*Note: The views expressed in this essay are the author’s alone, and should not be taken to represent the views of any current or former employers.

 

When I read Uma Thurman’s stories of abuse and betrayal at the hands of the men who were supposed to be her collaborators, I couldn’t help but write about it. Something about the context of experiencing these terrible things while she was working on Kill Bill, one of the most violent cinematic environments possible (even if she and her stunt double were often the ones instigating the violence), struck a familiar chord with me.

I work in the entertainment industry, translating films and TV shows. I translate mostly TV, but I love film. Film is my greater love, and it’s where I wish I spent more of my time. But I’ll tell you something: Despite my profession, in my private life, that love died for a long time. I stopped watching films for years.

It wasn’t “despite” my profession. It was because of my profession.

I’ve never been sexually assaulted or put in extreme physical danger in the name of film, like Thurman and so very many of her colleagues. I don’t claim the #MeToo hashtag for myself, because it belongs to those who have experienced things I haven’t. But the juxtaposition of “my day job” with “horrific sexual violence” is familiar to me. I think it’s probably familiar to far more people than those outside the industry might imagine.

That’s why today, I want to talk about the entertainment industry. Not because it’s the only industry that is home to male sexual predators—it isn’t. Not because the suffering of entertainers matters more than other people’s suffering—it doesn’t. Not even because this is the worst of work environments for a language professional—that’s not true, either. (I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a court interpreter, hearing and relating the stories of crime victims.) But because it’s a work environment that’s not easy for many people to understand, and that’s something I can help with.

So, here are some thoughts on being a woman in the entertainment world.

You might be thinking, “What could possibly happen to a translator, other than just watching a particularly terrible show and then going home?” Judging by the number of times someone has asked me what it’s like to “watch TV for a living,” that’s what many people think entertainment translators, script adapters, QCers, producers, and the rest all do: watch TV for a living. But that’s really not it at all; at least, not if you want to do a good job. Our work is not in front of our eyes. It’s in our heads. And that applies both to localized content like mine and to the people making original TV and films for a living.

The Job Is Physical and Mental

An actor gets into character physically and mentally, and that can get both physically and mentally intense. Hopefully that’s pretty intuitive and easy for audiences to understand.

The physicality part goes for “voice actors” too, which maybe isn’t as intuitive. But it’s true. They are still physically embodying characters with their voices, and depending on the actor, sometimes also with other parts of their bodies, changing their postures and facial expressions to fit the role. It can get intense just in terms of the physical work: I know at least two voice actors who have briefly lost consciousness after having to scream/retch/gasp too long in in the booth, which I didn’t even know was a thing until one of them posted about it on Facebook. It can get intense in other ways. When I interpreted for Yuko Miyamura at a convention in 2008, she told the crowd a story of how while she was voicing Asuka in The End of Evangelion, Director Anno wasn’t satisfied with her takes during a scene where she was being strangled. He felt that it didn’t sound as though she were being strangled in real life, so she replied that she had never been strangled in real life. Finally, one of her fellow actresses physically strangled her for a few moments so that she could perform from experience. Miyamura told this story in a calm and professional way, making it sound like something understandable that could happen to anyone. Not a typical day at the voice acting studio, perhaps, but she is also a theater actress, and any film or theatrical actresses reading this may be nodding along, remembering a time when this happened to somebody.

Imagine what it would be like to go home and answer “Hi honey, how are you?” with “My throat is sore, because my coworker strangled me.”

For the non-acting staff, we may not embody what is happening in a show or film, but it’s still in our heads. As a translator, for example, when I do my best writing I’m not just in the head of whatever character is talking, but in the heads of the Japanese director and writer. Those minds are not always pleasant places for me to be.

Violence and Mental Strain Are Daily Life

Everything you see on the big and small screens, including the things that may make you change the channel, are daily life for us. All the joy and sorrow of fantastic characters and storytelling, yes. But also: All the treating women as beautiful props while men get to be fully fleshed out characters who carry the storylines. All the gay or minority-race characters being the butt of intentional or unintentional jokes. All the sex, the violence, and the misogyny that sells no matter what the storytelling is like.

That’s daily life. That’s the backdrop against which entertainment professionals can experience assault and dismissal by their bosses and coworkers: a landscape that is already filled with assault and dismissal.

The heads of those who create this landscape, the characters who dwell within it, and the audiences who embrace it are not okay places to be 24/7, so I have to try to back off and establish distance to protect myself when necessary. And if I’m not careful, if there’s a crack in my psychic armor, it can get personal. Visceral, even.

