Speaker 1: The night before my birthday this year, I had a
Speaker 1: late flight home from Los Angeles. I arrived back in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn and go to bed without seeing anyone. I sleep
Speaker 1: late into the morning that I come downstairs, not having
Speaker 1: seen my family in several days, and there's my wife
Speaker 1: and my two year old daughter, so excited to wish
Speaker 1: me a happy birthday and give me my gift. So
Speaker 1: sweet to be reunited, and they bring out this giant box.
Speaker 1: My wife has been talking about it for weeks. Would
Speaker 1: the box arrive in time? She's been thinking about it
Speaker 1: and worrying about it. It's the perfect gift. She's been
Speaker 1: talking up how much I'm going to love it, and
Speaker 1: how brilliant she is for coming up with the perfect present.
Speaker 1: Very exciting build up. They give me this giant box
Speaker 1: and I open it and it's a big, beautiful, fancy
Speaker 1: framed photograph, something that looks like it should be in
Speaker 1: a museum. It's of an old man in a black
Speaker 1: suit with a giant black dog next to him. And
Speaker 1: I look at it like, oh wow, this this is
Speaker 1: really something, and my wife says, yeah, it's Billy Wilder.
Speaker 1: I looked so hard for it. I found that at
Speaker 1: this auction house, so incredible. I know he's your favorite.
Speaker 1: How cool is that? And I don't quite know what
Speaker 1: to say because this is not a photograph of Billy Wilder.
Speaker 1: So I just sort of.
Speaker 2: Say, oh my god, I've never quite seen him look
Speaker 2: like this before. I didn't know he had a dog
Speaker 2: like that, but then I had to, so I said,
Speaker 2: but I'm not sure it's actually not This isn't Billy Wilder.
Speaker 1: And my wife got so embarrassed. Really not a great scene.
Speaker 1: She bought it from this auction house that labeled it
Speaker 1: as Helman Newton photographing Billy Wilder. Later that afternoon, she
Speaker 1: texts me from her office after doing some research, and
Speaker 1: not only is it not Billy Wilder, it is a
Speaker 1: photograph of Jean Marie Le Penn, the founder of France's
Speaker 1: far right party, whom many consider to be a fascist.
Speaker 1: So we now have a giant, beautiful, black and white
Speaker 1: Helman Newton photograph of an anti semite in our home.
Speaker 1: Happy birthday. I tell this story, of course, because role
Speaker 1: Doll is and always has been part of the fabric
Speaker 1: of my life. He helped shape my worldview, just like
Speaker 1: Billy Wilder did. But it's hard to escape the feeling.
Speaker 1: Now that there's been a bit of a mislabeling, it's
Speaker 1: hard to see Doll as the sweet, creative hero I
Speaker 1: want him to be, and instead I now sort of
Speaker 1: see him as this darker figure. Can I square Doll's
Speaker 1: much loved broken spine books scattered throughout our house with
Speaker 1: the mezuza on our front door? Should I hide his
Speaker 1: books like the Penn photo is hidden in the back
Speaker 1: of our closet. I really don't know the answer, but
Speaker 1: I want to. I really want to. For my hard podcast,
Speaker 1: Imagine Entertainment and Parallax, I'm Aaron Tracy and this is
Speaker 1: the Secret World of Roald Dahl episode eight. On our
Speaker 1: last episode, Roxanne Gay suggested we speak to the author,
Speaker 1: Claire Debtterer. Let's do that now. Claire has very different
Speaker 1: feelings from Roxanne on the subject of separating the art
Speaker 1: from the artist. Claire is a prolific writer whose work
Speaker 1: has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Nation Vogue,
Speaker 1: Marie Clare Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, you name it.
Speaker 1: Her book Monsters a Fans Dilemma has become something like
Speaker 1: a definitive text on this giant controversial issue that we're
Speaker 1: all grappling with. It's brave, and it's honest, and it's
Speaker 1: personal and it's really funny. In its rave review, The
Speaker 1: New York Times wrote, this is a book that looks
Speaker 1: boldly down the cliff at the roiling waters below, and
Speaker 1: jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn't afraid to get wet.
Speaker 1: I started off by a skinclaire to tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about monsters.
Speaker 3: I came to write this book.
Speaker 4: I started it many years ago, in twenty fifteen or so,
Speaker 4: because I'd been thinking and writing a lot about Roman
Speaker 4: Polanski and I started my career as a film critic,
Speaker 4: and Polanski's one of my top five filmmakers of all time.
Speaker 3: I love his work.
Speaker 4: I was researching him for a previous book where I
Speaker 4: was writing about predation of young girls in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: and so Polanski came into that story, and I, you know,
Speaker 4: I really began to learn a lot about what had
Speaker 4: happened in his not even just alleged rape of Samantha
Speaker 4: Gaily or Samantha Geimer as she's sometimes known. I read depositions,
Speaker 4: I read a lot on the subject, and when I
Speaker 4: finished reading, I found, to my surprise that I could
Speaker 4: still watch the films, and this seemed hugely interesting to me,
Speaker 4: that there was something happening here that was complex and
Speaker 4: sort of upsetting. And I began to think about this problem,
Speaker 4: and in early moments of writing, I was just sort
Speaker 4: of looking for someone to tell me what to do,
Speaker 4: which now is a dynamic I'm very familiar with as
Speaker 4: the author of this book. People just want me to
Speaker 4: tell them what to do. The book is not That's
Speaker 4: not really what it's trying to do. What it's trying
Speaker 4: to do more is look at what was happening to
Speaker 4: me in that moment when I was consuming the Polanski
Speaker 4: films knowing what I know. It was talking about what's
Speaker 4: occurring there, what happens to the audience member? Is the
Speaker 4: art changed? Is there something immoral in that moment? Does
Speaker 4: it matter? I was trying to be descriptive of the problem.
