Why We Have To Separate The Art From The Artist, And Why We Can’t

And “Birth of a Nation” has become a crucible for this debate in so many more ways: embraced from the off (and even before, as the pre-opening credits ovation at Sundance suggests) as the Great Black Hope for the 2017 Oscars after the #OscarsSoWhite 2016 awards, telling a rousing historical tale of slave revolt, even titling itself after the notoriously racist KKK-glorifying 1915 DW Griffith film, Parker’s picture was pre-ordained for greatness, or at least for importance, based on its anti-racist credentials. But how jeopardized are those credentials now by the revelation that he was involved in a rape case? Even more tortuously, how are we now to view his decision to include a rape in his film? This is a storyline which is not part of the historical record of Nat Turner’s slave revolt, but which he and presumably Jean McGianni Celestin, who gets a co-story credit, decided to include. Celestin was the other named party in the Parker rape case, and, unlike Parker against who was acquitted, he was convicted (a verdict that was later overturned). The gravity of these crimes, the unsatisfactory nature of Parker’s initial responses (though what, exactly, would have been satisfactory? And to whom?), the revelation of the subsequent desperately tragic suicide of the victim — all these factors simply will materially affect how we receive Parker’s film if we make the informed decision to go see it in the first place.

The other aspect of the “Birth of a Nation” scandal is of course the way the revelations about Parker came to light — it seemed to be a strategy on the part of distributor Fox Searchlight to manage a potential headache by “getting out in front of it.” If so, it went dreadfully awry — not least because of the justifiable outrage that audiences feel when we identify that something as grave as a rape is being “spun” as part of a film’s marketing and awards-hopeful release plan.

Perhaps the truth these days is less that it’s impossible to separate the art from the artist and more that we can’t separate the art from the marketing, and the artist has become part of the marketing. On a lighter note than the above, you can simply look at the recent reactions to the premiere of Mel Gibson‘s first post-meltdown directorial outing “Hacksaw Ridge” and count how very few make no mention whatsoever of his being on the “comeback trail” or searching for “rehabilitation.” On an even sillier note, you can also see as proof the rash of warmed-over hot takes on “By The Sea” that blossomed in the wake of the news of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie‘s split and  the doubtless-wholly-coincidental release of the trailer for “Allied,” which stars Pitt and Marion Cotillard, whose rumored affair is reported in the more gossipy corners of the internet, to be responsible for Jolie’s filing for divorce.

But perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this new attitude is how a certain element of hysteria has crept into the discourse around it. There are those who are guilty of just as extreme a black-and-white approach as the diehard “separatists” but from the other end, those who like to police the reactions of others (who might be genuinely and honestly struggling through this treacherous territory) and to find those reactions wanting because they do not match their own in vehemence. Because of the very emotive issues that the most high-profile cases recently have revolved around, a great flattening occurs all around: to murmur a single word that can be interpreted as a defence of “Birth of a Nation” (like this sentence, for example) is to be guilty of propagating rape culture. To suggest that you are curious enough to want to check out “Crisis in Six Scenes” this weekend is to participate in the kind of social injustice that sees women who accuse powerful men of violent crimes routinely ignored or diminished or doubted.

The genie won’t go back in the bottle, and there’s no way to un-open Pandora’s box. The film culture in which we live, that is at least partially of our making going back to the first auteurists who stated that films represented the personal vision and imprint of a single author — the director — and progressing on through to our current celebrity-obsessed times in which part of the marketing arsenal for any new film, particularly a smaller one trying to make it big, is the “visionary” to whom we ascribe all its best and worst qualities, is simply more cluttered and complicated and cross-referenced than before. In this environment, as unsatisfactory as it seems, it feels like the only honest answer to “Should I separate the art from the artist?” is “Yes, except when you can’t.”

There are so many fewer certainties than before, but here are two. Firstly, if you can, as a thinking human being, continue to regard all art in isolation of its maker, I am jealous of you and wish you the very best: it is a level of purity that I wish I could retain in all cases. And secondly, if you can’t, then that moment probably came for you at a different time than it did for me or for others, and just because someone else is at a different stage on that journey does not make you morally superior to them. The world is a dangerous, treacherous place at the moment and those at either end quashing the moderate, hesitant, honestly-working-it-though voices that land somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are part of the problem. If you’re really thinking about these thorny questions and being asked for a definitive, bulletproof answer, sometimes the bravest and rightest reply of all is “I don’t know.”