You can’t keep your distance 24/7 either, or you dissociate. Every day in my industry, something is happening to someone. A marketing manager watches yet another episode fail the Bechdel Test. A producer reviews art assets he or she received and discovers pictures of nude women in positions that don’t look natural. An editor QCs video and sees an underage child being sexualized for the titillation of the audience. An actor has to perform a murder scene. A writer or a localizer has to write dialogue for a rape scene. Some days, their Work Armor Personality can let it slide over them like background noise. Other days, it pierces the shell and they viscerally experience how horrible it is. For every wonderful piece of art that makes you remember why you do what you do, there are five more that are… well.

At least in a populated environment, like the one I’m fortunate enough to work in, we can talk to each other when we need to. Many translators and writers are freelancers. They sit at home with it. Maybe they have people in their lives who understand. Maybe they are alone.

It’s not some faceless force of the universe that creates misogyny and exploitation in films. Actual people, usually men, create these films. Maybe to make a point. Maybe to satisfy their own fantasies under the guise of satisfying audiences. And they continue to do it, because they continue to make money doing it, because actual people, usually men, want to consume this content.

You don’t just have to live with the fact that real people honestly want to make misogyny and violence against women sexy. You have to live with the fact that the real people in the audience (who are sometimes the ones paying your bills) honestly seem to agree.

It’s in your head. You choose whether to let it live there or not. Most likely you choose “not” most days, and other days it’s not a choice.

Here’s what happened to me:

At some point in the mid-2000s, I realized that I could not watch movies with sad endings anymore, or movies where the “bad guys” were not brought to justice. I could not. This made it almost impossible to watch many of the best films, emphatically including the ones that I, in my natural state, would most want to watch. For almost a decade, I was cut off from everything but Disney and the summer blockbuster action flicks. During the worst part of this period, I had trouble even hearing friends tell me personal anecdotes that had sad sides to them. Imagine that you used to love going to the movies, and now not only are you unable to go to most movies, but you can’t even talk to your own friends. It was… not great.

The first time someone asked me, “What happened to you? Why are you like this now?”, something interesting happened. I had not previously asked myself why I was like that. My conscious mind didn’t have an answer ready—but my unconscious mind sure did. When I opened my mouth to say “I don’t know,” this is what came out instead:

“I used to be the interpreter for company screenings where a small group of us would watch a Japanese product and discuss whether we thought we should license it for the United States. Since most people on the screening committee didn’t understand Japanese, I would narrate the film/TV show.

 

One day, we screened a live-action movie. I started narrating. During the first fifteen minutes, there were two onscreen rapes.

 

Now I can’t watch sad movies anymore.”

Yeah.

I don’t blame anyone in that room. They were just as horrified as I was. They didn’t know what was going to happen in that movie. They turned it off after the second time. But, dear readers, notice this: they turned it off after the second time. That’s how many times it takes to feel like we can reasonably stop considering a film. That’s the landscape.

I personally think the Japanese entertainment landscape is worse in several ways, but that’s the landscape in the US, too.

And it gets to you, even if (like me) you don’t notice how right away. It changes things about your life.

Onscreen/Offscreen

I can imagine how much worse this landscape would be for me if my coworkers weren’t universally sensitive and respectful with me about these issues, which they always have been. I can imagine how bad it would be if I were the victim of sexual assault while living in this landscape. I can’t and don’t want to imagine how awful it would be if everybody expected me to keep living in this landscape after an assault.

And that’s where Uma Thurman was. In Kill Bill, her character was raped onscreen. Her character was violently attacked onscreen. That was her workday.

That doesn’t necessarily bother everyone, when it’s only happening to your character. A character is an idea and not a person. So maybe it didn’t bother Uma Thurman. (After all, she had the strongest character in that film.) I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter either way. It doesn’t matter, as long as it stays onscreen.

The point is, it didn’t stay onscreen. Her day was full of violence happening to a character, and it bled into a set where Quentin Tarantino pressured her into nonconsensual violence happening to her actual person. It bled into a life where Harvey Weinstein pursued her for nonconsensual sex.

The two most powerful men in her career treated her like an idea instead of a person, when they were very same men most responsible for remembering that she is a person and not an idea.

I’m not in her head and I don’t speak for her. But I speak for me, and I know that spending my workday surrounded by fake violence like I do would make experiencing real violence against my person worse.

I know that what happened to me sitting in that screening room would have been hell.

That’s the entertainment industry. It’s a creative outlet both for us and for the viewers who go on to think and talk and write about it afterwards. It’s art. It’s something vital to our society. It’s often fun. But it’s also bound up in racism, misogyny, and violence. That’s the landscape, and I for one would welcome a change in the landscape.

This post has been two months in the making, and it’s still not perfect. It’s a loose collection of thoughts, I know. But if it gives someone else a peek into this world, or a moment of relief that they’re not alone, that’s more than worth it to me.