We only punish ourselves by erasing sinners from history
There aren’t many people left in public life who can use the word “extrude” with confidence. Fewer still who are prepared to put in a good word for Kevin Spacey. But the good thing about being 83, and a national treasure, is that Dame Judi Dench can say whatever she likes.
Dame Judi is fond of Spacey. They made a film together in 2001, just after her husband of 30 years had died. Spacey, she recalled at the San Sebastián film festival this week, was “an inestimable comfort … He cheered me up and kept me going”. This confounding revelation – Bad Man Was Kind To Widow – made headlines.
Spacey has been persona non grata since this time last year, when 16 different men accused him of sexual misconduct. He has since vanished from sight. His representative says he is “taking the time necessary to seek evaluation and treatment”. (It always sounds suspiciously like a spa, this limbo into which disgraced sex-pests retreat. One imagines them all, between “treatments”, wandering the corridors in their towelling robes, grumbling about the tiny portions in the Diet Room.)
The point is, Spacey has vanished. Not just in person, but on screen too. The moment the first allegation came out, Netflix sacked him from its hit series House of Cards. More panicky still was the reaction of Sir Ridley Scott, who had just finished filming All the Money in the World with Spacey. Sir Ridley cut all of Spacey’s scenes, and reshot them with Christopher Plummer in his place.
This is what really bothers Dame Judi: the editing of culture to appease changing mores. “Are we to do that throughout history?” she boggles. “Are we to go back throughout history and anyone who has misbehaved any way, or who has broken the law, or who has committed some kind of offence, are they always going to be cut out? Are we going to extrude them from our history?”
Forget the usual #Metoo arguments about whether X did a bad thing, or how bad, or whether that sort of carry-on was acceptable in the Eighties. This is about us: you and me. Are we no longer grown up enough to separate artists from their creations? Do we actually want to be mollycoddled like this: rescued, like swooning Victorian spinsters, from exposure to any cultural experience that doesn’t pass the Moral Purity Test?
Charlie Chaplin had a troubling habit of marrying teenagers. Should he be cut from every scene of Modern Times? Woody Allen is accused – though he fiercely denies it – of molesting his own daughter. Does that make it unsafe to watch Annie Hall?
It’s an inconvenient fact that some of the best films (and books, plays, painting, sculptures, scientific inventions, political ideas and intellectual insights) have been the work of deeply flawed humans. Those who have committed crimes should pay the price. But why must we?
The sculptor Eric Gill sexually abused both his daughters, had a lifelong incestuous relationship with his sister, and even forced himself on the dog. He also produced some of the most exquisite art in British history. Every time I walk past New Broadcasting House, I look up at Gill’s statue of Prospero and Ariel and marvel that such a terrible person should have so much beauty in him. It is a moral lesson in itself: a testament in stone to the vast, unruly capacity of human nature.