this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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I guess it depends for me. I love Roald Dahl, both his children's and his adult's work, even though he was a virulent antisemite (even the museum dedicated to him comes right out and says it). My dad, who was super-sensitive to that stuff, was okay reading his books to me when I was a kid despite that.
And I think the reason why is that he didn't let his beliefs leak into his work. I can't look back at any of his works that I have read and see any hatred of Jews.
On the other hand, there's someone like Woody Allen (Jewish connection not intended here) who you can see his awful shit in his movies. He's literally dating a high school student in his film Manhattan. And he treats her like shit and basically gets away with it too.
I can't watch Woody Allen movies anymore.
I agree that sometimes it's possible to separate the art from the artist. Sometimes that's pretty easy to do, but sometimes it's pretty ambiguous.
A grey area for me is the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He was a Nazi, and this definitely comes through in some of his philosophical work. Some of it doesn't seem to be informed by his Naziism, but I'm still pretty averse to reading it, because how do we separate the person from the Naziism? If I were a philosopher, my own political viewpoints would inevitably permeate everything I wrote, even if the texts weren't directly political. Perhaps I'd be better able to discern the line in Heidegger's work if I were a philosopher.
I always worry about missing bad vibes in text, because especially as an adult, I have discovered many areas in which I didn't even notice problematic things in media (antisemitism being one such area). I cringe when looking over Harry Potter as an adult, for example, and not just because of its author's awfulness since the books were published.
I think we need to allow people the benefit of hindsight, as well as the space to have complicated feelings. Like, sometimes there might be some news that's comes out about a person, which causes us to look over their work with a more critical or more mature eye. Without this space, people are much more likely to dig their heels in and refuse to change.