The Big Questions The Big Questions: Should artists’ lives or opinions affect how people perceive their art?

Like so many people, I was a naïve idealist in college. And one of the subjects I was most naïvely, idealistically intractable on was the separation of art and artist. We perceive books, movies, television, fine art, and so forth largely through a lens of our own experiences and interpretations. Our most instinctive reactions to culture are likely to be the strongest ones. Specifically, they’re likely to be more immediate and powerful than any reactions creators try to dictate. So I always believed that art should stand on its own, without commentary from the artist, which just muddied the issue.

The problem is that artist commentary is so often tempting—even when we get something different out of a work than what directors or writers or actors say they put into it, it’s generally compelling to hear them out as they explain their vision. (If it wasn’t, half this website wouldn’t exist.) Inception wouldn’t be sparking nearly so much avid online debate if Christopher Nolan released a dry statement explaining what he believes it all means and exactly how we should interpret the final act—but even so, I’m betting if he did issue such a statement, everyone who saw the movie would want to read it anyway.

And by the same token, even people who would like for work to stand entirely on its own have trouble turning their heads during major media blowouts like the current business over Mel Gibson’s profanity-laden meltdown tapes, or Roman Polanski’s arrest and release. Often after being exposed to artists’ work, we feel like we know them on some level—especially if that work speaks to us in personal ways. It can be a shock when terrible behavior (or even just normal human behavior that happens to be at odds with a carefully crafted media image, or with the art itself) reminds us that we really don’t. And our own personal judgments about a creator’s actions can be even harder to separate from the work than the direct, overt statements they make about that work.

Even so, art can’t exist in a vacuum. Interpretation is a personal act, but so is creation, and some part of the artist goes into the work, whether it’s a specific intended message, or just the inevitable imprint of a creator’s personality and experiences. Work still has to stand on its own, but it’s increasingly hard to let it, given our media-driven, privacy-lite era, where we tend to know a lot more about high-profile writers, actors, and directors than they’d like us to know. Yet at least from an idealistic perspective, the ultimate determinant of whether a work speaks to someone should be whether the work actually does speak to someone, and not whether the creator said it should, or the creator is funny or interesting or smart or plays well on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Or for that matter, whether he’s a drunken, abusive, ranting psychopath.

I blame my attitude in this on Dave Sim. In college, I started reading his epic comic Cerebus for the first time, and the fifth book of the series, Jaka’s Story, struck me particularly powerfully. It’s an intimate, deeply emotional story about a young aristocrat married to a sweet but irresponsible, childish man, and working as an exotic dancer for another man who is, unbeknownst to her, ruining himself financially (and mentally) out of secret lust for her. Meanwhile, a writer heavily based on Oscar Wilde writes (possibly entirely fictional) stories of her childhood. In the end, something is revealed that permanently changes her circumstances and explosively ends her marriage. I thought it was one of the most poignant, well-written portraits of a woman’s inner life I’d ever read, and one of the most insightful about what it’s like to be caught between practical life, personal desire, and other people’s emotional and sexual demands.

Then I read an interview with Dave Sim in which he offhandedly dismissed the whole thing as a “writing exercise” where he tried to make Jaka into a nuanced, sympathetic character to draw people in and make them care, but the real point was when she got knocked down a peg: “The female character was the center of the story and could do no wrong,” Sim told Comic Culture in 1994. “Everybody’s in love with her and she pretty much rules the roost and then to basically turn the whole thing upside down with the ending. That was the purpose of doing it. I certainly don’t see Jaka as this magnificent character or really wonderful person.” 

So here’s the center of the struggle to separate artist and art: No matter what Dave Sim says about the book, I still loved it, and still found it compelling and immaculately crafted. The book did not change in any way because I read that interview. Even if Sim intended it as no more than a standard punishment drama, a sign of his ever-growing issues with women, he’d tapped into something that touched me personally. But his interpretation took an awful lot of the admiration out of it, and made me wonder, was I wrong, or was he? Was it actually possible for an artist to somehow misinterpret his own work? 

