does is matter if woody allen is a pedophile?
Originally published at What She Says. You can comment here or there.
Here is a link to a NYT’s Open Letter by Dylan Farrow:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
I will say that I wasn’t there, that parts of the way this letter is written seem odd, maybe suspicious on the surface of it, but I cannot dismiss this in whole. The fact that Allen actually married one of his stepdaughters has always bothered me, just the way that Polanski’s rape of the thirteen year old girl has bothered me. These incidences don’t bother me in their own right, but because of my own involvement. I watch their movies. I admire their movies. Rosemary’s Baby is my favorite movie. Chinatown is my friend’s favorite movie. Woody Allen is another friend’s favorite director. She loves his movies. We-us girls, us women, us vulnerable-are not bad people for liking these movies, for admiring these men and their genius. But this is an old, old debate.
Should we separate the artist from her work, his work? Do our artists have to be good people? Do our writers and composers have to be good people? Do our politicians have to be good? Does the art matter more than its creator?
When I was studying Rhetoric and Composition, we read a book. I can’t remember what it was or who wrote it, but the man who authored the book argued the “Q” principal. His argument was that we MUST NOT separate the evil artist from his work. We must turn our backs on him, on it, discount it. Do not look or watch or admire or buy or be in any way involved with the art of an evil person. This seemed like a bullshit idea to me at the time and it seems like a bullshit idea to me now.
But, it gives me pause.
Picasso was a miserable person. He was mean to his women, to everybody. But then he was also so charming. When his grandson grew up he drank chlorine bleach. Picasso was callous about women in general, used them for inspiration, discarded them. He held his first wife in a kind of psychological prison she never broke out of until she shot herself. But he produced art that is beyond compare, art that makes us consider ourselves as human beings and that’s the very highest form of art. He created beautiful things. As did Pound, who was an anti-Semitic nutcase. Wagner, too. We can easily judge these artists because they rose to the top, because we learn about them and study them, and their work. And I feel a sort of guilt about the whole thing, an uncertainty, but I still think we should let the art speak for itself, because one thing is absolutely true. If we were to find Picasso’s canvases hidden away in a warehouse somewhere, we would revere them, we would worship them, we would wonder about who this artist was, but we wouldn’t know and we would never have this dilemma. So, we have to let the art stand alone, apart from the artist.
My admiration of Achilles, Nestor, Hector, Ajax-is a beautiful, beautiful, terrific, ugly thing. They raped and enslaved the women and killed children, threw the babies from the city walls. They all did this. It was customary. It was evil, but no one really thought much about, except to fear it. It was the way it was. That’s why it’s so important for students, for everyone, to read Candide. Voltaire makes this point over and over again, effectively, admirably. But even Voltaire made fun of the Jews, because it was customary, because everyone did it. It’s been going on so long. No one even knows when it started.
There is something in us drawn, forever drawn to beauty. And there is something in us that is drawn, forever drawn to the dark thing waiting for us on the edge of the world, the place of dragons. Maybe Allen and Polanski and Picasso and Pound and Achilles straddle this tension in a way that illuminates the world, the human condition, in ways that only great art and stories can. Maybe, by admiring these great, renowned artists’ art, we learn more than we ever could from the sort of beautiful, somewhat strange but just okay art, not very good in the end.
Just think. Botticelli burned most of his canvases in some sort of religious fit, or fear. Standing in front of one of those surviving paintings is an indescribably beautiful thing. Sometimes, in spite of who or what we are, we are all very, very lucky. In the end.
~r.