by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
Last weekend, my wife and I enjoyed one of our favorite weekend excursions—we biked the Greenbrier River Trail, stopping off for pizza at Jack Horner’s Corner. As we sat on the deck waiting for our order, the opening chords of “Every Breath You Take”—the 1983 hit from The Police—began to play.
I observed to Caroline that if that song was released today, it’d be much less likely to have been a hit.
The observation kicked off a long discussion about problematic art.
Now there are a couple of ways that art can be problematic. The content itself could be objectionable. “Every Breath You Take”—which many would argue romanticizes stalking women —is an example of problematic content.
Art with objectionable content is a thorny problem that we’ll leave for another day.
I’m interested in the second way art can be problematic—when the art is good but the person who produced it is problematic. (I’m not assuming a particular definition of “problematic” here. You can read the term as “something that you personally find significantly objectionable for moral/social/ religious reasons.”)
Take the 1974 film, Chinatown. It won an Oscar for best screenplay and secured nominations for its lead actor and actress and for its director.
That director, of course, is Roman Polanski, a man who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl.
I’m confident we can all agree that someone who rapes a child is a Very Bad Person.
But what do we then want to say about Chinatown—a film that many critics argue is among the best ever made?
Chinatown is a relatively clear-cut case—an objectively important work of art made by an obvious villain. Other cases are harder. If you’re a left-leaning fan of outlaw country, what do you say about racist comments from Charlie Daniels or Hank Williams, Jr? If you lean right, can you still enjoy Rage Against the Machine when Tom Morello calls a Republican presidential ticket “the embodiment of the machine our music rages against?”
How much can we really separate the art from the artist?
In the early part of the 20th century, most critics believed that art and artist are fundamentally intertwined. For this school of thought (which is known as formalism), an artist’s biographical circumstances are the key to understanding any piece of art, music, film, book or poem.
A formalist would say that it’s impossible to separate Chinatown the film from Polanski the child rapist.
By the 1960s, formalism had given way to a new form of interpretation that viewed a work of art as a self-contained item—a thing that could be judged solely on its own merits. This strategy reached its peak in Roland Barthes 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author.”
Barthes—whose essay is one of the defining works of a school of thought known as post-structuralism—argues that authors (and any other type of artists) are simply vessels through which the artwork passes. The author/artist’s views and intentions have no bearing on the interpretation of a work. Each individual’s interpretation is uniquely valid.
We’re unlikely to solve a century-long academic debate in a newspaper column. But I’d suggest that both the formalists and the post-structuralists are partly right. Individual interpretations are perfectly valid. But the artist’s intentions aren’t completely irrelevant.
For example, both David Fincher and Chuck Palahnluk—respectively, the director of Fight Club and the author of the book from which the film is adapted—intend their work as a criticism of a particular type of masculinity. Tyler Durden isn’t a hero—he’s a hyper-violent reaction to the Narrator’s loneliness.
But a not-insignificant set of (mostly) men do read Durden as a hero. Actual fight clubs sprang up in the wake of the film’s release. It’s not hard to find internet forums filled with Durden’s muscular, burn-modernity-to-the-ground masculinity.
Which is the true interpretation of Fight Club?
The answer turns on how much we separate art—the film/book as a self-contained unit—from the intentions of the artists.
The same is true for art by problematic artists.
I’ll be honest: I like a lot of art made by people I find problematic. But there are also things I once liked but no longer enjoy because I can’t get past the terribleness of the artist.
I don’t have a universal principle to share. I just try to ask myself in each example, “why do I like this thing even though I know it’s problematic?”
Sometimes I emerge from that process liking a thing less. Sometimes I emerge liking it more. But in every case, I find that by taking the time to think through why I still enjoy (or don’t) a problematic work, I have far more sympathy for those who reject things I like or like things I reject.
That’s probably about the best any of us can do. Enjoy what we enjoy, but do it reflectively and with kindness toward those who reach a different conclusion.
Stop by your local library branch and check out some things you enjoy. And if we don’t have it, just ask and we’ll get it for you.