Speaker 4: This is what it's like to consume work knowing what
Speaker 4: we know. You know, I do have some ideas of
Speaker 4: what people could or might do, but the book is
Speaker 4: more interested in how we live through this problem.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, is there a difference in your mind between
Speaker 1: consuming the work of artists who committed crimes against people
Speaker 1: versus those who just said big into things. Doll was
Speaker 1: a bit of a jerk to the people who are
Speaker 1: closest to him, but he's not accused of any sort
Speaker 1: of actual physical abuse like so many of these artist
Speaker 1: monsters are. His crimes were what he said. Do you
Speaker 1: think that there's a difference there.
Speaker 4: I don't mean to be Yoda like or KG, but
Speaker 4: I think that it's interesting that your question cites the
Speaker 4: answer to the problem in the nuances or differences in
Speaker 4: the behavior of the artist alone. And I guess what's
Speaker 4: most interesting to me is the audience member. This is
Speaker 4: really the nexus from which I look at this problem.
Speaker 4: I guess the question is who are you? Who is
Speaker 4: the person who's consuming the art? You know, the person
Speaker 4: who's able to withstand their knowledge of someone's biographical shittiness.
Speaker 4: It's largely dependent on their own life experience, you know.
Speaker 4: So you have the biography of the maker, but then
Speaker 4: you also have the biography of the audience member. I
Speaker 4: think that somebody's experience of Doll's anti Semitism, for instance,
Speaker 4: might be coming to that work with their own experiences
Speaker 4: of that. We can't just sort of make these kind
Speaker 4: of universal or hard and fast rules about what could
Speaker 4: or could not be consumed based just on the artist's behavior.
Speaker 4: It really, to me comes back to the subjective, lived
Speaker 4: experience of the audience member.
Speaker 1: Certainly everyone could make the choice for themselves whether they
Speaker 1: want to consume this work or not. But with Doll,
Speaker 1: I think there's that added wrinkle of what about kids,
Speaker 1: because it's not their choice right what I read to them.
Speaker 1: As my kids grow up, I am of course terrified
Speaker 1: that they're going to be subject to any sort of
Speaker 1: anti Semitism or bigotry of any kind. But here I
Speaker 1: am happily giving them Roll Doll's books. And I'm curious
Speaker 1: if you have any thoughts about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think this really has come to
Speaker 4: the four. Also with Rolling, what do we do about JK?
Speaker 3: Rowling? Do we give her books to our kids?
Speaker 4: And it's different because she's alive and very much doubling
Speaker 4: down right, She's saying what she's saying, And it's a
Speaker 4: very interesting and complex dynamic there. With Doll, you have
Speaker 4: someone who's dead where there's not this ongoing connection to
Speaker 4: the horrible things.
Speaker 3: He said.
Speaker 4: This question is interesting because it's almost like when I
Speaker 4: think about this problem, I think about individual responses and
Speaker 4: institutional responses. Will I watch a Polanski film?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Would I program or curate a series of Polanski films
Speaker 4: at my local art museum? More complex if my local
Speaker 4: art museum were to do that on its own, would
Speaker 4: I hope that they would acknowledge some of the complexities
Speaker 4: of the biography?
Speaker 3: Also?
Speaker 4: Yes, in your role as a parent, in a sense,
Speaker 4: you're an institution. There's pedagogy involved, There's the person is
Speaker 4: can't escape the roof that they're under. So you have
Speaker 4: different pressures on you as an institution than you do
Speaker 4: as a single person who's making his own decisions about
Speaker 4: whether or not to consume the art. So I guess
Speaker 4: you just have to ask yourself what kind of institution
Speaker 4: do you want to be and what is it that
Speaker 4: you're saying to your kids. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 4: how old your kids are, but I do think there's
Speaker 4: a sense in which if you're going to consume this work,
Speaker 4: you can also talk to your kids about what's going on.
Speaker 4: Maybe not when they're four, but maybe when they're ten.
Speaker 4: Kids can handle all kinds of complex discussions. Part of
Speaker 4: the issue around This is this debate over levels of complexity.
Speaker 4: How much should people know? How much should they have
Speaker 4: to have to know? Is it somehow a disruption of
Speaker 4: some kind of innocence to share information with people, which
Speaker 4: is the institutional question?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that.
Speaker 4: For me, the reason this question is so pressing is
Speaker 4: the way in which there is no escape from that biography.
Speaker 4: The biography is what's happening to us all the time.
Speaker 4: We can't not know. I'm fifty eight. When I was young,
Speaker 4: it was very difficult to find out biographical information about artists,
Speaker 4: certainly about pop artists or current pop culture figures. It
Speaker 4: was really incumbent on the audience member. And now biography
Speaker 4: happens to us as audience members for all of these
Speaker 4: different cultural reasons. But the reason it's really happening is
Speaker 4: because social media is built upon biography. Your biography, my biography.
