Art, artists, and us

Seeing chatter about the Oscars, I realized that I am really disconnected from movies right now, which probably does not bode well for me making it as a screenwriter. That is something I am going to have to deal with.

One question that came up recently with Dylan Farrow's open letter is to what extent we consider the personal life of the artist in our appreciation of the art. I am not a huge Woody Allen fan. I loved Midnight in Paris, and I thought Scoop had some good bits but was too loose, but those are all I have seen and that is without a lot of regrets. So, I could boycott Allen pretty easily, but I'm not sure that's the answer.

I have had this conversation with myself before, and I had come to the conclusion that if someone who was a bad person created some beautiful art, then that could be their big contribution and maybe it's really unfair to shun it. Of course, when I had that thought, it was about Romantic composers with messy personal lives. It was something far past, and not quite as repugnant.

One thing about the distance is that some things are more understandable. It is more understandable that George Washington had slaves, and more courageous that William Lloyd Garrison spoke out against slavery, in their respective time periods. In one of the Allen articles someone had mentioned Orff being a Nazi, which is not a great example and it is a complicated story, so we admire his friend Kurt Huber, and the other people in the White Rose movement more, but still, Orff is not automatically a monster, and even if he were definitely a full-fledged Nazi, I might still feel that was a natural result of his time and place, and still listen to Carmina Burana.

My problem, I suppose, is that if prominent director were found to be funding a Skinhead group or keeping slaves now, I believe that would kill the career pretty definitively. If someone proves me wrong, that will be very disappointing. However, we already have a director who definitely did rape a child, and people still work with him and admire him and don't want him in jail.

I read something interesting today. Nicholas Kristof has taken some flack both for publishing the letter, and for putting a disclaimer with it that we can't know that it is true. I was not bothered by the disclaimer, because I believe that is a mark of the paper's legal department. As such it feels reasonable, and it never occurred to me that he didn't believe her or didn't think his readers should believe her.

One of his critics is Janet Maslin, and in addition to a remarkably poorly-reasoned and offensive suggestion that the letter was inspired by sibling rivalry, she refers to Allen going through a dark period and that he "managed to rehabilitate himself through his work".

(I am taking this from a Gawker piece at http://gawker.com/times-critic-blasts-nick-kristof-says-dylan-farrow-wan-1527880499.)

That sounds an awful lot like she believes the abuse happened, but she doesn't think we should be making an issue of it. It might not bother me so much if that wasn't a feeling that I got over and over again. It's not really that the victim isn't believed, but we don't want to have to deal with it. He gets to do what he wants. If we can find a way to make it seem like you deserved it, we will; otherwise you are crazy and confused.

It goes along with something else I had read recently that disturbed me. The original post was an update from the mother of a girl who had been raped, and was being harassed for it, and she had attempted suicide. She was doing better, but was staying offline so she could heal, and that was completely understandable. What stung was that in the comments one woman wrote that this was why she had not reported her rape, and that she was glad she hadn't.

That's the thing we still haven't gotten right. We will still make a rape victim testify even though her rapist is already never getting out of jail because of murder charges. Not let her get her day in court because it's important to her, but make her because it's important to the prosecutor. We will still throw an unstable rape victim into jail when the prosecution finds her unreliable, while the person who set her up to be raped gets reduced charges for his cooperation with the prosecution. A judge will still base his sentencing on the girl looking older. (And her suicide attempt was successful.) And I could go on.

If we were not like that, maybe it wouldn't matter if Woody Allen still had a career. As it is, there is an overwhelming concern about smearing an innocent person. Well, that's fine, except over and over we see that the rate of false reporting on rape is about three percent, the same rate for most crimes. In contrast, the rate of successful prosecution of reported rapes is also about three percent. That's the number we should be concerned about.

I have no memory of the original charges. I think based on the timeline, it happened while I was on my mission, so I wouldn't have heard. When people found Woody Allen creepy, I thought it was just because of Soon-Yi. That was creepy, but even then the creepiness was minimized, because he was not biologically her father, and she didn't have his last name, and I knew nothing about grooming at the time.

I don't think I can watch Woody Allen films anymore.