In Brave, a book she was writing even before Harvey Weinstein’s reckoning kicked off last fall, actress and activist Rose McGowan tells her life’s story as a series of brain-washings: “Here’s the thing about cults,” she begins, “I see them everywhere.”
She was born into a literal cult, the Children of God, known for child abuse at the hands of charismatic cult leaders. After stretches of homelessness, legal emancipation from her escaped cult-member parents, years’ dependence on a lowlife boyfriend, she stumbled into stardom—in Hollywood, which is just another cult, she says. “Anywhere there is group thought and group mentality: you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult.” And, “I would know,” she tells us, “I escaped from two of the most iconic cults of all time.” The first is the Children of God, the second “a mental disorder called Hollywood.”
As a caller-out of cultish thinking, it’s ironic she so swiftly became the face of a feminist movement that, rather cultishly, brooks no dissent. And in due course, McGowan has been called out herself: At a Barnes and Noble book talk last month near NYU’s campus, a trans activist lambasted her for comments casting doubt on transgender women’s ability to experience innate womanhood. Thorny as ever, she bit back.
The thrust of McGowan’s memoir fits her confessional Twitter persona—which, as she tells it, grew from a viral jeer at Adam Sandler’s sexist casting call for a 2015 production. It’s the same spirit underlying her transgender skepticism, a 2015 line of biological reasoning resurfaced in time to derail her book tour. It’s a consistent if vague rebel yell, incompatible with her former status in the movement, that says to a series of what she calls Thought Cults, You don’t own me. Her new legions of fans got the message, finally, when the same outlets that celebrated her as a key player in Weinstein’s fall broadcast reports of her transphobic comments, her canceled book tour, and the death of her former manager. She’s an unlikely movement leader for the same reason she was such an arresting one while she lasted.
Early in the memoir she introduces an Old Hollywood foil. “There once was a famous actress named Frances Farmer. She hated everything about her artificial life. She wanted to be free.” A Hollywood starlet who wanted to be a serious actress, she’s seen as a martyr to the movie business: In the early 1940s, an alcoholic tailspin landed her in a mental institution, where shock therapies irreparably dulled her. (Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon has the best treatment of her tragic fall.)
To borrow from Brave, the punishing “cult” in power today is the feminist left. McGowan fell from their favor almost as quickly as she’d risen to be #MeToo’s warrior queen. At her political activist peak, she headlined the Women’s Convention in Detroit, a final-hour replacement for Bernie Sanders. At the time, THE WEEKLY STANDARD was, sort of, offered an exclusive interview to promote her book’s late January release. I say “sort of” because, I later learned, her then publicist thought I wrote for The Nation—despite my TWS email address. Would Rose approve of her people’s pandering to partisan journalists? “If you blindly vote for so-and-so, you’re in a cult,” she writes. “If you’re deep into your country’s propaganda machine, you’re in a cult.” Still, selling McGowan to the left was a lay-up back then. It helped that her status as an infallible #MeToo mascot made criticizing her more or less criminal.
Therein lies another problem. Brave reveals the inner world of a woman still recovering from what she describes as sustained temporary insanity—a condition that, with its analog in cult programming, makes up the main theme of this memoir. And at times, McGowan’s book reads as a rundown of deeply held resentments vented without much forethought. She scolds viewers of Charmed, for instance, for consuming a product that sapped her lifeforce and insulted her intelligence: “Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers. You should know this and acknowledge.” Her position in the movement may have put her beyond reproach, but an honest reader can’t miss flaws in her thinking.
And so what is an honest reader to make of McGowan’s insinuation in Brave that her former manager, Jill Messick, set up a breakfast meeting at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival in Weinstein’s hotel knowing what a session alone with him would lead to? McGowan recounts that afterward “she counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run. … . How could she not have known? And if she did, how could the woman I trusted with my life set me up?” Privately, according to her family, Messick maintained her innocence. But in public, where McGowan had the first and last word, she was complicit.
Alas, Messick also battled bipolar disorder and fell into fatal despair when McGowan’s story made her an undeserving enemy of the #MeToo movement. She committed suicide recently, and her family published a searing statement targeting both Weinstein and McGowan. “Words matter,” the grieving family warned. And McGowan’s supporters took her unquestioningly—cultishly, you might say—at her word. (“I consider my supporters to be cothinkers,” she writes. “We are an army of thought. We are a group of like-minded individuals who see things differently, who live differently.”)
It’s a tragic reminder that McGowan is right about this one big thing. Mob mentality, groupthink—whatever you call “cult” membership in its many mainstream iterations—works against fairness and truth. “Look around you and see where the cults are, because they are everywhere,” McGowan instructs. On and off the page, her story proves her right. She sees cults everywhere, and so should we.