Speaker 4: That's what it's made out of, his people's stories. So
Speaker 4: we learn this biographical information whether we want to or not.
Speaker 4: Like to me, it seems like a real nicety to ask,
Speaker 4: do I need to go find this biographical information to
Speaker 4: share with my students, because in most cases, the biographical
Speaker 4: information is preceding the work almost always. Now you know,
Speaker 4: this is a question for the ages, But the reason
Speaker 4: that this moment is special or unique is because of
Speaker 4: this way biography is out there running the show.
Speaker 1: Something else I grapple with is when the artist chooses
Speaker 1: to apologize with Doll he was absolutely unrepentant, but it's
Speaker 1: so tracked. He called himself an anti Semite and had
Speaker 1: he was totally fine with that. But a few years ago,
Speaker 1: right before, right around the same time that Netflix bought
Speaker 1: The Doll State for an incredible amount of money to
Speaker 1: turn those stories into films, the Doll State issued an
Speaker 1: official apology for his anti semitism. So I guess I'm
Speaker 1: trying to decide if that should make a bit of
Speaker 1: difference from me or not.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I like how you just said that.
Speaker 4: You know, you're trying to figure out how you feel
Speaker 4: about it and how you feel about as a Jewish family,
Speaker 4: how you're going to.
Speaker 3: Relate to that apology.
Speaker 4: And the Wagner Festival went through a similar thing where
Speaker 4: there was some reckoning and I think one family member apologized.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure where they are with that. I haven't
Speaker 4: doune research on it. In a few years. I think
Speaker 4: that to me, we can't change what Dall said, we
Speaker 4: can't change who Wagner was. But I think the a
Speaker 4: state or the institutional drive to apologize is actually meaningful.
Speaker 4: I think that apology, which is a little different from remorse,
Speaker 4: but I think apology, within the context of the conversations
Speaker 4: we're having is actually quite rare. It's not something people
Speaker 4: do a lot of. There's a lot of lack of
Speaker 4: repentance across the board around these issues, and I think
Speaker 4: that every apology begets more apologies.
Speaker 3: One hopes that it creates this idea that we.
Speaker 4: Can acknowledge that wrong was done, and that has both emotional,
Speaker 4: maybe even aesthetic, and certainly legal meaning. I sort of
Speaker 4: treasure every apology because they are so rare and because
Speaker 4: they remind us that it can be done. So one
Speaker 4: of the things I'm thinking about a lot in the
Speaker 4: book is I really grapple throughout the writing of the
Speaker 4: book with should a person be written off or lost
Speaker 4: for having done a rotten thing or said a rotten thing?
Speaker 4: What is it to take responsibility for the crummy things
Speaker 4: we've done. Part Way through the book, I'm dealing with
Speaker 4: my own sobriety and becoming sober sort of creates this
Speaker 4: necessity for an acknowledgment that you've done something wrong, because
Speaker 4: if you hadn't done something wrong, you wouldn't quit drinking, right,
Speaker 4: One's own monstrosity is kind of baked into the act
Speaker 4: of becoming sober.
Speaker 3: What is your life after that?
Speaker 4: What is it to be a person after that acknowledgment?
Speaker 4: And that question I think aligns me with people who've
Speaker 4: done something crummy, right, and what is it to be
Speaker 4: human in.
Speaker 3: The face of that? So people do get.
Speaker 4: In my opinion, they do get to change or get better.
Speaker 4: And it's a little different within a state. But I
Speaker 4: think apology and remorse are such powerful tools, and if
Speaker 4: we don't take them in some kind of good faith,
Speaker 4: we start to make them even more extinct than they
Speaker 4: already are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so hard to think of any especially in
Speaker 1: today's climate. I'm just thinking about Kanye West, track, Kyle Hitler.
Speaker 1: I mean, so many of these guys are just so unrepentant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And like, if Kanye were to make an apology now,
Speaker 4: would that be meaningful? Probably not, because it has been
Speaker 4: so unrepentant. The performance of his own hatefulness has been
Speaker 4: so ongoing and so relentless that apology would just be
Speaker 4: another performance. But there are context in which it's meaningful,
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I read your piece in Paris Review about Woody
Speaker 1: Allen this morning, and it seems like one of the
Speaker 1: things that bothered you so much was when he said
Speaker 1: the heart that's what the heart wants. That's his justification,
Speaker 1: which is the polar opposite of an apology.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love that. I'd never thought of it that later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I did try to title the book the
Speaker 4: Heart Wants what it wants, and my editor just laughed
Speaker 4: me out of the room.
Speaker 5: I'm not calling it that.
