Uma Thurman and the Price of Being a Muse
In 2004, Quentin Tarantino told Rolling Stone all about his working relationship with actress Uma Thurman, who starred in 1994’s Pulp Fiction and his then-new female revenge fantasies, the Kill Bill films.
"It's just this cool connection that happened while we were doing Pulp Fiction," the director told reporter Erik Hedegaard of the woman he called "my muse." "I mean, von Sternberg had Marlene Dietrich, Hitchcock had Ingrid Bergman, André Téchiné had Catherine Deneuve. It's a special bond that I'm proud to have, and hopefully, one day, people will reference me and Uma like they do the others," he continued.
Today, we know a little bit more about their so-called muse-auteur relationship, in light of a piece published in the New York Times this weekend. If you wade through writer Maureen Dowd’s confusingly obscure language, you find Thurman’s own voice telling a disturbing tale of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, who produced Tarantino's films - and an even more shocking tale of manipulation by Tarantino himself. (Weinstein denies assaulting Thurman and has said he and Thurman had a "strong relationship" over the years.)
Thurman specifically recalls a terrifying incident on the Kill Bill set, saying Tarantino pressured her to drive a faulty car herself instead of having a stunt double do it, despite the fact that she told him she was afraid to. He pressed her anyway, and what resulted was a 40-miles-per-hour crash that left Thurman with a "permanently damaged neck" and "screwed-up knees." The fallout from that breach of trust heralded the beginning of the end of her stint as the public muse for Tarantino’s work. (Tarantino has not publicly responded to these claims.) "When they turned on me after the accident," she told Dowd, "I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool."
Thurman’s story reveals something profound about the price of being stuck in a “muse” role, which has historically been one of the few paths to prominence for women in any creative industry. Any power you gain in such a role is conditional - it can be taken away in an instant.
Muses in mythology are goddesses summoned by great men for inspiration. Nearly every epic poem from the Odyssey onward begins with an invocation to such a muse, a request for her help in telling a story.
But if the muse began as a metaphor for creativity, in the modern conception, she’s an actual flesh-and-blood woman who urges the great director or songwriter to reach new heights, thanks to her beauty, charisma, and talent. This is inherently a problem: a real person with agency shouldn’t be reduced to a metaphorical role. That’s why today's artist-muse myth is often an avenue for male control. One way that powerful men gain a foothold over women, particularly in a public-facing environment like Hollywood, is by elevating those women to a position that appears essential, while keeping them disposable.
The modern muse is ultimately an accessory, if a prominent one. She’s Tina Turner prompting Ike Turner to write and arrange gorgeous songs for her voice. She’s the menswear-clad Diane Keaton inspiring her ex, Woody Allen, to write Annie Hall; she’s Tippi Hedren, Ingrid Bergman and a series of "cool blondes" starring in Alfred Hitchcock's films, his obsession with the leading ladies fueling his innovation behind the camera.
These examples are notable because so many of their stories involve allegations of serious mistreatment. Tippi Hedren and Tina Turner were infamously subject to harassment and abuse, respectively, by the men whom they inspired. And while Keaton has stuck staunchly by Woody Allen through claims of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow (which Allen denies), there he was at a recent AFI awards-show roast of Keaton, listing her work as a "fellatrix" - aka one who gives blow jobs - among her crowning achievements. Critic Mimi Kramer correctly noted this as an "example of stealth misogyny." "He engineered things so that at the climax of the award ceremony, when everyone thought they were applauding Keaton, they were actually applauding him for demeaning her," Kramer wrote.
Kramer’s use of the word demeaning is a key reminder of something that Thurman eloquently explains at the end of Dowd's piece. The public conception of the artist-muse relationship contains a level of meanness - explained away as part of the fixated, hungry nature of the artist. If he’s haunted, tortured by his muse during the creative process, the unspoken idea goes, he has the right to haunt her back by making her life miserable. "Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you 'in love' with you," Thurman told Dowd.
The Thurman-Tarantino pairing, while it flourished, was accepted as a charged relationship between two people who pushed each other to new artistic heights - but also as a singular obsession on Tarantino’s part. Thurman acknowledged some accuracy in the first reading, saying in her Times interview that even when things got rough with Tarantino, she saw a "greater good" in their work together, and felt like she had "a say." But she wasn’t a producer or director on those films; she effectively worked for Tarantino and Weinstein. When she was pushed to do things she found untenable as an actress, she was compelled to comply. That’s why Thurman felt discarded and broken after she confronted Tarantino and Weinstein for refusing to give her footage of the Kill Bill crash (you can now see the video on the Times website).
Being a muse can seem like it means unwittingly enabling bad behavior, by making the men around you appear like appreciators of female strength and ability. Think of all the fans who have defended Allen by praising the roles he gives to women. Because she hobnobbed with Weinstein and appeared in his films, Thurman says she feels she was part of the "cloud cover" that allowed his alleged abuse of other women to continue. But that, too, is part of the unfair deal. If a muse figure inevitably goes along with the artistic spectacle created in her honor, she can be left feeling responsible after she is tossed aside, even when she didn’t have any real ability to stop the bad behavior.
If anything, Thurman is being too hard on herself. After all, she was actively rejecting the muse pigeonholing - and questioning the meaning of the word to begin with - from the beginning. Go back to that 2004 Rolling Stone piece and find her response to the question of how it feels to be "Quentin’s muse." "I mean, what does muse mean?" she asks the reporter. "Someone who inspires? ...I think I listened to a lot of scenes and gave Quentin my opinions and killed myself trying to help him make the movie great. But I didn't spend a lot of time on a pedestal, musing. It's great if he finds me inspiring. But it doesn't really relate to what I did."
There are telling phrases here, including "killed myself." But the reporter and editors (and likely most readers) didn’t further question Tarantino’s perception of the relationship, even though Thurman was pointing out the problems with the label. It’s an indication of how seductive and accepted the muse idea can be, and how easily we are able to tune out women’s voices as a result.
But maybe we’re also beginning to question the romance of the muse. Darren Aronofsky’s controversial film Mother! used an unfathomably exploitative artist-muse relationship to offer an allegorical look at climate change (or fame, or the Bible, according to various interpretations) - and it wasn't well-received. More intriguingly, feminist critics have seized on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-nominated film Phantom Thread as a deconstruction of the muse myth. Though the film hinges on a muse figure turning violent - a twist that may seem outlandish or disproportionate on first viewing - Anderson asks us to consider the idea that being treated as a mere avenue for someone else's art is its own form of violence.
The muse is one of a variety of public roles - like First Lady, for instance - that keep women relatively powerless while seeming powerful. It’s always been a creaky construction. Obvious though it may be for some of us, women aren’t goddesses who can be summoned at will: We're people, and we always have been.
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