News emerged in the past few weeks that distressed a lot of literary fans. As I detailed in last week’s entry of This Week in Books:
The late Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an essay about how Munro stood by Skinner’s stepfather even after he admitted to sexually abusing Skinner. Nearly as distressing as that, all of this was more or less an open secret among those who surrounded Munro. And author Neil Gaiman has been accused by two women of sexual assault, allegations he denies.
Meanwhile, a certain transgender-obsessed author of a certain bestselling children’s book series is taking an ongoing blowtorch to her legacy. And, needless to say, this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Roald Dahl had a history of ugly anti-semitism. Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed in 1851 that he had no sympathy for slaves. Throw a dart at American letters and there’s a good chance you’re going to hit a morally questionable individual.
This isn’t a new debate or tension by any means, but it rose to the forefront of my mind during an election season where, inevitably, we find ourselves deciding between lesser evils as imperfect people engage in the messy and often morally dubious business of politics. And we post about it all on a social network owned by a horrible buffoon.
These dynamics led me to rewatch Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir classic “Chinatown” over the weekend.
Should we even watch?
In case you’re unfamiliar (spoilers for a fifty year old movie ahead), “Chinatown” centers on private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) as he unwittingly unravels a conspiracy to divert water to the San Fernando Valley, where water baron Noah Cross (John Huston) is covertly buying up farmland via elderly/deceased proxies. Cross is also trying to locate his daughter/granddaughter, who he fathered with his daughter Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) when she was 15.
The movie is loosely based on the ecologically and morally reprehensible diversion of water from the Owens River Valley to Los Angeles. The broader Los Angeles that I currently live in would not exist without it. While the water project happened in the 1900s, screenwriter Robert Towne and Polanski updated the timeline to the 1930s.
Polanski, of course, has lived in exile mainly in France since 1977 after fleeing charges related to the sexual assault of a 13-year-old. In interviews over the years that I don’t care to link to, Polanski has doubled-down on what he did rather than expressing anything resembling contrition and made it clear it was not an isolated incident.
In part because he’s still alive at 90, I wondered if I should even stream “Chinatown.” Am I complicit in some way by adding a digit to the streaming numbers that may ultimately profit Polanski? While watching a movie one time is not the same thing as, say, giving Polanski a reprehensible standing ovation at the Oscars (which happened in 2003), should we be boycotting morally dubious artists entirely?
I don’t know, honestly. But I wanted to see how “Chinatown” felt to watch, so I plowed ahead.
“Chinatown” is a difficult watch
“Chinatown,” particularly re-watching in 2024, is a really ugly movie.
I don’t mean ugly in an aesthetic sense, as it luxuriates in the orange groves, estates, and opulent restaurants of Southern California. It has some spectacular action sequences (again orange groves). Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway are actors at the height of their powers.
But even aside from the plot specifics, the movie features intense racism against Asian-Americans even by 1974 standards. While, as poet Garrett Hongo argues in a fascinating interview after a 2017 rewatch, the racism seems to have deployed intentionally as a story device that blinds Gittes, there are moments like “glass/grass” that just feel gratuitously mean-spirited and unrelated to the broader metaphor of Chinatown as a byword for Byzantine (itself a problematic choice).
Throw in a healthy dose of misogyny and the abuse against Evelyn Mulwray–Gittes even elicits her to shake her head “no” when he asks if she was raped–and it’s all an absolute yeeeeeeeeesh to say the least.
The moral horrors are bound up in Noah Cross, the rapacious (in every sense of the word) water baron who is seeking to kidnap his daughter/granddaughter, has his son-in-law and former business partner killed, and is bilking the public, among pretty much every other form of misdeed.
Why does he do it? Jake Gittes asks him directly:
Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future…
When Gittes asks why he’s estranged from Evelyn:
Cross: You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.
What struck me most on this viewing: I don’t even think Roman Polanski believes Cross is the villain of “Chinatown.”
Did Polanski identify with Noah Cross?
It’s curious from the off that Polanski cast himself as the Noah Cross henchman responsible for the most brutal nose gash in film history.