Speaker 1: Something that I certainly think about a lot is whether
Speaker 1: or not the artists personal beliefs or prejudices infects their work,
Speaker 1: And with someone that grow and Polanski, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I see it, which maybe is why it's easier to
Speaker 1: watch those movies with Doll. It's complicated. Some people certainly
Speaker 1: do make the case that there are figures in the
Speaker 1: Witches that can be construed as antismitic tropes. I don't
Speaker 1: know how I feel about that, but I don't really
Speaker 1: see his anti semitism in his work, so that becomes
Speaker 1: much easier for me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that there's a kind of an interesting
Speaker 4: lineup of the way these things work. I think you
Speaker 4: have someone like What where the thing that people perceive
Speaker 4: as objectionable is so inherent in the work when you
Speaker 4: watch Manhattan and the way that young women are presented
Speaker 4: and used in his films. So that's a place where
Speaker 4: the biography and the work are really close together, and
Speaker 4: that's disturbing in that way. And then you have, you know,
Speaker 4: something like Cosby, where there's such an incredible chasm between
Speaker 4: doctor Huxtable and what he is said to have done
Speaker 4: that that makes the work sort of upsetting in a
Speaker 4: different way. And so I think that Doll is fascinating
Speaker 4: because there is a sense that he is somehow uniquely
Speaker 4: tapped into what makes a person ugly in their heart,
Speaker 4: and he's found a way to express that through these
Speaker 4: different characters. Sometimes a minor character is in a book,
Speaker 4: sometimes a more major character, and that is always fascinating.
Speaker 4: When somebody has this darkness inside them, or has this
Speaker 4: dark quality.
Speaker 3: And then they express it through character.
Speaker 4: It does make it more confusing, because on some level,
Speaker 4: the ridiculousness of being a person who's against others is
Speaker 4: expressed in his work. There's a periodic funny element to
Speaker 4: some of these characters. And yet did he see himself
Speaker 4: as a comic figure because he had this hate that
Speaker 4: he was living inside of.
Speaker 5: I think probably not.
Speaker 4: I think there's something about authors who write work for
Speaker 4: children that has really withstood the test of time, and
Speaker 4: certainly that is work that I had a relationship when
Speaker 4: I was young. You know that there is some part
Speaker 4: of the landscape of My Psyche that belongs to Roldahl,
Speaker 4: just as there is the part of the landscape of
Speaker 4: My Psyche belongs to Laura Ingles Wilder, and she has
Speaker 4: her own problems.
Speaker 3: And I would say that when that's.
Speaker 4: Your experience and you learn these pieces of biographical information,
Speaker 4: there is this sadness that comes with it. It's a very
Speaker 4: specific sadness, and I think it's a sadness that cries
Speaker 4: out to be discussed, that needs to be acknowledged and
Speaker 4: talk about, needs to be taken apart and looked at.
Speaker 4: We need to ask why does this sadness exist? And
Speaker 4: too often in this discussion, I feel like it's too absolute,
Speaker 4: and there's either somebody saying you should absolutely throw out
Speaker 4: the books, or there's somebody saying these things are separate
Speaker 4: and we don't care and you shouldn't care. But what's
Speaker 4: most interesting to me is the fact that most of
Speaker 4: us live in the middle. And I think that we
Speaker 4: actually are helping each other. If we can say this
Speaker 4: is a bummer and yet the work is meaningful, that
Speaker 4: is reality. And I think when we talk about that,
Speaker 4: we're living in reality rather than in some fantasyland where
Speaker 4: the work must be separated, or some other fantasyland where
Speaker 4: the work doesn't have meaning or cultural valance, which.
Speaker 3: It does thing.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm just always really interested in acknowledging that
Speaker 4: our responses to this biographical information are emotional. And I
Speaker 4: feel like so often when we're supposedly having these ethical
Speaker 4: conversations around these issues and people are defending their point
Speaker 4: of view, what's really happening is they're having a feeling.
Speaker 4: This is art where audience members, we are deep in
Speaker 4: our own subjectivity. The art is giving us an emotional response.
Speaker 4: Sow's the biographical element. If we can acknowledge that's what's happening,
Speaker 4: I think we can get a lot farther.
Speaker 1: That was the great Claire Denner, author of Monsters a
Speaker 1: fans Saba after the break, we'll talk to someone who
Speaker 1: sees the issue a little differently. Eric catall Mathis is
Speaker 1: the chair of the philosophy department at Wellesley College. He
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Drawing the Line What to do
Speaker 1: with the work of immoral artists From museums to the movies.
Speaker 1: It's all about what to do, think, and feel when
Speaker 1: artists that we love do terrible things. I started off
Speaker 1: by asking him the obvious question.
Speaker 5: So can we separate the art from the artists? Is
Speaker 5: a question that really dominates the space. But I think
Speaker 5: it's largely the wrong question. I'm not sure it really
Speaker 5: matters whether we can separate the art from the artist
Speaker 5: often because the question we should be asking is should
Speaker 5: we separate the art from the artist? And when I
Speaker 5: say should we separate the art from the artist, what
Speaker 5: I mean is that we should be taking seriously what
Speaker 5: we know about the moral life of the artist and
Speaker 5: then asking the question every time, how should what we
Speaker 5: know about the moral life of the artist factor into
Speaker 5: my art consumption, or how I'm engaging with this art
Speaker 5: in public, or how I'm thinking about introducing my kid
Speaker 5: to this art, or broader policy decisions that we make
Speaker 5: about the arts so I think it's essential that the
Speaker 5: question about the relationship between the moral life of the
Speaker 5: artist and their artwork remain a live question in all
Speaker 5: of these different contexts, one that we need to think
Speaker 5: about in those contexts and figure out how to answer.
