From fall to winter, the #MeToo movement has uprooted fixtures of the media and entertainment industries with tornadic force, leaving consumers flailing to digest the bad behavior of good artists.
Social media at our fingertips, the impulse to issue immediate verdicts after each exposé hit the web has been strong, and some observers swore off the work of popular creators instantly. Freethinking feminist dissident Camille Paglia rendered her assessment of the dilemma in The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, arguing it’s perfectly fine to admire the work of men like Roman Polanski.
“Great art has often been made by bad people,” Paglia wrote. “So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, as I demonstrated in my first book, Sexual Personae, the impulse or compulsion toward art making is often grounded in ruthless aggression and combat — which is partly why there have been so few great women artists.”
Fans of Woody Allen, Paglia contends, are now experiencing “a sense of deception and betrayal” given the filmmaker’s deliberate depiction of himself as a “lovable nebbish.” On the other hand, “no sin or crime by Polanski the man will ever reduce the towering achievement of Polanski the artist, from his starkly low-budget Knife in the Water (the first foreign film I saw in college) through masterworks like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown,” she wrote, simultaneously acknowledging the director appears to have lead a “squalid and contemptible” private life.
Though the question of what makes “good art,” of course, gives way to no easy answers, it seems perfectly logical that people governed by the darkest human impulses might be equipped to produce work that more compellingly explores those impulses, the “ruthless aggression and combat” Paglia identifies. Perhaps our entire approach to Hollywood, fostered by the entertainment media’s fawning coverage, is now due for some dramatic reconsideration.
But how to enjoy a film like “Chinatown” without enabling and rewarding Roman Polanski, lining his pockets, padding his ego, creating an aura of respectability around a man who deserves none apart from his work? As a practical matter, that question poses challenges we must now confront.
