Reading a book about Kurt Cobain's legacy right now, and I have happened upon a part of it that deals with the recurrent fact that Aberdeen (where he's from) and surrounding small burgs have not wanted to erect statues or name anything after him because "won't somebody think of the children" and "what kind of message does that send about drugs?"
You know, guys - he made music, too.
Why this is relevant right now? Why THIS, of all things (okay, there was also a copyright thing I had to deal with) pulled me out of a three-year break from blogging? Because I feel like there's an obvious parallel to our current series of escalating (or swirling) situations. Should Kurt Cobain's drug use and suicide and poor-decision-making skills fuck up our relationship with his music? I would land in the "decidedly not" camp, where I would prepare Pennyroyal Tea and for any other recent camp arrivals. But is it that easy?
People don't want to watch the Netflix House of Cards because Kevin Spacey's recently been outed as a career Uncle Touchy Rapist Dickhead. Granted, he's a sexual predator, and while his victims have every right and responsibility to speak out, shouldn't his other actions be able to stand on their own? Does this have more to do with what we imagine (him diddling unwilling guys off camera during the production of Se7en) than his actual performances? I think it does. I think he pissed in the pool of his own performances, and now we don't want to get in any more. I don't know if that's fair, and I don't really care if it is or not. Everyone's going to have to deal with this in their own way.
I do NOT think that it is an endorsement of someone's past behaviors to experience their art, though. Unless their behavior kind of fucks up the whole basis upon which you were evaluating them and their output, the two should be able to be separated. Not every act carries every other act with it. Know how I know? Hitler is worse than Jeff Dahmer. You can look it up. He is. Stalin, for some reason, is only worse than Hitler depending upon who you talk to, but at least there's a metric in place there. So, yes - for matters of egregious and inarguable evil, we have matters of degree. We just do. Otherwise, "worst shooting in American history" would be a meaningless fucking phrase. By that same token, it is not necessary to evaluate someone's whole life based on one event.
Let me clarify: Spacey and Weinstein and O'Reilly and the President are obviously sexual predators. They keep doing the same things, over and over again, forcing themselves on others as part of a sexual power dynamic - so, yeah, defining their entire output through gross-tinted glasses is certainly fair, and probably logical. Do that if you see fit. And if you're a victim? Well, you know better than anyone else, so no one's going to tell you what to do. Also - the zeitgeist of people coming forward (blogs say "zeitgeist," it's a thing) to force what one can only hope is a paradigm shift (also "paradigm shift") in the patriarchy (that one's not funny anymore) is ultimately a good thing, so whatever pushes that up the mountain, good on it.
However. One act does not define a person. If it did, Mother Teresa would be only a racist, while Dr. King would be only a philanderer. Gandhi would be only a misogynist, and most American soldiers would simply be hired murderers. By contrast, Charlie Manson would be a musician, Jim Jones a preacher, and Hitler a landscape painter. You could pick one single act of any other kind committed by any of those people and define them by that. "That Gandhi, what a cloth-maker," is simply not a thing that people say. People are all the sum total of all of the things that they do, and we all have to weigh that out. Context is hugely motherfucking important. People who meet me now think I'm both better & worse than people who have known me for a while, because they're working off of a limited data set.
I say all of that to say this: Don't let actors (or anyone else) fuck up your enjoyment of their output. They did a job, that job is done, and it's a separate act from all the other stuff they've done. Learn to ruefully shake your head and appreciate and/or judge things in a full context. This is a part of growing older. You can enjoy NFL football and hate criminality, concussions and morons. You can like Heinlein's writing and acknowledge that he was a fucking terrible human. Everyone's got a hard-on for Agatha Christie again right now, but WOW at the racism in her books. Her mysteries are awesome, but I can see how black people and Indians would categorically turned off by them. I don't let Tim Allen's cocaine-dealing and Republicanism fuck up the Toy Story movies for me, and you shouldn't either. If you can't get around something, fine. We can sympathize. But if someone else can, you probably ought not judge.
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