Speaker 5: But when we try to separate, when we say can
Speaker 5: we separate the art from the artist? My worry about
Speaker 5: that is it's often an attempt to say, like, well,
Speaker 5: if we can, then we can sort of prise them
Speaker 5: apart and not be faced with this question, how should
Speaker 5: we engage with the moral life of artists? And that
Speaker 5: concerns me right. I think that's the question that we
Speaker 5: should always be thinking about. And sometimes the answer will
Speaker 5: be that the moral life of the artist isn't particularly
Speaker 5: relevant in this context. That's certainly a possibility, and that
Speaker 5: will happen in all kinds of different situations, but will
Speaker 5: have at least asked that question, that question will be
Speaker 5: front and center.
Speaker 1: That leads me to wonder, how much investigating are we
Speaker 1: supposed to do. I've been reading Edgar alam Poe My
Speaker 1: whole Life. I didn't know that he married his thirteen
Speaker 1: year old cousin. How much responsibility do I have consuming
Speaker 1: art to really look into the potential really awful, disgusting
Speaker 1: behavior of the artist.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, I mean, I don't think that we need
Speaker 5: to become the cops and private investigators of the art world.
Speaker 5: I think that the questions that the moral life of
Speaker 5: the artist poses for everyday our consumers are going to
Speaker 5: be dependent on the kind of information that's part of
Speaker 5: the public discourse, part of the public domain, the things
Speaker 5: that we can reasonably expect people to know. I think
Speaker 5: that if we thought that there was some sort of
Speaker 5: strong moral obligation to do investigative work about every artist
Speaker 5: that we wanted to engage with, not only would that
Speaker 5: make a lot of art not fun for us, but
Speaker 5: it would be overly burdensome and not really sort of
Speaker 5: in the spirit in which we often want to engage
Speaker 5: with the artwork. I think it would prioritize the moral
Speaker 5: life of the artist over other kinds of considerations, like
Speaker 5: our aesthetic engagement with their work. So I think it's
Speaker 5: really more of a question about, given what we know,
Speaker 5: how should we confront that knowledge, not how much can
Speaker 5: we go find out about the moral life of the artist.
Speaker 1: It feels a little bit dangerous only because it almost
Speaker 1: feels like you get rewarded by burying your head in
Speaker 1: the sand, choosing not to read the articles that you know,
Speaker 1: for a while seemingly appeared almost every day in the
Speaker 1: New York Times about how awful a lot of our
Speaker 1: artists were. If you don't look at those if you
Speaker 1: don't read those stories, you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: enjoy a lot more art.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's it's true. I mean, I think there are
Speaker 5: questions we can ask about what people should reasonably know,
Speaker 5: and those are broad questions that include this conversation that
Speaker 5: all all kinds of other things. And I think sometimes
Speaker 5: people can be subject to criticism for not being aware
Speaker 5: of things that it's reasonable for them to know, given
Speaker 5: how pervasive they are in public discourse and how much
Speaker 5: attention they received in the media. But I think that
Speaker 5: we should certainly approach these issues not in the spirit
Speaker 5: of blaming people. If you encounter somebody who doesn't know
Speaker 5: anything about roll Doll's anti semitism, right, I don't think
Speaker 5: they're response would be how could you not know that?
Speaker 5: But rather, well, now that you know that, that opens
Speaker 5: up space for a conversation about how that is going
Speaker 5: to influence how we engage with the work.
Speaker 1: Eric brings up a really good question, how should we
Speaker 1: engage with the work? For me, especially after my conversation
Speaker 1: with Claire, I'm realizing a lot of it depends on
Speaker 1: whether I can locate the bigotry in the actual text.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I see it in Doll's stories. But
Speaker 1: what do we do when there's a really clear connection
Speaker 1: between an artist's problematic actions or beliefs and the work
Speaker 1: we consume by them. In our last episode, Roxanne Gay
Speaker 1: talked about the Nobel Prize winning author Alice Monroe, who
Speaker 1: stayed with her second husband despite apparently knowing that he
Speaker 1: abused her daughter. There's a strong case to be made
Speaker 1: that Monroe's guilt comes out in some of her short stories,
Speaker 1: which makes reading these stories for me now feel pretty icky.
Speaker 1: The same goes for a bunch of other artists too.
Speaker 1: Some critics say that in everyone ranging from TS Eliott
Speaker 1: to Ezra Pound to H. P. Lovecraft, Picasso, Hemingway, Mailer
Speaker 1: to even someone like Mel Gibson, you can see there's
Speaker 1: sometimes monumental personal flaws come out in the work, which
Speaker 1: makes engaging with that work really complicated. I spoke more
Speaker 1: about this with.
Speaker 5: Eric Roldel has this very short story for adults, Genesis
Speaker 5: to Catastrophe. I'm going to spoil it, so if you
Speaker 5: don't want to hear it spoiled, you should stop listening.
Speaker 5: But it's a very short story. It involves this kind
Speaker 5: of tense scene in a hospital where a mother is
Speaker 5: going through a complicated delivery, and in a very short space,
Speaker 5: the writing gets you very concerned for her and the
Speaker 5: life of her child. And then it's revealed towards the
Speaker 5: end of the story that the child is Adolf Hitler,
Speaker 5: and so you find yourself in this fascinating and uncomfortable
Speaker 5: position of having your concern about this child put into
Speaker 5: stark tension with your moral abhorrence of Hitler. And the
Speaker 5: thing about the story is that it seems very clearly
Speaker 5: designed in order to put you in that state of tension.
