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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.

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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.

That sounds like a plan!

And, when it comes to these things, the internet, or the social media part of it, has always been one of the worst places to have any such sort of conversation, save in particular spaces where you can trust people to reasonably civil if not necessarily nuanced (like many journals). I suppose part of it is being so distanced from the other person (you don't see them, they're not quite real, you don't get halted by seeing they're upset etc. as you would in person) but who knows? I'm fairly cowardly in general anyway - a don't go there, don't read the comments sort of person! - but then again, it's best to do what helps keep us healthy/reasonably functional.

So I hope very much it's a good book or movie and that there is no more de-mothing to come. And that you can restock on chocolate brownies while you're at it. <3

This is what makes me say that it's not about communities, it's about individuals: the unholy mess you are describing seems to result from people trying to resolve their individual, sincere and reasonable reactions into some kind of group consensus. We can't even agree to differ...

In these circumstances, I don't see what you can do except walk away and do something else. But what I value in LJ / DW is that I have never not been able to say: well, this is what I think... I may just have been lucky.

It's been my experience too that LJ/DW is a fairly safe environment. Very little drama- and when people beg to differ they usually do so politely. In 13 years I think I've only ever had to deal with one person who habitually got rude and shouty.

I think the LJ/DW site structure helps, because there’s a firm divide between public and semi-private content, and another between “my” and “your” space — between making a post on one’s own blog versus commenting on somebody else’s, and most people seem to understand what different behaviors are acceptable in each of those contexts. On Tumblr or Facebook, everything one says is by necessity on one’s own blog, which I think tends to increase the feelings of... I’m not sure if entitlement is the word, but of “I have a perfect right to be this emphatic, how dare you take it as inflammatory”. It’s much harder to take a conversation out of context here than it is there.

I don't watch Woody Allen movies any more- and that's got something to do with finding him a creep and something to do with the way he continually falls short of the mark he's aiming at.

I gave up on Polanski because his stuff always left a bad taste in my mouth- and this was before we knew he was a child rapist.

I wouldn't call either of them geniuses.

It would be odd, I think, if an artist's character, sexuality etc didn't bleed over into their work. There are several artists I'd be happy to call great whose work I avoid because I find the personality revealed in it to be unsympathetic or even repellent.

For me, weirdly enough, one of the artists who bothers me that way is Oliver Goldsmith, about whom I don’t actually know anything bad (granted, we’re talking someone in the 18th century); I have this longstanding disconnect between the reactions of (admittedly older) critics, who praise him in an uncomplicated way, and my own reaction to something like The Vicar of Wakefield, which was to decide two chapters in that the vicar was a hypocrite and stop reading (if I’d encountered anything at the time that suggested the vicar was meant to be a hypocrite, I could have dealt with it, but like I said, every summary I came across thought he was the hero of the story, and that Goldsmith was sweetly naive).

This is all sort of topic-adjacent though.

I read The Vicar of Wakefield in my teens and found it extremely boring. I too had been misled by older critics who thought it wonderful.

I don't know much about Goldsmith as a man except that he was Irish and a hardworking literary hack.

I also tried to read the Vicar of Wakefield in my early teens, because of the line in "Little Woman," when Jo said "I'd just got to where they all tumbled into the water, when I forgot and laughed out loud." I borrowed the Vicar from the library, but found it unreadable, and never got to a part that could be considered funny. Not likely to go back to it now, many decades later.

Edited 2017-11-15 15:43 (UTC)

I seem to have only seen two Polanski films, Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist. We knew many people who wouldn't see the latter because of Polanski. In terms of creepy men, the yucky thing related to that movie was Adrian Brody's behavior at the Academy Awards, when he won for best lead actor for his role in The Pianist. Instead of air kissing next to presenter Halle Berry, he grabbed her, and apparently stuck his tongue in her mouth. She was seen wiping her mouth, with a distressed look. He got a lot of flak for it, but also hand-waving, even from some women.

I gave up on Polanski long before the Pianist. Rosemary's Baby makes me squirm. And it's not because I'm particularly squeamish- it's the feeling I get with everything of Polanski's whether it's in the horror genre or not. His work exudes negativity.

It seems Berry was taken completely off guard. I think it was more prank than sexual assault- but still an iffy thing to do.

That sounds like a good plan. I've been more cautious about looking at the Internet (not just social media, but definitely including Twitter there) in the last year, because "oh god, look at this horrible thing!" can be stressful even when it's a friend or ally shouting a warning.

Once I've been up for a bit I'll look at the CBC and find out what's going on in the world beyond "the sun is up and the local power grid still functions" [so civilization hasn't ended yet], but right now it's DW and a careful look at my email.

Thank you very much for posting about it. Needless to say, I did wonder what the provocation was.

No, your first paragraph isn't controversial; it's true.

