Reel dilemma: are we condoning the conduct of Hollywood's tyrants by watching their films
Reel dilemma: are we condoning the conduct of Hollywood's tyrants by watching their films?....
The 1949 film The Third Man casts Orson Welles in the role of smirking Harry Lime, a black-market racketeer who sees himself as an artist. War-torn Vienna is his canvas; its desperate people his oils. He needs a climate of fear and darkness in order to paint his masterpiece. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime explains. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene, but its most famous speech was improvised on the spot. Welles would later say he’d pilfered it from “an old Hungarian play” the name of which he’d forgotten, but there are more philosophical echoes here, too. He might have been referencing Walter Benjamin, who argued that “at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism”, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt that “the strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity”. True artists, in other words, are ruthless and amoral. They make their own rules and leave casualties in their wake. But what would you rather have in your life? The soaring genius of the Italian Renaissance or the bland precision of the cuckoo clock?
I used to think I knew the answer: Italian Renaissance, without a doubt. But these are difficult times for tyrannical artists and the idiots who support them. The lid has been lifted, the list of sexual harassments grows ever longer and there’s only so much you can read about the supposed misdeeds of Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman before one starts to feel complicit. There have also been denials from James Toback, Louis CK and Lars von Trier. These are men whose work I admire. Some (Polanski, Von Trier) have produced art that I love. If they come up dirty, that means that I’m soiled, too.
Except that this is the dilemma that runs through the whole of art history. Either everything’s dirty or everything’s clean. Caravaggio was a murderer but his paintings are sublime. David Bowie slept with underage girls. Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were both antisemites. Does admiring their poems make us condoners of hate-speech? Or do we cut this Gordian knot and view the work in isolation?
That’s the position advised by psychology professor Peggy Drexler. “It’s critical to remember that when we watch a film, view art or read a book, we’re doing so to be entertained and enriched,” she says. “We’re not doing it to issue an endorsement of the human being whose work it is.”
Drexler acknowledges that our attitude to the artist can impact on our attitude to their art. Still, she insists that a line must be maintained. “Art and morality are distinct activities. And it’s essential to separate the art from the artist. Chances are good that if we delved into the private lives of every single artist whose work we admired, surely we’d find plenty not to like, and even to be disgusted by.” She jokes that we’d never watch another film again in our lives.
I’d love to follow Drexler’s advice. Keep the art clean and pure, exempt from the actions of its creator. I’m just not convinced it quite works in practice. If we accept that “bad” (subjective moral judgment) people can create “good” (subjective aesthetic judgment) art, then it follows that amoral artists can hold the world to a higher moral standard than they follow themselves. But isn’t art also an extension of the artist’s inner self? How does one begin separating the two? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” as Yeats put it – though ought we still to quote Yeats, what with all that fascist-sympathising? If so, here’s another: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
Away in Los Angeles, film historian Cari Beauchamp suggests a more nuanced approach. She cites the example of DW Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a fantastically racist celebration of what it calls “the great KKK” which nonetheless established the rules of film grammar and stands as a piece of living history. “The bottom line is that you can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Beauchamp insists. “You can’t erase history by not showing The Birth of a Nation. It’s a powerful film. It should stay part of the conversation. But what you can do is show it in context. You show it with a discussion. You say: ‘That was then and this is now’ – and you learn from it.”
No comments