Friends star David Schwimmer has had a decidedly mixed time of things after retiring Ross Geller. Most of his movies and TV series have flopped, most recently the awful AMC food comedy Feed the Beast, though he did get some plaudits for playing Robert Kardashian in FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Now Schwimmer has produced #ThatsHarassment, a series of six short films about sexual harassment in the workplace as part of a campaign to raise awareness about gender discrimination.
Schwimmer also stars in one of them as a lawyer who behaves inappropriately towards a female colleague. Emmy Rossum and Cynthia Nixon are among those to also star in the short movies which are well made, well-intentioned and well, obvious.
But The Guardian has now come out and said the films are problematic because Schwimmer happens to be a man. Noting #ThatsHarassment‘s writer and director Sigal Avin is a woman, Australian feminist Van Badham writes: “To enhance the reach of her project, she approached her friend Schwimmer to helm an American version.
“It’s a good thing that Schwimmer’s done to assist the broadcast of Avin’s message. But it’s so hard as a feminist to shake a conviction based on so much accumulated evidence that these films have received the positive reception they have because their identification with Schwimmer lends masculine validity to their analysis.”
She adds: “In Schwimmer’s case, said the optimist, it’s entirely possible that an effort to serve Avin’s mission and broaden her platform has been denied recognition by a cultural infrastructure so wedded to patriarchy it can’t fathom there might actually be men who just want to support women, not take ownership of them, or their campaigns or their work.”
Eh? Schwimmer is a Hollywood celebrity. Sigal Alvin is a successful American-Israeli director who, for now, isn’t all that famous.
Badham sounds like she would make a good character in a novel, the sort of person who would start a fight in an empty room. But she should understand Schwimmer’s high-profile relationship to the project is a question of Hollywood economics rather than gender politics.
Ironically since he is backing the #ThatsHarassment campaign presumably to improve relations between the sexes, Schwimmer himself is caught up in a nasty custody battle with his ex-wife.
But he can be forgiven for wondering with Friends like this Australian Guardian columnist, who needs enemies?