Editors note: While this piece was written before the issues with Casey Affleck and Mel Gibson surfaced or in the case of Gibson, before his award season validation from the Academy, we have decided to reshare this piece today as it feels more relevant than ever given today’s Oscar nomination results.
Good people sometimes make bad things. Bad people sometimes make good things. Picasso was misogynistic, Wagner was anti-Semitic, Paris Hilton said homophobic things, and yet between them they have gifted the world such masterpieces as “Guernica” (1937, oil on canvas); “Ride of the Valkyries” (beg. Act III of 1856 opera “The Valkyries” from “The Ring” cycle); and “Confessions of an Heiress” (2004, Publisher: Fireside). Until some time ago, when everything was still simple and it was all fields around here, like many people, I reconciled this ugly truth by simply, deterministically drawing a line between the artist and the art they create. Just as we cannot visit the sins of the parent on the child (and the creative act is often handily if glibly compared to that of childbirth) we cannot “blame” the book for its author, the song for its singer, the symphony for its composer or the film for its filmmaker. (Also presumably the dance for its choreographer, the tile for its ceramicist and the truffle for its chocolatier, but I’m not sure how many people are up in arms over the politicization of dessert). But it just doesn’t work like that anymore, not for me anyway, not always.
Discounting overtly personal or metatextual films — works of autobiography or veiled autobiography that more or less explicitly invite the comparison and always have — what has changed? Have I become wiser? Have I become less wise? Am I a more moral person now than I was ten years ago, or just more moralistic? Have otherwise unrelated artworks become more reflective of the personalities, viewpoints and/or lifestyles of their creators? Have filmmakers become awfuller? Some or all of these factors may be at work, but in the movie world certainly, the problem seems most closely related to the changing way we interact with films, and to the way that film culture has become inextricably bound up with the broader cultural conversation that encompasses such often oppositional impulses as social activism and celebrity worship, with all the minute media scrutiny and social media attention that both entail.
This is not inherently either a good or a bad thing, it just is, and when you think about it, it was probably naive to not have foreseen that an increasingly thriving discourse around films, in which the “highbrow” and the “lowbrow” are expected to rub shoulders (at least from the admittedly rarefied position of commentator or critic), would have had some complicating, troublesome and frankly time-consuming ethical offshoots. Part of the reason that “admire the art and not the artist” was such a seductive fallback position for so long is that it lets the viewer (and indeed the critic) off the hook, and frees them up to consume more art, safe in the belief that the only moral quagmires they have to negotiate are the ones they bring into the theater with them.
But a greater awareness of the forces by which a certain film makes it to our screens, and a certain filmmaker becomes feted and successful, has necessarily meant closer investigation of those forces, and the injustices they often enshrine. Whether or not, say, a rapist will make a “rapey” film is less the issue here (as the film’s content has been downgraded in importance next the film’s impact as a cultural object) than the concern that by celebrating any work made by a personally compromised filmmaker, we are somehow endorsing the person, and not just the film. And of course that’s at least partially true — a filmmaker who makes a successful film will likely get to make another. They might even win an award and become the thing that our culture seems to value above all else: a celebrity.
This puts all of us in the immensely uncomfortable position of not only judging art for its artistic merits, but also judging the person who made it, based on standards (often non-legal ones, since in many cases lawsuits, where they were brought, came to naught) that change with time and on incidents whose actual truth has been obscured. So we all become jurors and detectives and cold-case investigators — and we all try to ignore the sneaking suspicion that there are just as many terrible skeletons in as-yet-unopened closets. The problem here is that I am aware that I’m vastly underqualified for that job, and that it’s not actually my place to make these judgements. On more than one occasion recently I’ve found myself getting hot in the face reading a retweeted court transcript or an impassioned victim impact statement and wondering what the hell I am doing, what horrible, prurient, ghoulish interest I am indulging — however noble my ostensible motives — in investigating something that is, literally and figuratively, not my business? At what point does my desire to educate myself to make informed decisions about the art I consume become exploitative of the miseries of the very people who have already been victimized?
And yet this is who we are now. 2016 has seen this quandary arise apparently more often and more unavoidably than ever before, and it’s certainly not going away. This weekend, Amazon debuts its Woody Allen TV show “Crisis in Six Scenes” (his last film “Cafe Society” opened Cannes in May, and was released in cinemas this summer); last week, casting details emerged for Roman Polanski‘s recently-announced next film (called, teasingly “Based on a True Story“); and without doubt the biggest ongoing talking point of this fall movie season has been the controversy surrounding writer-director Nate Parker and his Sundance hit, “Birth of a Nation,” due in theaters in a fortnight. All three of the these people have been accused of heinous crimes; all three have their responses (or lack thereof) to the allegations minutely parsed, and in each case it is going to be largely impossible for any viewer, let alone someone professionally involved in film culture, to settle back and uncomplicatedly appreciate the work(s) in question, context-free, no matter how hard they try.
Those three cases (and how sick they must be of being lumped together now as the poster-child triptych of directorial infamy, and how uncharitable of me to not give a damn about that) are particularly pointed and not just because they relate to some of the most emotive and enraging issues of the day — pedophilia, rape and a culture with a proven tendency to exonerate the perpetrators of these crimes while vilifying the victims. They are also located at the nexus of this ongoing art vs artist debate, because of the nature of the art they create, and in each case (though I have not yet seen “Birth of a Nation”) they have made a significant contribution to shifting my stance, and perhaps that of others, from the vehement, tidy, Swiss-style armed neutrality of before to the messy, compromised, case-by-case complexity of now.
I can’t forsake “Annie Hall,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” or “Manhattan Murder Mystery” and so on, but nor can I ignore the discomfort I felt during a pointedly self-justifying speech of Steve Carell’s in “Cafe Society” (a film I actually mostly enjoyed) wherein he explains why he’s having an affair with a much younger woman (or during pretty much all of “Irrational Man,” which I loathed). I won’t ever be able to renounce Polanski’s “Chinatown” and how much it has meant to me (I even wrote a long, breathless essay on it), but found his “Venus in Fur” deeply unappealing, not least for a moment in which Mathieu Amalric‘s character has a petulant outburst over a mention of child abuse.