Review: Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"“We devolve to the individual so often because the structural and
systemic feels so daunting, and how are we going to actually shift
and change that? Also, because it feels so good to enact vengeance
on people who’ve harmed us."

Kyra Jones is, among other things, a prison abolitionist. Jones, a filmmaker who has acted on The Chi and has written for shows like Queens and Woke, told me she does not believe calling the police and putting people in prison meaningfully alters communities experiencing harm and violence for the better. For that reason, after she was raped, she agreed to go through a process called restorative justice (or transformative justice); it was led by author and activist Mariame Kaba, the author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.

Whatever you think of prison abolition, Kaba’s work and writings on this and related topics are thought-provoking. She and other activists have explored ways to rethink and rebuild systems of
justice, violence prevention, and community care, all areas of American life that are certainly in need of enlightened change. And her work is relevant because Hollywood, like many communities in the United States, would often rather focus on the “one bad apple” theory of wrongdoing instead of get to the bottom of the whole troubling barrel.

In a 2021 interview, when discussing the trial of Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Kaba said, “We devolve to the individual so often because the structural and
systemic feels so daunting, and how are we going to actually shift and change that? Also, because it feels so good to enact vengeance on people who’ve harmed us. Part of the conversation we don’t have is just how much liminal pleasure people get out of vengeance, which is a big part of why it’s so hard to uproot that feeling and that desire within us as human beings.”

During my years of hearing about the actions of people in the entertainment industry who have harmed others—and I know of far more instances of abuse, damage, and violence than I’ve been able to publicly write about—I’ve felt those emotions. I have fantasized about going John Wick on a few individuals. I never would do that, of course (damn you, Buddhist nonviolence). But I’ve felt rage when I hear about what survivors have endured at the hands of nightmare people whose reigns of terror were barely a secret. On top of all that, Hollywood itself has trained many of us to think we’re entitled to vengeance, under the right circumstances. Or under almost any circumstances, really. The final act of every superhero or action film is, after all, usually just a whole bunch of punching, shooting, and killing.

But there is a difference between vengeance and justice, and there’s a big difference between exposing the abuse of one person and changing an entire social, cultural, and corporate apparatus for the better. I care about both, but I’m writing this book because I (and others) desperately long for the latter.

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