But what gives it all away for me is his casting choice of legendary director John Huston in the role of Noah Cross. Yes. A film director plays the child rapist baron with the doubly biblical name of Noah Cross who perpetrated the theft that built Los Angeles.
As Garrett Hong points out: “Polanski himself a mirror [sic] of Noah Cross the puppet master of the movie and pedophile in life. That irony is scary as hell.”
I don’t think it’s ironic, it was a deliberate choice.
This creeping sense that the movie isn’t treating Cross as the villain contributes to the overwhelming ugliness of the movie. Unfortunately, legendary film critic Pauline Kael never wrote a full review of “Chinatown,” but she did say:
He makes the LA atmosphere gothic and creepy from the word “go.” The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It’s all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.
The thing is, modern Los Angeles really was birthed by an epic, nasty ecological and economic theft. L.A.’s founding fathers really were rapacious, morally cavalier robber barons. Same with Hollywood’s founding fathers. Maybe it took a creature of Hollywood who didn’t necessarily see the problem with rapacity to render such a vivid depiction of L.A.’s ugly inception and underbelly.
Could a grim classic like “Chinatown” have been made by a less benighted director?
How conjoined are art and the artist?
Author Joyce Carol Oates got roasted a few weeks ago on Twitter (I’m not calling it X) for grappling with some analogous questions when it comes to Alice Munro, whose highly regarded stories deal with the kinds of family secrets her own life uncomfortably mirrored:
For some artists, their personal darkness and what they tap into help produce the art people admire. It’s an uncomfortable reality.
I am by no means wondering in this post if we need moral monsters to create great art, as there are plenty of wonderful artists who double as wonderful human beings.
But when it comes to the more morally dubious artists, it’s not as simple as simply “love the art, hate the artist.” It’s a nice fiction that we can simply cleave the art from the artists as if they’re not inextricably linked, both in the art’s production as well as its reception.
I don’t find it so easy to just block it all out and enjoy the work produced by monsters, particularly the living ones. At what point are you, as a consumer of art, complicit in empowering artists to terrorize others in their personal lives and contributing more broadly to unjust and corrupt systems?
I honestly don’t know. There are bloody edges on this subject that I don’t know if I’ll ever resolve.
How do you come to terms with the blurry lines separating art and artist?
Need help with your book? I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and coaching!
For my best advice, check out my online classes, my guide to writing a novel and my guide to publishing a book.
And if you like this post: subscribe to my newsletter!
Photo: “Chinatown” (1974)
When I find out an artist, author, actor, etc., has committed something I (and most people) consider an atrocity or injustice, I steer clear of patronizing or in anyway adding to that person’s wealth, popularity, rank, etc. For me, it’s feels a lot like the notion behind Einstein’s reference to “silence is complicity”.
This is great! A thoughtful, super well written essay, Nathan.
I don’t know what to do. It’s hard. I mean, I love the writing of J.D. Salinger so so much. I don’t understand how the man who wrote the books and stories I love is the same man who did what he did to Joyce Maynard. And you probably know the heartbreak I had to go through regarding Win Butler, the lead singer of the band I worshipped for years and years. I won’t go to their concerts anymore, but I still find myself listening to the songs sometimes. Polanski made some incredible films. And, he’s a bad guy. People will say humans are gonna human, but we don’t have to buy the tickets. I deactivated my twitter account because I can’t stand the idea of supporting Elon Musk in any way. But still, I can’t deny how much I love Franny and Zooey. I can’t not love a certain song, a painting, a story. I can’t even pretend there isn’t some real beauty in them sometimes. It’s just not true that Picasso is/was overrated! I haven’t really added much to this conversation, have I? Short answer, I just don’t know. Ugh, is all I can say.
Writers spend a lot of time trying to understand the bad guys of the world. My favorite villains are 99% understandable and 1% redeemable. However, when I put so much effort into understanding immoral acts, I have to also do the work of strengthening my own moral code when I’m done. I have to set the boundaries again, so to speak. A creative person could skip the second half of the work and end up living without a firm moral code.
As for creative types who’ve clearly crossed boundaries, I can appreciate their work but I won’t contribute a penny to their wealth.
Everyone has a dark side but most of us don’t venture beyond the thrill that seeing it gives us. Why do we watch horror, mystery, sci-fi? Or any genre with death, etc? If we didn’t have a dark side within us, all our pictures, books, and movies would be pastels with cows in a field with a red barn. Artists delve into their souls to create. The more they’ve experienced, the darker they go. Their revealing of the darkness they experience, gives voice to our own. There is some truth to the phrase, “Write what you know.”
But when does the darkness go beyond the art? When is the darkness living and breathing within the artist? When is the artist the darkness? The “Voldemort” of art? How do we stop it?
Certainly we can “un” support the artist. But in a case where the injustice is only discovered years after, when we’ve watched and relished dozens of films, books, or paintings by the artist, what can we do?
I say hit them where it hurts the most. In the pocket. If there is no questionable doubt about the guilt of the artist, I say we collect all future art royalties from the date of proven guilt, and give it to the victim or a fund for people who help the victims. Let the artist starve.
But then do we look at all art, that tends to be on the dark side, and question the author? I have written (but not published) short stories where I murder people. I’ve not murdered anyone, but if I publish it, would I be questioned as a possible murderer?
A tough question indeed. I try to separate art from the artist, but of course morals, ethics, personal beliefs and experiences do have an impact. I find it easier to tie an author to the written page, or a painter to an art piece, or even a musician to a song, than I do individuals to motion pictures. Motion pictures by their very nature take a wider spectrum of people to create a finished piece..
To the example of Chinatown – of course Polanski is a piece of work for both his crimes and his decision to flee responsibility. But, Nicholson, Dunaway, and the rest of the cast and crew, all worked together to make this film arguably one of the best American noir films ever made.
Creatives tend to be unique. If I were to think too deeply about an artist’s views, ethics, or politics, it might become difficult to find a book, a song, a painting, a finely prepared meal, or a movie to enjoy. Life is short, I try desperately not to overthink it….
The link below leads to my favorite response to this topic (from musician Nick Cave). His thoughts are a reminder that humans are complex, the world filled with more gray answers than black and white ones. These days—and I think some social media with its “pick a side” algorithmic attitude has heavily contributed to this—it often feels like we try to force people into neatly labeled boxes (“If you’re this, you obviously can’t be that”), and I’d argue that is a much more forced, stressful, alienating, and unnatural way to think, than remembering we are all a mixture of darkness and beauty and strangeness and foolishness and so on and so on.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/should-we-separate-the-artist-from-the-art/
Excellent article, and a much needed perspective. I’m on the side of “avoid the morally reprehensible,” once you know. There are so many artists who are decent and produce brilliant, insightful work, and yet they often go unrecognized because of our fascination with evil.
Such a good post! I think about this issue all the time, and still haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion. For now, it’s a case by case basis, depending on the actions of the artist and the value of the art to me. But is that fair? Who am I to judge? And how much is lost to the passage of time? I ask that last one because I just visited Athens for the first time, and there’s an amphitheatre built over 2,000 years ago that’s still in use for concerts today — and it was commissioned by a man who may or may not have murdered his underage wife!
I wonder how these questions would be answered if we were talking about inventors and their technology, like the microscope or automobile etc.? I guess one could argue these inventions are needed to live life normally, while the exposure to art is more of a choice of luxury. Also, the transformation of inventions, due to continued evolution/improvements, further separates them from the original inventor, making their use more palatable. I’m certain that there are many inventions, including life saving medical devices, whose genesis includes unsavory players.
But don’t we NEED art to live life fully, to move us, and give insight to future historians on the current state/importance of topics? Art and technology are being developed right now by creators whom many of us would look upon with disdain if we truly knew them. Does this mean their works should be ignored or even discarded? And what basis should be used to decide this? I don’t know the answer either, but I suspect I am already appreciating arts whose origin would not please me.
Interesting perspective! And certainly visiting medical museums is an extremely bracing experience for this reason, such as the Hunterian Museum in London.