And the answer is no, of course not. But it’s possible for me to get something out of it that he didn’t specifically intend and didn’t specifically put into it, because we’re radically different people, and we see the book in radically different ways. And in deciding that, I was separating the artist from the art. I was choosing my reaction—which is, after all, mine, and thus more authentic to me—over his.

Authorial intent can be enlightening, and it can open up a work to new interpretations, or—more often, I think—shut down too many possible interpretations. Even for idealists, it can be hard to get around authorial intent, though unless the art itself is overwhelmingly strident and unequivocal—in which case usually isn’t very good art—it’s certainly possible to miss, misinterpret, or just not internalize a work’s intended message. In an A.V. Club interview, Primer director Shane Carruth explained that he was exploring the moral aspects of abortion when he made the film, though it’d take a microscope to find it unless you’re aware that it’s there and you’re specifically looking. Plenty of kids read C.S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles without being aware that it’s all Christian allegory. (And man, some of them feel astonishingly betrayed and angry when they find out.) Knowing that Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon who intended the Twilight books as one long abstinence tract explains an awful lot about the details of the story, but just reading the books, it’s easy to lose that amid all the throbbing (though repressed-’til-after-marriage) lust. But once you’re told all those things are there—once the artist has stated outright what a piece of art is supposed to mean—it can be difficult to go back to your own original reaction to a work. 

But it’s easier if the work has its own independent strength, if it’s well-crafted and stands up on its own, and if it authentically touches you. If a story is so weak and lacking integrity that the writer saying “It’s secretly about this one thing I didn’t spell out directly” erases any and all previous reader/viewer reactions, it wasn’t much of a story to begin with. I can’t help but wonder if that explains the fury and sense of betrayal some people get over Lewis’ Narnia books—they stood on their own just fine as exciting children’s fantasies, and finding out they’re all Christian metaphor doesn’t erase that previous reaction, but now it has to co-exist in the readers’ heads with a preachy Sunday-school lesson. And having to hold both interpretations at once—fun fantasy and religious tract—makes some people feel as though they’ve been sneakily proselytized, forced to participate in something against their will.

A similar reaction seems to loom whenever a creator or actor does something really beyond the pale, like Roman Polanski. The online debate on Polanski since his 2009 arrest in Switzerland has been lengthy and furious and emotional, and boils down to two sides: “But he raped a child!” and “But he made Chinatown!” Few people are debating that both events occurred, but no two people seem to agree on whether and how they’re relevant to each other. Should we feel guilty for enjoying Chinatown, given that it was made by a man who raped a child? More troublingly, should we interpret the film’s key forced sexual relationship between an older man and a traumatized, underaged girl in the light of Polanski’s own later actions and his unfortunate subsequent “Everyone wants to fuck young girls” statement? Even if we aren’t supposed to, can we stop ourselves? Does Polanski’s crime make the movie any less a masterpiece?

And at that point, we move away from authorial intent and back into the messier aspect of separating the artist from the art. Because as I said in the opening, we interpret art through the lens of our own experience. And if part of our experience includes Mel Gibson’s hysterical, shrieked threats ringing in our ears, it may be impossible not to mentally integrate that not just into every film he makes from now on, but every old film of his we attempt to watch today. The same can be said for Tom Cruise leaping around on Oprah’s couch and trying to bully Brooke Shields out of postpartum depression, or Alec Baldwin calling his daughter a thoughtless little pig, or David Hasselhoff drunkenly trying to eat a floor-burger. It’s all but impossible to stuff those weird, messy genies back into their bottles and let these men disappear entirely into characters and films where their embarrassments don’t come to mind.

But again, it helps if those films are terrific, and develop their own strong stamps on our minds. Enjoying Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock makes it easier to forget and forgive anything he’s done in his personal life; some people clearly feel the same way about Polanski. (I’m not taking a stance on that one, one way or another; the question I’m tackling already is big enough without getting into whether art can rehabilitate someone, much less justify a horrible crime.) Again, if the art on its own is weak enough that a creator’s real-life behavior wins out as the most important thing about it, maybe it wasn’t a worthwhile story to begin with.