The thing I've noticed about making an observation on the internet--even when it's not about an issue that's directly in the news--is that it will prompt some people to respond with the opposite observation. So, "if you push yourself to do a thing, you can end up feeling glad" is an observation of the first sort; "sometimes pushing yourself just makes you feel worse" is the kind of response I'm talking about. Often (though not always) the person making the first observation is aware that the other observation is also true for some people or for many people in some situations, etc., but they wanted to concentrate on the particular point they're making. But depending on the heat in the conversation and how people escalate things, you can quickly have a fire on your hands.

Who is the conversation for? Sometimes it's for everyone across a spectrum of thought. Sometimes it's for only for like-minded people. Sometimes there's just no a priori way of telling, and sometimes the person who made the initial statement wasn't thinking about that question. And people have different ideas about the rightness or wrongness of inserting a diverging opinion or observation into a conversation. There are all sorts of shades and riders and caveats about how we feel about this, and that's not even touching on good faith or bad faith, etc.

One reason I don't talk much about topics of controversy online--even though they occupy a great deal of my thoughts--is because the options are either to talk about something in an exhaustively nuanced way, which is probably not even possible, and which can **still** be upsetting to people--understandably--if they're reeling from some punishing hit, or else say just a part of a thing and risk either alienating people who are in the "Yes but also not-A" state or just feeding people's appetite for saying "Yes that."

I think this is all very true. People will have idiosyncratic reactions to works and creators, and most of the time it's not because they're evil, but when people are upset it can be very hard to see that nuance.

And even if someone does decide that they can no longer watch Woody Allen or read Marion Zimmer Bradley or whatever - if that art was really important to them, then disentangling emotionally may be a long process.

Internet comment section trash fires are honestly so stressful. It feels like they shouldn't be, because it's just words on a page, right? And it's probably less bad than watching actual people actually shout at each other about these things would be - but it's very rare for people to get into arguments that hostile in person, which probably just contributes to the stressfulness of it on the internet.

Hear, hear. It's so, so complex and individual; it has to be, and other people are never going to react exactly the same. But there are so many people reacting ad if they could ensure emotional unanimity if only they proclaim their pain loudly and fiercely enough. It's so grinding.

Unrelatedly: here is a sculpture that made me think of you.

But there are so many people reacting ad if they could ensure emotional unanimity if only they proclaim their pain loudly and fiercely enough. It's so grinding.

That is a very apt description. You just end up feeling worn thin.

Unrelatedly: here is a sculpture that made me think of you.

That's beautiful. Thank you.

I found the meme "stop mourning the work that's been tainted by shitty men and start mourning the work we lost from the people they targeted" helpful because it turned my attention from my own self-absorbed feelings(*) to empathy for the targets of harassment. I also did not see the terrible discourse you described though, which sounds incredibly infuriating and unproductive.

I do think the image memes on FB with only a handful of words tend towards the overly-reductive and inflammatory, because that's what generates the kind of "engagement" that FB's algorithms recognize and reward. It's the biggest systemic flaw in FaceBook, IMO (and also responsible for the wildfire spread of untruths and slander).

(*) Which is not to say everyone's feelings of mourning art tainted by shitty men are self-absorbed. Just that my particular thoughts were self-absorbed in a way that was not helpful either to myself or to anyone near me or to the wider social conversation.

Which is not to say everyone's feelings of mourning art tainted by shitty men are self-absorbed. Just that my particular thoughts were self-absorbed in a way that was not helpful either to myself or to anyone near me or to the wider social conversation.

I'm glad it was helpful to you! I don't think it's a terrible way to reframe the situation; it seems a similar impulse to the photographs of Sharon Tate and other victims of the Manson Family I have seen circulating on the internet today in lieu of posts about Charles Manson. I just kept running into people posting the link and then people fighting in comments over the process or even the premise and it rapidly became exhausting. I think you must have a better grade of friendlist, or at least of commenters on your friendlist.

(I agree with you about Facebook being designed to reward the inflammatory. It is one of the reasons I cannot spend much time on that site at all.)

I don't think I have just made a controversial statement.

I agree. This is a complicated set of issues, and as you say, the internet is often not a great place for nuance.

I love the Columbo shout-out in that review of the Louis C.K. film.

I love the Columbo shout-out in that review of the Louis C.K. film.

It made me imagine Peter Falk in a combination of his roles from Columbo and Wings of Desire, a kind of mild-mannered celestial detective. I'd have watched it.

"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

This has helped me a lot in life.

*puts one tentacle out from beneath this rock to offer you a fistbump*

*puts one tentacle out from beneath this rock to offer you a fistbump*

*tentaclebumps back*

Thank you.

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.

....yeah. The great thing about the internet, we were told, is everyone can express their own individual opinions! and then it turns out everyone wants to express their opinions on how everyone else's opinion is wrong.

It came up recently for me because my mom loved Radio Days, and I loved watching it with her and I want to re-watch it and remember her, not think about Woody Allen. Blargh.

I am late commenting for the same reasons as usual, but I just wanted to say that I agree with everything in this post.

I am late commenting for the same reasons as usual, but I just wanted to say that I agree with everything in this post.

Thank you for saying it, late or no.

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He found this mote and now we wonder where we are

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