Speaker 5: It seems like you're supposed to have that feeling of,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh, I was still concerned for this child,
Speaker 5: but it's Hitler, you know, how do I grapple with that?
Speaker 5: So once you then put that into this further context
Speaker 5: of knowing about Doll's antisemitism, then it can make you
Speaker 5: feel even further at tensions here of like wait, was
Speaker 5: that interpretation? I just gave the story the right one?
Speaker 5: Are you supposed to feel attention? Is it not actually
Speaker 5: creating that particular kind of tension because there's some sort
Speaker 5: of implicit endorsement of the idea that you should be
Speaker 5: concerned about the survival of baby aidlf Hitler. I think
Speaker 5: it adds even further intrigue to the story and enhances
Speaker 5: some of the esthetic delight and weirdness of it. I
Speaker 5: think when you engage in this kind of process that
Speaker 5: I was just modeling here, sort of thinking through how
Speaker 5: do I fit this knowledge with my experience of the story.
Speaker 5: It's not that we're always going to have some really
Speaker 5: specific answer that we come out with. On the other end,
Speaker 5: we're not just going to say like, oh, yes, actually
Speaker 5: the story just sort of confirms Doll's antisemitism. I think
Speaker 5: there's still space to think. No, it actually is the
Speaker 5: first interpretation. The story really is trying to get you
Speaker 5: to feel this tension. And that's the case. Independently of
Speaker 5: whatever feelings Dull might himself have had, This kind of
Speaker 5: knowledge about the moral life of the artist often just
Speaker 5: enhances our experience of engaging with their work. It makes
Speaker 5: it sometimes even more complex and complicated, and that's a
Speaker 5: real opportunity for us to sort of think with that
Speaker 5: knowledge and engage with the work in light of it,
Speaker 5: rather than saying, oh, I'm not going to read this
Speaker 5: anymore because Doll's anti semitic.
Speaker 1: I'm going to come back to my conversation with Eric
Speaker 1: in a minute. Before I do that, I want to
Speaker 1: dig into a separate, somewhat related topic. And that's the giant,
Speaker 1: fascinating censorship controversy that swirled around Doll a few years ago.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, thirty three years after Doll's death,
Speaker 1: his publisher went through his books and removed all language
Speaker 1: that people might take offense to. The Hollywood Reporter laid
Speaker 1: it out really well in a long article. They explained
Speaker 1: that Doll's fat phobia, for instance, was suddenly at odds
Speaker 1: with changing sensitivities around body of its issues. So Doll's
Speaker 1: publishers removed the word fat from all of his books
Speaker 1: and issued new editions. Augustus Gloup, the Gluttonois boy from
Speaker 1: the Chocolate Factory Tour, is now to as enormous in
Speaker 1: James and the Giant Peach Doll's lines. Aunt Sponge was
Speaker 1: terrifically fat and tremendously flabby at that is now Aunt
Speaker 1: Sponge was a nasty old brute and deserved to be
Speaker 1: squashed by the fruit. And the sensors didn't stop there.
Speaker 1: Anytime Doll wrote that a character was crazy or mad,
Speaker 1: they took it out. The Umpa Lupas and Willy Wonger's
Speaker 1: factory are no longer tiny, titchy, or no higher than
Speaker 1: my knee, but just small. In Matilda, our hero no
Speaker 1: longer reads the problematic author read Yard Kipling, and the
Speaker 1: revised version she now reads Shane Austen. So in that instance,
Speaker 1: the sensors kind of got a two fer, not only
Speaker 1: changing Doll, but also erasing the very existence of Kipling.
Speaker 1: What else, the fantastic mister Fox, he now has three
Speaker 1: daughters instead of three sons. I absolutely cannot explain that
Speaker 1: the BFG, his famous cloak, is no longer black. In fact,
Speaker 1: and this is real, the words black and white were
Speaker 1: systematically deleted throughout Doll's catalog. Even when describing something like
Speaker 1: the color of snow, the very words black and white
Speaker 1: are treated as problematic. So how did these changes even
Speaker 1: come about? According to the New York Times, they were
Speaker 1: made after Dolls of State hired a consultancy group to
Speaker 1: evaluate his work. The consultant's aim was to promote inclusion
Speaker 1: and accessibility in children's literature. Needless to say, fans of
Speaker 1: Dolls and free speech advocates and many others were completely
Speaker 1: freaked out. To take just two examples, the writer Salman
Speaker 1: Rushdie called the revision's absurd censorship. Best Selling writer Philip
Speaker 1: Pullman said it would be better to let Doll's book
Speaker 1: Squa out of print than to alter them without the
Speaker 1: author's consent. And that's kind of the big issue, right,
Speaker 1: that these alterations were made without dolls approval. He was
Speaker 1: long dead, so he didn't have the option of signing
Speaker 1: off on them. Digging into this, I found a bunch
Speaker 1: of fascinating similar examples of artists to states grappling with
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. According to The New York Times, again,
Speaker 1: Agatha Christi, the best selling novelist of all time, had
Speaker 1: her books altered after her death too. The truly galling
Speaker 1: title of her top selling book was changed to and
Speaker 1: then there were none. Christy's great grandson says that without
Speaker 1: that change it would probably be completely unpublishable. Now he's
Speaker 1: not wrong. Similarly, an addition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn,
Speaker 1: arguably the great American novel, replaced a racial epithet throughout
Speaker 1: the text overconcerns that such an offensive word was causing
Speaker 1: schools to stop assigning the book. Doctor Seuss's estate took
Speaker 1: a different tack and just stopped publishing half a dozen
Speaker 1: of his books because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes
Speaker 1: in them. Personally, I hate the idea of that amazing
Speaker 1: a Gatha Christi mystery not being published anymore, and I
Speaker 1: genuinely think it would be a tragedy if Huckleberry Finn disappeared.