Believe it or not, this column wasn’t inspired by the Gibson tapes or the Polanski release—it was prompted by our Wrapped Up In Books coverage on Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction/drug-culture novel A Scanner Darkly. Both his book and Richard Linklater’s film adaptation end with a poignant personal note from Dick, making it clear that the characters are inspired by himself and his friends and their experiences, which puts a new emotional spin on the story. In our live online chat about the book, staffers and readers debated at length whether this coda added substantially to the experience of the book, or distracted from it by trying to bring in personal pathos that the book doesn’t necessarily earn. I found the coda touching, but in the end, I feel it’s a distraction from the work itself. I still have that much of the idealist in me. I still think a work should stand on its own in the reader or viewer’s mind, regardless of what the creator says or does.

At the same time, I acknowledge that there are some excellent reasons to be aware of an artist’s opinions or real life when approaching their work. Hypocrisy is a big one—it’s hard to take Mel Gibson’s avowed, public devotion to religion (and his mega-successful religious film The Passion Of The Christ) seriously given his apparent private behavior. And I can similarly understand people not wanting to financially support work by a creator they consider reprehensible; I have no argument with people who refuse to see new Polanski movies because they don’t want to support the luxurious lifestyle of a rich fugitive from justice. Boycotting an artist due to personal reservations may mean you miss out on some great art, but if it keeps your conscience intact, it’s a valid personal choice. And on top of all that, some people may just want to avoid work where they know the creator had a purpose and a message in mind and is actively going to try to sway people with it, as with Lewis’ Narnia books, or John Travolta delivering Battlefield Earth as a testament to his own Scientology. (Yes, there are many other reasons to avoid that film. Don’t get distracted here.)

Besides, as I said earlier, separating artist and art can just plain be difficult. More than a decade ago, I talked over this same issue with a prominent, veteran science-fiction author who’s won every major award in the field. He came down firmly on the side of the importance of the art over the artist. And then he paused, thought about it for a minute, and added something to the effect of “Except when it comes to Harlan Ellison. Ever since I met him, I can’t read anything he’s written without hearing it all in that high-pitched, angry little voice of his.” Sometimes you just can’t help bringing the artist into the art, even if you want to.

But here’s the thing: Ultimately, if the art has value, if it speaks to people in anything but an ephemeral, of-its-immediate-era sort of way, it will likely be around longer than the artist will. It will reach more people than the artist’s interviews or personal life. And eventually, it’ll have to stand on its own. Irritating hiccups like George Lucas “enhancing” the original Star Wars trilogy aside, the artist changes over time, but the artwork stays the same, and part of its value comes out in whether it speaks to people outside its immediate era, and whether it outlasts the creator’s own commentary.

Case in point: Ray Bradbury has, over the decades, become increasingly crotchety and conservative. In a 1999 interview with The A.V. Club, he shrugged off concerns about restricting or regulating language in art in a way that surprised us at the time; he says that’s good taste rather than censorship, but  it still felt strange coming from the author of 1953’s Fahrenheit 451. But regardless of his views today, or what they become in the future, the book isn’t any less scathing or brilliant an indictment of censorship. Which suggests that the book was a separate entity all along, and has become even more of one as Bradbury has moved away from it. 

It’s hard to know exactly where knowing the context of a work—knowing about its creator’s history and goals—fades into bias, and an inability to see the work for itself. It’s hard to come to any piece of art without bringing our personal baggage with us. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves whether a given film, show, book, or whatever is meaningful and worthy, and we do that with all the knowledge at our disposal, often more subconsciously than consciously.

But I still think that while we can’t help how we interpret something subconsciously, we can help whether we let an artist’s words or actions completely distract us from our own direct, personal reactions. And in the end, letting those things get in the way is unfair to ourselves, and to our own emotions. And it’s unfair to the art itself, and whatever it may move us to feel or think. Regardless of its intent, regardless of its creator’s behavior, regardless of what anyone else who experiences it says, something speaks to you or it doesn’t, all on its own.

And sorry, Dave Sim, but you don’t get a vote.