch. For a long time—before most of them moved behind the paywall of streaming subscriptions—we used to mine the rich vein of terrible evangelical movies.
These conservative "Christian" films were often notably horny in an unselfconscious way. One of the hallmarks of the reactionary mind, after all, has always been a lack of self-awareness, and the greatest prurience is the prurience that cannot recognize itself.
And to my point here, almost every evangelical film seemed to have this same "playboy" character at its center.
One of the freakiest examples we ever found was in the films of a small independent production company, which seems to have been run by a single minister, and which starred members of her own congregation—most of whom seemed to be directly related to her.
Stranger still, this director appears to have cast her own son in the role of "playboy" protagonist in nearly every film she made. He always starts off the film in compromising situations with a succession of women.
But ultimately, of course, her son must be redeemed in every story arc. Evangelical morality must be vindicated in the end.
And so, we find an exaggerated form of the same split-consciousness we have seen in the Hollywood version of the trope. The "playboy" must ultimately be saved for monogamy. But, in order to be worth saving, he also needs to prove his attractiveness to women.
The only way to resolve the contradiction is to shift the burden of redeeming him onto the women in his life. Earlier on, he must have been led astray by a series of unworthy women; but by the end of the film, the "right" one comes along.
And so, this is exactly what happens in these bizarre films. The director's son is besieged in every film by an army of desperate women whom our filmmaker plainly regards as undeserving of being her future daughter-in-law, until an exceptionally virtuous one appears.
No one has described this split consciousness as well as Samuel Butler. In a passage in his great novel The Way of All Flesh, he writes—about his character Christina Pontifex—almost as if he could have had our eccentric evangelical filmmaker in mind:
"Ernest’s official purity was firmly established, but at the same time he had shown himself so susceptible that she was able to fuse two contradictory impressions concerning him into a single idea, and consider him as a kind of Joseph and Don Juan in one. This was what she had wanted all along, but her vanity being gratified by the possession of such a son, there was an end of it[.]"
If there is one contribution #MeToo has made to society that has survived the period of the backlash, it is, thankfully, to have permanently retired this "playboy" or "Don Juan" character from mainstream media at last.
A long and depressingly repetitive series of revelations about prominent men who were seen in the 1990s as "womanizers", but who turn out on closer inspection to have been simply predators (Jeffrey Epstein most obviously of all, but there were countless others) has exploded the myth of the "playboy" for all time.
Another extreme example of this myth collapsing was in the headlines yesterday, after the Alexander brothers were sentenced to thirty years each in prison for alleged sex crimes.
Here was another group of powerful men who formerly had a reputation as notorious rakes and grand séducteurs in their '20s. What actually appears to have been going on, in hindsight—at least according to the prosecution—is that they lured a succession of women under false pretenses, held them captive, and drugged and raped them.
The brothers, of course, still deny that force and drugs were involved. They were admittedly "in their 20s [...] sexually somewhat aggressive," as their defense attorney put it. But they have settled down since then, they say. They had become "family men." One of them reportedly said that "he exchanged his party lifestyle for family life years before federal agents knocked on his door."
In short, the brothers tried to resurrect all the tropes of the "playboy" myth, complete with the redemption arc at the end. At the time of their earlier alleged sex crimes, they were just sowing their wild oats. They were just fooling around as young men, before they finally met the right women who were worthy of marriage.
The jury apparently did not see it that way. They instead saw what the prosecution saw: a group of men who had developed a micro-cult around sexual violence and predation among themselves, which started in high school but lasted well into adulthood, in which they used a combination of deception, drugs, and straightforward physical violence and compulsion to force women into sex.
As we saw in Oz: The Great and Powerful, Hollywood movies used to wink at this sort of behavior. Admittedly, using force would have been going to far, by these films' standards—but lying about your past and identity in order to manipulate your employees into having sex with you is portrayed in this film as a likable quirk. Oz, ultimately, is portrayed as the good sort of con artist and deceiver.
But as Philip Larkin once pointed out in an uncomfortable yet indelible poem about sexual violence—"Deceptions"—the Don Juan, the grand séducteur, the "playboy" as we have come to know his true face, in the wake of the implosion of the myth—the sexual predator, in short—is ultimately deceiving no one as much as himself.
Lord knows what lasting power or pleasure the Alexander brothers thought they would get from their alleged actions. All we can know for certain now is that they didn't get it. As one of their alleged victims reportedly put it in court, gesturing to them behind the dock: "You are weak [...] You never had power, and look at you now."
As Larkin writes in his poem—addressed to the victim of an act of violence eerily reminiscent of what the Alexander brothers are alleged to have done, down to the same combination of guile, drugs, and force:
I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said, [...]
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.
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