Speaker 1: But changing in dead author's words is the slipperiest of slips.
Speaker 1: It's really complicated stuff for some. For others it's easy.
Speaker 1: Here's Margaret Atwood, the great novelist of The Handmaid's Tale,
Speaker 1: a book about a dystopian society, encourage his censorship, speaking
Speaker 1: to BBC.
Speaker 6: News, Good luck with Roald Dahl. You're just really going
Speaker 6: to have to replace the whole book if you want
Speaker 6: things to be nice. But this started a long time ago.
Speaker 6: It was the dismification of fairy tales. What do I
Speaker 6: think of it? I'm with Chaucer, who said, if you
Speaker 6: don't like this tale, turn over the page and read
Speaker 6: something else.
Speaker 1: So if we follow Outwood's advice, no one should touch
Speaker 1: Doll's books, Readers should just be allowed to choose which
Speaker 1: stories of his they want to read. Filmmaker Wes Anderson
Speaker 1: feels similarly to that. Would Anderson, of course adapted several
Speaker 1: Doll stories for Netflix. He disagrees with me about the
Speaker 1: big issue here, being a doll isn't alive to give
Speaker 1: his consent to changes. If we're up to Anderson, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't even let a living doll make any changes.
Speaker 7: You know, I'm probably the worst person to ask about this,
Speaker 7: because you know, if you ask me, should Renoir be
Speaker 7: allowed to touch up one of his pictures and modify?
Speaker 7: I would say, no, it's done, somebody bought it, it's
Speaker 7: in a museum. I don't think even the artists. I
Speaker 7: don't want even the artist to modify their work. I
Speaker 7: understand the motivation for it, but I sort of am
Speaker 7: in the school where when the piece of work is
Speaker 7: done and we've we participate in it, the audience participates
Speaker 7: in it, we know it, and so I sort of
Speaker 7: think when it's done, is done, and certainly no one
Speaker 7: who's not an author should be modifying somebody's book.
Speaker 3: He's dead.
Speaker 1: You hear Anderson's argument a lot in the world of film.
Speaker 1: If you're a Star Wars fan, you probably remember the
Speaker 1: hubbub over George Lucas going back into the original trilogy
Speaker 1: years after its release and making changes. He re engineered
Speaker 1: a famous scene, for instance, so that Han Solo doesn't
Speaker 1: shoot first and kill someone in cold blood. Outrage fans
Speaker 1: didn't care that the person making the changes was the
Speaker 1: original creator. To them, like Anderson said, when it's done,
Speaker 1: it's done. But of course this is all academic. Having
Speaker 1: read a lot about Roll Dall, I feel pretty confident
Speaker 1: saying he would not have made the changes his published
Speaker 1: or wanted. Let's go back to my conversation with Eric Mathis.
Speaker 1: I really want to know what he thinks about the
Speaker 1: censorship controversy.
Speaker 5: So I'm really concerned about the ways in which legitimate
Speaker 5: and important concerns about how we take the moral life
Speaker 5: of the artists into account can easily slide into practices
Speaker 5: of censorship, which I'm very opposed to. I think it's
Speaker 5: crucial that we not ignore the moral life of the artist.
Speaker 5: What you do with that knowledge, I think should not
Speaker 5: lead us to try to censor their work. So in
Speaker 5: the context of kids, for instance, and serve children's literature
Speaker 5: and movies and things, I think that children need morally
Speaker 5: complex literature in order to develop into morally sophisticated adults.
Speaker 5: My worry is that when you take morally difficult content
Speaker 5: out of an artist's work, I mean, not only are
Speaker 5: you messing with their work in a way that feels
Speaker 5: artistically illegitimate, but you're also depriving kids of the opportunity
Speaker 5: to wrestle with challenging moral questions. Sometimes they're going to
Speaker 5: need help and wrestling with those questions, and that's why
Speaker 5: we often engage in practices of reading with our kids
Speaker 5: or talking with our kids about the books that they're reading.
Speaker 5: But I think that if you take away that content,
Speaker 5: you're also taking away the opportunity for moral growth and
Speaker 5: discussion and development, and that's not a great way of
Speaker 5: raising our kids.
Speaker 1: I guess, just to push back for a second, or
Speaker 1: to Billy Devil's advocate, some of the censorship they did,
Speaker 1: like removing the descriptors fat and ugly. They feel like
Speaker 1: the kind of thing like, if my kid was reading
Speaker 1: a book that had those words in them, I probably,
Speaker 1: and maybe this is my own moral failing, I probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't stop reading and explain to them why those words
Speaker 1: are problematic the way I would if there was something
Speaker 1: incredibly bigoted or anti semitic. Those words probably do just
Speaker 1: get incepted by the child as normal. If the great
Speaker 1: majority of us are not going to turn those kinds
Speaker 1: of things into a lesson, is it still okay? I mean,
Speaker 1: when it comes to terms like fat, gross, It's not
Speaker 1: as if taking these terms out of kids' books are
Speaker 1: going to prevent kids from hearing these words as they
Speaker 1: go about their lives.
