I came across an old copy of the TLS today (of Apr. 15 2016) in which there is a review of Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ which starred Kevin Spacey, and he gets quite an accolade for his portrayal of Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian politician.
This was of course before all the brouhaha about Spacey’s private life, which brought about the removal of the seasons in which he acted and his removal from the series altogether - which considering he was the main character was quite a move.
If it was such a good performance then, is it not always so? and is it not like saying, because Caravaggio was a murderer, we shouldn’t admire Supper at Emmaus and have its removal from public view?
Nobody is arguing that Spacey is less talented an actor, they just don’t want to support a guy who regularly commits sexual assault, sometimes against minors.
It’s a silly reason for downgrading House of Cards when there’s a much better reason to disregard it: it isn’t this, the original, which was superlative and didn’t intrinsically invite an inferior remake.
That’s quite a euphemism you wrote there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else refer to multiple instances of sexual assault and attempted rape of underage persons as someone’s “private life”. Kudos to you for blazing that trail!
If you were to start poking around in the lives of many people in the Arts and world of entertainment you might be in for a shock to your sensitivity. Michelangelo was a known pederast and had plenty of handsome boys hanging around his studio - what ya gonna do about that?
The amount of artists who have been involved in all sorts of jiggery-pokery might make you hair stand on end, There’s Lord Byron and Eric Gill and hundreds of others. whose work is admired every day.
What would you do if you discovered that Shakespeare had buggered the parson’s son - close down the Royal Shakespeare Co. and burn all his books?
Kevin Spacey is no William Shakespeare. He’s an above-average character actor. Perhaps it would be better to ask, “Would you still support Designated Survivor if it turned out that Kiefer Sutherland was a serial rapist?” I wouldn’t, even if Designated Survivor was as good as House of Cards (it’s not).
But that’s not, in my opinion, the key difference. Kevin Spacey is alive. Every time you hire him, every time you stream his content, that’s money and support going his way. That’s an active signal that you don’t care about his victims, and you don’t mind him continuing to be in a position to continue abusing his victims. We don’t have any of that with people like Byron or Michaelangelo, so it’s not quite as problematic.
Repeated for emphasis, because I’m not sure what the OP is arguing for.
Is Spacey a tremendous actor? Yes, IMHO. Is he a dirtbag? Yes, IMHO. Does him being a dirtbag invalidate his past work? Not at all. Does him being a dirtbag mean he should get fired from his job and not pursued for future work, despite being good at his job? In this case, sure. He’s not owed a career in entertainment and if no one will hire him because he’s a dirtbag( I sure wouldn’t if I were a producer ), oh well.
Did I enjoy reading Marion Zimmer Bradley books? At one time, yes. Would I read one now? Sure, if I felt like it( I don’t - burnt out on her oeuvre some time ago ). Would I buy one if she were alive or even today knowing that the proceeds don’t go to her children/victims? Nope.
I agree with the OP. To retroactively downgrade someone’s performance in light of revelations that come out later (and aren’t directly related,) does not make sense - unless somehow the misdeeds were directly related to the performance (i.e., an athlete taking steroids or some other form of doping.)
At least one significant difference is that those guys are dead, and buying/supporting their work doesn’t give material benefit to rapists and abusers. Buying/supporting Spacey’s work gives material benefit to a probable abuser of minors, and plenty of us are not inclined to do things that directly benefit probable abusers of minors.
American Beauty was a good movie. That said, if I had the choice to buy it again, knowing that I’d be enriching a serial rapist and making it more likely that that serial rapist gets further work in Hollywood, I probably would pass.
Does that make sense?
(In before it turns out American Beauty was produced by Harvey Weinstein anyways)
So help me, I was listening to “Fat Albert’s Car” by Bill Cosby the other day and laughing my ass off. I’ve liked Cos since I was six years old. I was sad when I found out he committed all of those acts of sexual assault, but dammit, he was funny!
Are you just trying to, in a weird indirect way, advocate for complete separation between art and artist?
I mean, are you actually seeing someone judge Kevin Spacey’s previous efforts as less good now, or do you consider people not wanting to hire him or see his movies as “downgrading his talent”?
Other people have already answered fairly well why we might decide not to contribute to Kevin Spacey’s income, but I have to say that if it turns out that Shakespeare was Jack the Ripper (I know it’s bizarre, but the evidence is overwhelming and also shows that he wrote all of the works we know as his, except for the third act of Hamlet) I would not personally feel comfortable watching any of his plays again.
There are so many good artistic products out there that being choosy and reducing the impact of artists who were terrible people is not a big sacrifice for the audience. And the “you can’t ignore this art due to the artist’s life”-police is going to have a very hard job of proving intent.
The example OP provides is that of the Spacey seasons of HoC being pulled from the Netflix stream, in effect, doing a retroactive across-platforms cancellation of a whole set of works by association with one person. To some people this feels like more thanwhat is needed, but part of the problem is that Spacey was not just the lead, he had an Executive Producer credit, so it is hard to disentangle the show from him.
What I see here is a fair enough concern that with a modern-day literary/artistic/performance contract, since paying for the writer/artist/performer’s past work means providing him/her with additional income (royalties, residuals, shares), then people are unwilling to say “just stop hiring/publicizing them from now on, but keep the old work in print and on sale”. Which makes it different, as pointed out earlier, to when the work’s so old it’s in the public domain, or if the individual is deceased and any royalty goes to victims or to an estate that can be reasonably considered not responsible.
Of course, retroactive cancellation and taking the old material out of print/sale/syndication availability socks it to co-stars or other collaborators who may not have had anything to do with the disgraced person’s crimes and were beneficiaries of that income stream… but it’s not like they were *guaranteed *a lifelong income protected from sales failing for ANY reason, either.
While nothing anyone else said is wrong, I would argue that the revelations do in fact decrease the value of the work retroactively. The performance itself is not the only criteria people are using to value the work. It is also partially how much you can enjoy said performance, which can be negatively affected by learning that the guy was actually doing these bad things. There is also just the idea that people who do bad things must work that much harder to earn respect. That can take the form of working for forgiveness, or just being so good that their badness is overwhelmed by their talent.
And, finally, there’s just the normal change in valuation that happens over time. The show is older, and is now being analyzed in a different way, as for whether it has continuing value rather than just having been good in the moment. And a work of fiction is generally analyzed as a whole, not just its parts. So subsequent actions can affect things. Plus, the longer people have to think about something, the more likely any suspension of disbelief be broken, forcing a more critical look.
Mix all this together, and it’s definitely possible to value House of Cards less than you did before due to the subsequent revelations. And that’s without getting into whether you should financially support the man in any way.
As for taking the show down–I’m much more for the idea of these sorts of things being able to remove their monetary rights. It should not be easier to take the show down entirely than to not pay Spacey any additional money. That just encourages piracy.
The trouble is, the appreciation of art is quite subjective. It isn’t like he developed a new mathematical theorem and people decided not to use it because he is a creep. Artists are not really separable from their art. I’m sorry if that seems unfair. Knowing someone is noble, or loathsome, in their private life does bear upon your emotions about their art. Just because we have rather more access these days to artists’ private lives doesn’t change that.
I never liked Spacey as an actor so perhaps this biases me in his particular case. I also found American Beauty to be a pretty abominable film.