When the Artist Is an Abuser

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here .

IN THE PAST couple of months, since the sex crime revelations about Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, a historic corner has been turned regarding the fact that some powerful men abuse and degrade the women around them. In fact, we’re already talking about this as the post-Weinstein era.

But the wave of belated outrage that is just now cresting may have started building more than a year ago, with reports about Donald Trump’s sordid record as a serial harasser, molester, and adulterer, a history confirmed, on the record, by no less than 20 women in the weeks before election day.

For reasons that have been pretty thoroughly rehearsed, in these pages and elsewhere, that wasn’t enough to stop the Trump train. But the shock of Trump’s victory must have done something to embolden the next wave of women to speak out, at Fox News. And the example of Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly must have made it easier for some of Weinstein’s victims to speak. And after them, the deluge.

Since the Weinstein reports, Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore has been unmasked, Al Franken’s predatory actions exposed, and more revelations about politicians and others are sure to come. But it’s in Weinstein’s Hollywood that the deepest rot has been exposed, and it’s the Hollywood revelations that force us to think again about our relationship with works of art that may enrich our lives but were made, at least in part, by men who do dark and despicable things.

I think of it as the Woody Allen problem because that’s where I first encountered it. I used to love Woody Allen. Starting with Bananas, I saw all his movies, and I thought they were hilarious. As I grew up, his self-obsessed nebbish character started to grate a bit. But still I had to recognize Annie Hall as a work of genius.

Then there was Manhattan. In that 1979 film, Allen, who was 44, played a middle-aged man involved in a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl played by the model Mariel Hemingway, who was really 16 during the filming and on-screen looked even younger. It gave me the creeps, and I started losing interest in Allen’s career. When the 50-something Allen took up with the 35-years-younger Soon-Yi Previn, an adopted daughter of his longtime romantic partner, actress Mia Farrow, disinterest turned to deliberate avoidance.

So, given my Woody Allen problem, what am I going to do about Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey or, for that matter, about Weinstein’s productions, from Shakespeare in Love to The Butler and Fahrenheit 9/11? My reaction to Woody Allen was visceral. But I’m not sure I can defend it intellectually.

Flannery O’Connor, my surest guide on such matters, thought about this from the opposite direction, as a Christian artist who refused to produce overtly religious work, and she insisted that the value of a work of art should be judged solely in terms of the demands of its discipline. The duty of the Christian fiction writer, she insisted, was to write great stories, nothing more and nothing less. Following that logic, the work of the immoral artist could also have its own independent value. Another of my favorites, novelist John Gardner, said much the same thing in his classic craft book, The Art of Fiction. “Some bad men,” he asserted, “write good books, admittedly, but the reason is that when they’re writing they’re better men than when they beat their wives and children.”

So, for now, I end up believing that the work of these abusive, exploitative, and narcissistic little men can still have real value, and should be considered apart from their lives. But only after they’re dead. While they’re still on the hoof, possibly trolling for new victims, they’ll achieve their immortality without my patronage.