Speaker 5: While I'm sure grant that not everybody who's reading with
Speaker 5: their kids or talking with their kids about books is
Speaker 5: going to take the opportunity to think with them about
Speaker 5: the language being used, at least the opportunity is there
Speaker 5: on the table, and there are ways in which we
Speaker 5: can promote it. So clearly, the publisher in this case
Speaker 5: is taking action to address an issue, so they're committed.
Speaker 5: A different way they could take action would be to
Speaker 5: provide some guidance for kids or for adults on how
Speaker 5: to engage with that content, throw a preface in the book,
Speaker 5: put it in an appendix. Right, There are different ways
Speaker 5: in which we can take these issues seriously without engaging
Speaker 5: in cutting or obscuring. This comes up also in the
Speaker 5: context of you know, art and museums, especially when we
Speaker 5: know things about the moral life of the artist and
Speaker 5: aspects of their moral life sort of come up in
Speaker 5: their work in really explicit ways. So like in the
Speaker 5: case of Gogan, some people say like, oh, well, we
Speaker 5: shouldn't have space on our walls to display gogin. We
Speaker 5: should sort of like take that stuff off the walls.
Speaker 5: That's not a very common view, but it has been expressed.
Speaker 5: My worry about that kind of approach to the problem
Speaker 5: is it's like putting the skeletons back in the closet.
Speaker 5: It's like not a way of taking the accusations and
Speaker 5: the moral life of the artists seriously. In order to
Speaker 5: take it seriously, you need to confront it, and then
Speaker 5: there's a question of what you do once it's on
Speaker 5: the table. But if you sort of take it away,
Speaker 5: then you also take away this opportunity for moral reckoning.
Speaker 1: My favorite book to read my daughter, our favorite book
Speaker 1: to read it night before bed is called Poup poutfish.
Speaker 1: The ending is all about a kiss that is not
Speaker 1: asked for, and there's a Instead of changing it, there's
Speaker 1: simply a disclaimer on the very last page that says
Speaker 1: you should always ask. I would say, I read that
Speaker 1: disclaimer to my daughter. I've read it once and we've
Speaker 1: read Pow Pow Fish one billion times. That said, I'm
Speaker 1: very happy that they did not change the ending.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, you know, also, these kinds of like interventions,
Speaker 5: they don't always have to happen in the moment or
Speaker 5: or every time. Sometimes I think these are things that
Speaker 5: come up later in life. A kid might read some
Speaker 5: morally problematic content in a book as a kid, and
Speaker 5: nobody talks to them about it at all, But then
Speaker 5: when they're a teenager they think back and they say, huh,
Speaker 5: that was kind of odd that this happened in the book.
Speaker 5: Or I'm sort of raising some worries for me how
Speaker 5: this character was represented, and they have that there right
Speaker 5: as then a resource for thinking with. I don't want
Speaker 5: to sort of oversell the idea that it's about constant
Speaker 5: discussion and engagement, right That's the only way we can
Speaker 5: take the moral content of these works the Moral Lives
Speaker 5: star artist seriously is by talking the issue to death.
Speaker 5: But I think having it there in a child's set
Speaker 5: of intellectual resources allows them the opportunity to then think
Speaker 5: carefully about it, whether on their or in conversation, and
Speaker 5: whether it happens then or whether it happens down the line.
Speaker 1: That was. Eric mathis author of drawing the line what
Speaker 1: to do with the work of immoral artists from museums
Speaker 1: to the movies. I'm so appreciative to Eric, and also
Speaker 1: declare for coming on to talk about these really thorny issues.
Speaker 1: Next week, we're going to lighten things up a little
Speaker 1: and get into a topic very dear to my heart.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about what doll might be most globally famous
Speaker 1: for these days, the film adaptations, which means we get
Speaker 1: to talk about Spielberg and Zamechas and Burton and Clooney
Speaker 1: and Streep and so many more, true or false. Quentin
Speaker 1: Tarantino once directed a Roll Doll story starring Bruce Willis.
Speaker 1: We'll definitely get into that, and I'll speak to the
Speaker 1: man who just might be the single most recognizable voice
Speaker 1: in TV criticism. I can't wait see you there. The
Speaker 1: Secret World of Role Dall Is produced by Imagine Audio
Speaker 1: and Parallax Studios for iHeart Podcasts. Created and written by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Tracy, produced by Matt Schrader. Post production by
Speaker 1: wind Hill Studios, with editing, scoring, and sound design by
Speaker 1: Mark Henry Phillips. Editing by Ryan Seaton, Music by a PM.
Speaker 1: Executive producers Nathan Cloke, Karl Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard,
Speaker 1: and Aaron Tracy. Additional voice performances and recreation by Mark
Speaker 1: Henry Phillips and eleven Laps. If you enjoyed this episode,
Speaker 1: be sure to rate and review The Secret World of
Speaker 1: Roll Dall on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Copyright twenty twenty six Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax