He found this mote and now we wonder where we are

greygirlbeast has a line she often quotes from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965): "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

Two related items were making the rounds on Facebook and Tumblr at the point over the weekend where I burned out on social media: Olivia Collette's "Why I Stopped Watching Woody Allen Movies" and Caroline Framke's "stop mourning the work that's been tainted by shitty men and start mourning the work we lost from the people they targeted." The latter has since been expanded from a tweet to an article, "Instead of mourning great art tainted by awful men, mourn the work we lost from their victims," which in its longer form acknowledges that it is possible to do both, either abstractly because the art is important to history or personally because the art is important to you, but that point was getting really lost on Friday night. It is late and I am exhausted for reasons beyond the unkindness of the internet, my mental health is a tire fire and my physical health is more like one of those coal seams that have been smoldering underground for years, but even I know that the human response to art is an idiosyncratic thing. Different people can love the same movie for different reasons. Different people can hate the same movie for different reasons. Terrible art can be a lifesaver; mediocre art can be a lifesaver, too, but it doesn't make as dramatic a story; really good art can for any number of reasons leave a person cold. The same range of reactions applies when artists who made art that you love turn out to have behaved badly, whatever that means. (Assume it was reasonably bad. This conversation started with multiple sexual assault, not with saying something insensitive one time and then apologizing for real.) Some people are going to find that they can no longer engage with the art the same way, some people are going to find it still works for them, and everyone possessed of a reasonable degree of good faith, knowledge of biography or history, and exposure to any kind of art is going to have to sort through this question and the tensions it raises sometime in their life. But different people, for that aforementioned any number of reasons—which do not necessarily include being a concern-trolling avatar of internet purity culture or a terrible failure of humanity who complacently accepts the exploitation of the already marginalized in the service of the myth of genius—draw different lines.

I don't think I have just made a controversial statement. But I kept running into too many interactions all in the same night where people were just tearing one another down from every direction possible in this argument: how dare you throw this art out, how dare you not throw it out, how dare you do it so quickly, how dare you not do it quickly enough, how dare you throw out this person but not that one, how dare you try to quantify or qualify this process at all, how dare you do it differently from me. It would start in the abstract and then accelerate into the personal and then expand into a sort of vicious abstract again, where the art or the artist was assumed to be metonymical for the person's character; no one called anyone a Nazi that I saw, but there were certainly accusations of rape apology. I don't believe I was watching a bunch of trolls. No one read to me as arguing in bad faith. People were upset. People who are upset are not often the most articulate or nuanced and it is easy to feel attacked through art you care about and it is easy to conflate the two. Lots of ad hominem, is what I am saying: lots of defensiveness, zero persuasion. So in addition to the kind of hostility that is upsetting to encounter, especially repeatedly, I was watching a lot of people be hostile to one another in totally nonproductive ways, which I find agonizing. And then every now and then an exchange on this subject would go by which was not a 15-kiloton fire in a 64-gallon trash can and it would just make it worse to discover the next conflagration.

So that wasn't all of it, this weekend, but it didn't help. It's not that this is a set of conversations not worth having, but I can't see what good it does to have them in the form of a mutually assured meltdown, especially since it is almost a sure thing that more news will come out and more relationships of art to artists to people's personal experiences and decisions going forward will have to be reevaluated, a process which can suck quite enough when it's an artist who's been dead since before you were born and only sucks more exponentially when it relates to art you were enjoying earlier this year. On that front, Matt Zoller Seitz's review of Louis C.K.'s "I Love You, Daddy" is an extraordinary piece of critical writing and reflection. I am going to read a book or watch a movie or maybe just shower and lie down, because there was more de-mothing today. tl;dr I wish the internet was not so often apparently where nuance goes to die.

We're in possession of reaper's sleep, it's nothing for any of us to speak

In waking life I am having a terrible time writing about movies I have seen as well as everything else, so I consider it unnecessary that in last night's dreams I was having a terrible time writing about four out of five movies that don't even exist. I wanted to include them in the same post because they had formed a natural grouping by theme, even though I had encountered them through different means over the course of the last several months. All were British films; the earliest was from the 1930's and had a kind of phony war feel, the latest was from the 1950's and set in a manor house with children and directed by Joseph Losey, Michael Redgrave had been involved with one of the three from the 1940's. The one that really exists was Ealing's Went the Day Well? (1942), which in waking life I haven't even seen (and evidently had mixed up with Launder and Gilliat's I See a Dark Stranger (1946), since in the dream a major cast member was Deborah Kerr). The shared theme of all five movies was Nazi home invasion. Now I wonder what that can possibly say about my state of mind.