This essay I wrote for an Outlook magazine special is a condensed version of many discussions I have had over the years about the "art-vs-artist" debate. (I find that debate to be annoyingly reductive in most of its current forms – very few conversations/analyses seem to grapple with the possibility that even when someone has done terrible things in one context, they might have other, more exalted, more sensitive places that can produce worthy art. That their work, including their empathetic and ennobling work, can be as much a part of who they are as the things they have done at their very worst. That it is all an organic part of the mess.
Anyway, here is the piece; as always, there is much more rambling to be done along these lines.)
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As an adolescent movie buff in the early 1990s who became fascinated by old cinema initially through the work of Alfred Hitchcock, I had read enough to know that Hitchcock’s treatment of some of his leading ladies (and his gay or bisexual leading men) could be sadistic. And that Tippi Hedren in particular had been a target of much bullying during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. However, it wasn’t until a decade ago – partly through the Donald Spoto book Spellbound by Beauty – that I learnt of Hedren’s stronger allegations: that Hitchcock made clearly inappropriate demands on her, “expected me to make myself sexually available and accessible”, and played a role in damaging her film career when she didn’t acquiesce.
Some thoughts that flitted through my mind as I processed this:
-- If everything Hedren said was true (and there seemed no reason to disbelieve her, especially since she also stressed that the man had other, benevolent sides to his personality) – then, in a fairer world than the one we actually live in, Hitchcock should have been held to account in some clear-cut way, depending on the magnitude of the offence: if not prosecuted by law, then at least prevented from further unmonitored exercising of power and control.
(Of course, this is hypothetical: whether it’s a supposedly backward 1963 or a supposedly enlightened 2024, powerful people with connections routinely get away with crimes. And allegations that by their nature involve private encounters have to be proven, which can provide loopholes to the culpable.)
-- Meanwhile, another scrambled thought: there had been whispers about Hitchcock’s nasty behaviour (did it border on criminal behaviour?) towards other performers like Vera Miles before he worked with Hedren. If he had been brought to book earlier, landmark films like Vertigo and Psycho may not have been made, or not made in the way that they were. This would have very large implications for film history, including the important critical arguments of the early 1960s, which often centred on the value and depth of genre cinema.
It would also have had strong personal implications for me, because much of my life as a film obsessive – and eventually, a writer – dates back to that time, at age 13, when I became deeply moved by Psycho, related to the sadness and darkness in it, and disappeared down a rabbit-hole of cinematic analysis. Without that film to stimulate and console me, it’s likely that my personality and life would have developed in other ways than they did (this could be for bad, or for good, or a mix of both).
And that’s okay – if it helped some meaningful form of justice to be served, c’est la vie.
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For me, that’s the pragmatic way of looking at these things. What I have *never* felt, though, is that in such cases the director’s films become tainted by association or have to somehow be detached from him, as if their finer, more elevated qualities – which many of us responded to – were independent of the “monster” who helmed them.
Hitchcock apart, I have always been particularly interested in creative people who put a great deal of themselves – their lives, their scars, their best and worst dimensions – into their work. And this may be why I find most iterations of the art-vs-artist debate unsatisfying. The anguished question “Can we separate the art from the artist?” has become a lazy formulation that tends to be answered in one of two ways:
1) I cannot separate the person from his art. Therefore I will not consume any more of his output – for ethical reasons and out of unwillingness to contribute to his income. The art must be rejected as unsavoury;
or, 2) I can separate the art from the artist, and have no issues with continuing to consume it. But this is with the understanding that the art exists in some vacuum, and has little or nothing to do with the artist’s “reality”.
Both positions are fine as statements of intent. But they also carry a buried implication: that when an artist who has done terrible things creates a film (or book, or song) that shows positive human values, it means he was being hypocritical while creating it – concealing his true (bad) self. While there can be some truth to this in specific cases, on the whole I find it a problematic view (to deploy a favourite Woke word). However repulsed we may be by someone’s actions, are we really saying that they couldn’t have more reflective, sensitive sides that they tapped into when doing their best work?
I have been using the pronoun “he”, since male artists are far more often the subjects of such discussion – but the most recent teeth-gnashing centres on the writer Alice Munro and her part-complicity in her daughter Andrea Skinner’s victimisation (by her stepfather, Munro’s husband). And once again the language involved has been the smugly judgemental one that involves labelling someone as a “monster” – as if that was Munro’s sole, defining reality; and the difficulty of squaring this with her much-loved short fiction, known for its wisdom about people and their relationships.
But what does “separating art from artist” even mean, when it comes to creative people who have produced what we think of as personal art – a novelist or painter working alone, or a studio filmmaker picking at and reworking themes within the constraints of his working environment, or a more independent writer-director who has the freedom to make almost anything?
How can you possibly “separate” Hitchcock from (to take just one example) his most critically acclaimed work Vertigo – a film that gets so much of its power from the fact that its depiction of male sexual jealousy and insecurity (and the darker, more possessive aspects of “love”) seems to reflect how Hitchcock himself felt about some of his actresses? How do you separate VS Naipaul from An Area of Darkness? Woody Allen from Annie Hall? Or Marlon Brando – who, by many accounts, participated in the exploitation of Maria Schneider during the Last Tango in Paris shoot – from that animalistic shriek of “Stellaaa!!” in A Streetcar Named Desire: a scream that may come from a little boy terrified of losing his wife, or a patriarchal man who has just attacked that same wife, or both those people cohabiting in the same mind and body.
And how do you separate Roman Polanski from his work when he embedded his own history, fetishes and traumas into almost everything he did – not just in obviously personal films like the Holocaust-themed The Pianist but even in work adapted from enshrined literary material, like Macbeth (with its gruesome visualisation of the line “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” – just a year after Polanski’s heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered).
In Polanski’s case, the facts of criminality are clear and damning: he actually pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old minor (probably to escape a bigger conviction) and has been a fugitive from the US justice system for over four decades. It is completely reasonable to wish that he had been prosecuted and tucked away in the late 1970s – so what if that halted an illustrious film-making career. But even if you see him mainly and above all else as a predator, erasing his connection with the films he *did* make is a very strange position.
To be clear: apart from the importance of legal reckoning and fair conviction, I understand that someone might be so triggered by the details of the lives of Polanski (or Hitchcock, or anyone else) that they wouldn’t further engage with their work – that is a personal, moral choice, and I have versions of those triggers myself (which aren’t shared by many since they involve non-human-animal welfare more than homosapien-centred issues). What I don’t understand is the removal of Polanski’s name from a 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition of Chinatown (as was done recently), with the virtue-telegraphing pretence that an “evil” man must have no connection with a great film even though so much of what makes it “great” comes directly from him.
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During a monologue at a recent stand-up performance in Delhi, actor-comedian Vir Das stated that there are two types of people: the ass****s and those who have to deal with the ass****s. The audience laughed and cheered (most of us were probably self-assured that we belonged to the latter category, and could picture any number of our tormentors in the former). “And both those people,” Das continued, “are the same.” This time the chuckles were still there (some of us laugh reflexively whenever any sort of punch-line is delivered), but more muted, as if people didn’t fully comprehend – or like – Das’s point about monsters within and outside us.
In intellectual circles, the line “everyone contains multitudes” is an oft-uttered one (plurality being a liberal commandment) – but looking through my online feeds, and articles written by people whose work I have long admired, I feel very few of us face up to the full, unnerving implications of that idea. Why, for instance, is it so hard to believe that people who have done heinous things in one context are also capable – over a long lifetime – of producing thoughtful, moving art; and doing this *honestly*?
Linked to this aspect of the art-artist debate is something that has been common in recent cultural discourse, perhaps because of how social media encourages swift judgements: a growing intolerance for creative works that are very dark, pessimistic or non-affirmative in their worldview, or prominently use the lenses of unsympathetic characters. More than once, I have heard versions of the question “Why was it *necessary* to make this?” (The recent film Animal has been the subject of many such conversations, and some of the “liberal” bullying has been so shrill that a few perfectly sensible and normally thick-skinned people I know who liked the film – or could at least engage with it – have opted to keep their feelings hidden.) Well, one answer is: it isn’t “necessary” to create any art at all – negative or affirmative. But if you do choose to create, with serious and rigorous world-building, it is fine to tell a bleak, cynical story that doesn’t have comforting takeaways. Such art can make the world a little better not by offering “hope” in some obvious way, but simply by being very well done, presenting a particular way of looking and living, and leaving us with uncomfortable questions that we might or might not be equipped to address.
Like many others who were seriously invested in books or films from an early age, I grew up believing that one of the important functions of art is to discomfit us and warn us about facile binaries such as “moral” and “monstrous”. But during the recent Munro discourses, I have learnt that it is okay – during an online discussion involving apparently sensitive and intelligent people – for someone to casually label, say, Patricia Highsmith “a horrible person” *and* to posit that this is somewhat understandable given the nastiness or the darkness-bordering-on-nihilism of the stories she wrote.
In creative-writing classes, when the subject of ideology comes up, I occasionally discuss – or conduct a thought experiment around – the novel The Glass Pearls, by the great screenwriter Emeric Pressburger. Here was a Jewish man who had to flee Germany in the 1930s, whose mother died in a concentration camp, who lived in fear of Nazi persecution… and who also wrote this thriller about a Nazi in hiding in 1960s England, where the narrative’s impact hinges on us being able to feel for the protagonist – not to think that Karl Braun is a “good” person who should escape justice, but to see that he is a multi-dimensional human being with qualities all of us can relate to. We feel his genuine sense of paranoia and persecution, his grief for a wife and child who died, his boy-like excitement at a new romantic prospect. And these are all *honest* emotions. But many of the people who hold forth these days about art and artists, or draw a clear-cut line between “toxic” and “progressive” films, wouldn’t know how to deal with Pressburger’s book – or thousands of others like it.
One of the more sensible things I have read in Munro-related chatter is from the writer Brandon Taylor, who points out that what most people love about Munro’s fiction is “the way she reveals how, at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness” – and yet, despite this, the same readers are confused when they learn of “the common smallness” of someone they admired. “That, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work,” Taylor says, and I agree. More pertinent than that hoary “art-artist” question is this: how has it become so easy to ignore the mirror, to outrage constantly over instances of misbehaviour that most of us would be capable of given the right (or wrong) circumstances – and to fail to recognise the things that good art (including the art made by people who do bad things) can tell us about ourselves?
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(Related posts: glorification vs depiction, etc; The Glass Pearls)
But there was one session where I felt like an impostor – or at least that I should stay quiet and listen to what other, wiser souls had to say. This was a talk about lyrics in our film songs.
