In November of 2017, Uma Thurman posted to Instagram a screen-grab of the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge epic, Kill Bill Volume Two. The black and white image depicts Thurman’s character. The Bride driving down a highway, looking fearlessly into the camera, having murdered the man who had prior caused her so much misery. Thurman’s face stares at you from her Instagram feed, unrelenting. “Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!” captions the image, followed with, “Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators – I’m glad it’s going slowly – you don’t deserve a bullet.”
Thurman’s post pinpoints a moment in cultural history, where the biggest stand against sexual assault in years has taken place. The Instagram post came in the wake of the October 2017 allegations made against Harvey Weinstein. Over a dozen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and rape. Thurman added her name to the ever-growing list of accusations against Weinstein, a list that of this month now spans over eighty names and encompasses women from all scopes of the entertainment industry. Weinstein’s responses to the incident have been scattered and contradictory, and increasingly altogether silent.
In response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the social media movement ‘#metoo’ began. The phrase began to emerge across multiple social media platforms to encourage woman to band together, demonstrating that victims of sexual assault are not alone and should not be ashamed. The movement was also created to demonstrate the magnitude of the issue, as the hashtag was used by millions of women across the world.
Following the #metoo movement, in January 2018 the Time’s Up Movement was formed. Time’s Up was written partly in response to a letter written by Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, who expressed solidarity with Weinstein’s victims by exposing the extent of sexual harassment faced by farmworkers in the United States. Connecting the spheres of the entertainment industry with rural and domestic work, the letter displays the indiscriminative nature of sexual harassment and sexual assault as a force felt by women from all walks of life, from all spheres of the globe.
Thus, the Time’s Up movement was created; the climatic finale to the events and movements of the preceding four months, the final and loudest cry for change. The letter was written on behalf of over 300 women in the entertainment industry, calling for better accountability in the workplace, effective change to protect women from assault, and to shift the judgement female victims can face. “Time’s Up is a unified call for change from women in entertainment for women everywhere […] No more silence. No more waiting. No more tolerance for discrimination, harassment of abuse. Time’s Up.”
So there it is – it’s a whirlwind of a timeline. What began as a social media trend has morphed into a movement that has seemingly engulfed all women, everywhere. Time’s Up seems to be a modern battle cry, a cacophony of voices all calling out for a seemingly simple right – the right to not be sexually assaulted. A simple request, a powerful movement, an idea that can seemingly be executed without a hitch. Right? But the question we now face – what happens now? Is a voice – however loud, however powerful – is a voice enough? And what kind of voice is this?
Perhaps we go back to the image from Thurman’s Instagram, of the female protagonist driving away from carnage and bloodshed. Do we take the Time’s Up movement to be a revenge plot just as bloody as Tarantino’s two-volume-film-epic, a female crusade against men-kind?
Despite the nature of the image Thurman shared, Time’s Up cannot be seen as a revenge narrative. Whilst the message that Time’s Up is expressing is loud and powerful and unavoidably prevalent, it is not a cry for blood. This new breed of social political mobility is one of the largest of its kind, a form of revolution against abuse that simply cannot be ignored. The voices are too loud, and they are coming at you from all possible outlets.
As The Bride in Kill Bill drives away from Bill’s lifeless carcass, the film noir style credits rolling, she leaves behind a past life and moves onto a new dawn, one with seemingly more hope, however cliché. The Time’s Up movement enables us as a society to hopefully do the same.