Weep for art lost
Some creators and their creations may deserve boycotts — but others are forced into silence, writes Ann Hornaday.
In the riveting new documentary On the Record, in which former recording executive Drew Dixon recounts how being sexually harassed and assaulted by powerful producers drove her out of the music business, the journalist Kierna Mayo reflects on Dixon’s promising career as a gifted young woman with a keen eye and ear for talent.
Her eyes welling up with tears, Mayo wonders “what we’re poorer for” in the wake of Dixon being forced to give up her dreams. Considering all the music that went undiscovered, all the songs left unsung, she observes, “we all lose.”
It’s a shattering moment in an already shattering film, and it offers a sobering flip side to a question I’ve been pondering for a while: Do we have anything to gain when alleged perpetrators are shunned, and their work is marginalized or erased?
The question isn’t abstract: Both Woody Allen and Roman Polanski made movies that came out recently. Allen’s is A Rainy Day in New York, a romantic comedy starring Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning. Polanski’s is An Officer and a Spy, about the wrongful accusation and trial of French military captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894.
It’s not that anything new has emerged about either man: It’s by now well known that Allen stands accused of sexually molesting his daughter, Dylan, when she was 7, an allegation that was investigated but ultimately dropped without charges. (And which Allen denies.) The episode coincided with his publicly acknowledging affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow, who was also Allen’s romantic partner. (Allen and Previn have now been married for almost 23 years.)
We can stipulate that “messy” doesn’t begin to describe Allen’s personal life.
The same can be said for Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but fled the country before he could be sentenced, convinced that he was not receiving a fair trial.
In the absence of any satisfying form of private or public accountability, it’s been left to the audience to sift through conflicting stories, argue about whom to believe and why, make categorical decisions about never seeing that man’s movies again or separate the art from the artist — to the point of cognitive dissonance.
There was a time when renegade distributors might have jumped at the chance to market a film by exploiting its perceived controversy. Today, in the context of heightened awareness around sexual harassment and abuse, cancel culture and scorchedearth media takedowns, not even the edgiest film company is willing to invite the kind of blowback that Allen’s book publisher received earlier this year for putting out his memoir.
As a reckoning, though, the disappearing of Allen and Polanski feels simultaneously draconian and woefully inadequate — a form of collective but inchoate judgment that infantilizes the audience and unfairly punishes the hundreds of craftspeople whose contributions undergird a supremely collaborative medium.
It also, not incidentally, mirrors a form of denial that powerful men have engaged in for centuries when it comes to one another’s misdeeds. Too icky. Too difficult. Let’s ignore it. Separating the art from the artist requires holding two competing thoughts at the same time. So, it turns out, does separating the art from the audience.
I’m still sorry I can’t see A Rainy Day in New York or An Officer and a Spy, think fairly and probingly about them, and evaluate them as works of art and psychological reflections of the people who made them. But the unseen films that truly haunt me — the ones I weep for — are by the countless artists whose work has been rendered invisible without our even knowing they’re gone.
The Washington Post