Thursday, March 07, 2019

Terrible Beauty

As it happens, terrible people often produce great things. Once we learn of the terrible deeds of talented people, how do we handle that knowledge.

The matter has come up again with the release of Finding Neverland, the HBO documentary about Michael Jackson and his serial molestation of young boys. I have a lot of Michael Jackson's music in my collection. Am I supposed to stop listening to his music? Writing for The Week, Jeva Lange says yes, but she thinks certain deviant filmmakers are okay:
A boycott can feel like the only course of action when a musician (or a director, or a comedian, or an actor ... ) is credibly accused of something terrible. There is the financial consideration: Who wants their money going to a person, or the estate of a person, who's hurt other people? But a personal boycott is as much driven by one's conscience. In the case of Jackson, I've found it impossible to separate "the art" from "the artist," and the suffering the latter, in all likelihood, inflicted.

But I haven't felt similarly about films directed by two other celebrities accused of abuse: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.
Why? Because making a film is apparently more of a collaborative effort:
But to take Allen and Polanski as representative examples, it is much harder to justify boycotting films in response to directors' alleged sexual misconduct than it is a solo singer like Jackson. The accentuation of a director as the single "author" of a film is known as auteur theory, and has persisted as the primary mode of interpreting and analyzing movies since the 1960s. But auteur theory has plenty of problems, not the least of which is that it subscribes to the notion of a "lone genius," emphasizing the overriding importance of the director — who, historically, is often a man — over the work of the others involved in the creation of a picture.

Allen, as one example, is a particularly heavy-handed director, often writing and acting in his films. His subject matter is also difficult to grapple with as a moviegoer; as The New Yorker's Richard Brody notes in his own attempt, "There has always been something sexually sordid in Allen's work," which makes watching his films while knowing the allegations deeply uncomfortable. But even Allen's most hands-on and autobiographical films are collaborations, and the final product is consequently the work, also, of the actors, actresses, and technical teams behind them.
This analysis doesn't make a lot of sense; as Lange admits later on, Michael Jackson's best work is certainly in collaboration with Quincy Jones. If you want a sense of how crucial Jones was to Jackson's work, consider another group Jones produced, the Brothers Johnson. I'll post two videos, both from the late 1970s, when Jones was working with the Brothers Johnson and with Jackson:



These are similar songs, with similar structures, and they were both big hits in that era. Whose vision dominates these two recordings?

Quincy Jones is a very rich man because of his collaboration with Michael Jackson, but he also made a lot of money working with the Brothers Johnson. He won't care whether Jeva Lange listens to Jackson's music. But there's a larger question about Jackson, and Allen, and Polanski, and Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey, and so many others. Should their work disappear entirely? I'm coming back to that topic next.

3 comments:

W.B. Picklesworth said...

There's a kind of puritanism on display here that recalls the burning of Beatle records in 1965-6 and the burning of books under the Inquisition. The burners want for the evil never to have existed, to never have erred in reading/listening to them, to never let anyone err by having contact with it again.

It brings to mind Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Righteous Mind" in which he discusses different ways that we interact with the world. One of his categories is "disgust." A reaction of disgust allows us, compels us, to separate ourselves from the offensive object.

I don't think it's a simple question, though I feel cautious about an enthusiasm for purifying the past taking hold. For instance, I'm all in for Confederate statues. How do we distinguish? I'm looking forward to your continuing thoughts.

Bike Bubba said...

We are Savonarola, no? If we were to eliminate art created by sinners, it would be a dreary world indeed.

But that noted, it strikes me that with Jackson, one might note that he seemed, like many others, to descend into his filth, and it's worth noting that his career seemed to tank at about the same time--perhaps something of an inflection point with Thriller. There was a light touch prior to that, but afterwards his work becomes increasingly didactic and forced. And that's about the same time he apparently started abusing kids.

Mr. D said...

But that noted, it strikes me that with Jackson, one might note that he seemed, like many others, to descend into his filth, and it's worth noting that his career seemed to tank at about the same time--perhaps something of an inflection point with Thriller. There was a light touch prior to that, but afterwards his work becomes increasingly didactic and forced. And that's about the same time he apparently started abusing kids.

Yes. And that's a really important point. I'd substitute tendentious for didactic, but it's spot on. If people tell you how great you are, there's a propensity to believe them. And if people are willing to make excuses for you, you'll take them up on it.