Were you to cast someone in a Harvey Weinstein-produced movie about sexual predators, you’d almost certainly cast someone who looks like Harvey Weinstein — an ogreish man-mountain, someone who tumbled into filmmaking through the business side — whose bullying of employees and would-be stars alike has been a matter of public record for decades. Is that one reason why the Weinstein scandal is widening, growing, beyond all limits, swallowing up not only all of entertainment, but a large part of the news proper?

It’s worth asking why Weinstein-gate is becoming so transfixing. There is the fact that it’s happening in Hollywood of course, and so famous actresses are involved, there is the sleazy nature of Weinstein’s acts, which involve using sexual demands as a power over women, there is the substantial media access of the most-high profile victims, and there is, paradoxically, a voyeuristic thrill at hearing the stories of sexual shakedown, which is present underneath and with the public outrage at the acts themselves.

But why does it keep going? Why does it swallow up so much news? The question is wilfully naive, but it is also a genuine question. Weinstein is one powerful man doing this over a number of years, in a world filled with serial sexual harassment and shakedown. Has Weinstein-gate become a symbolic event, standing for sexual harassment in Hollywood and culture production, or even in all workplaces in general, or is it the reverse? Is the resonating shock a measure of the privilege of A-list actresses and actors, the sense that they are more traduced, more wronged by such behaviour, which is presumably going on in hospitality, plumbing supplies, and any other industry you might care to name?

To put it another way, is Weinstein-gate a measure of a new advance in the notion that workplace sexual harassment is unacceptable? As noted a few weeks ago, the “struggling actress” joke is an old standby, the casting couch is an old proverbial, and the sexual shakedown has been accepted as a perk – increasingly with young men, as well as women, the victims — for decades. The Moscow Trials’ alacrity with which Weinstein’s directors, scriptwriters, political donors, etc, have denounced, distanced themselves, has its own Hollywood reference: Claude Rains, as the police chief in Casablanca, who is “shocked, shocked” to find there is gambling going on at the establishment he frequents every night.

Weinstein has now been accused of an enormous number of sexual shakedowns of a pervy and rather pathetic type — “watch me wank”, “jump in the bath with me” — many of which appear to have been rejected, with or without career damage. It is impossible that Hollywood people did not know about these. The comical-grotesque particular nature of them would have ensured they echoed ’round the traps. Weinstein is now accused of at least three rapes and sexual assaults. If they turn out to be proven, then the whole thing will take a further turn.

The Hollywood moguls of hitherto not only had casting couches; they had whole bedrooms attached to their offices, and the sexual shakedown was universal. Some have said that no star of the golden age made it onto the screen without giving it up to Darryl Zanuck, Harry Cohn, or others — save for Kate Hepburn and Bette Davis. But that, too, may be an exaggeration, borne of the paradoxical nature of this story. The moral condemnation allows for a contemplation of the sleaze and excitement of the story, expunged of reader guilt.

Yet the fact that Hollywood appears to be actually falling apart under the weight of this scandal, is interesting. Structurally, the entity itself has been weakened by changes in media production, diffusion of distribution, etc, which has essentially dissolved the processes that made “Hollywood” the entity possible. Yet the moguls have retained power beyond the transformation. This one scandal appears to be revealing how worn down that legitimacy has become. At the same time, it does appear to be an enactment of a more general refusal about what people are willing to cop in the workplace. Whether this is how we want to do the politics of everyday life — whereby the conditions of multimillionaire actresses and actors stand for the rest of us — is another question. It appears to be the completion of the circle, whereby Angelina Jolie does our global refugee politics for us, Richard Gere handles Tibet, and so on. Has politics now become full spectatorship?

Paradoxically, the one industry that won’t be reformed is Hollywood. Weinstein’s weird, obsessive and fetishistic demands are the exception; the rule is that beautiful young women and men who turn up to get into movies or TV will only do so if they fuck an agent/producer/director six times, straight-up vanilla. It’s a supply-demand question. There will always be enough such people who don’t care about acting, but simply want to be stars, and can act just well enough to carry a role. You see them in B-list TV shows and movies every day. In times past, they would get a ticket straight to Central Casting, the pool of actors waiting for a role. Where, these days, they would find a figure like Harvey Weinstein, sexual predator straight out of Central Casting.