BROOKE GLADSTONE: To really change the status quo, we must interrogate it, both out in the world and within ourselves. For instance, one way the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein differed from those against Louis C.K. is that Weinstein was important to the film industry, whereas C.K. was important to us. His work seemed to explore our deepest selves. He seemed to know us, and we him. But now, burdened with what we really know, can we continue to love his work?
Kathryn VanArendonk, film and TV critic for New York Magazine, says that when considering how or whether to separate the artist from the art, you could start with the view of midcentury French literary theorist Roland Barthes.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: His whole idea is that once you've produced some kind of art, you don't get to say what happens to it once it's out in the world. The corollary of that, as a critic, is that I don't have to consider the artist, what their intention was. And there is a lot of me that really loves that idea but, when you go about separating art from artist, you can then run into all of these problems where you love work and you love an understanding of that artist that turns out to not actually be at all who they were in life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did I just hear you say “Louis C.K.”?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: I may have done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Talk to me about the conundrum that presented to you.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah. I loved a lot of his work. I particularly loved his television show, Louis. I loved, in particular, how inventive he was. You would start an episode of Louis and not know what you were gonna get. Maybe it was gonna be a full half-hour-long story where he goes to a war zone and tries to cheer up the troops.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how about the faceless nightmare monsters?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
It was exciting and it felt new and fresh.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And excruciatingly intimate, at times.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Absolutely. A show called Louis, made by a guy named Louis C.K. We know that C.K. really has young daughters and there were like fictional versions of them on the show, and we could see him sort of acting out parenting and we felt like he was giving us himself. And so, to then find out that the version of that that we saw on that television show is actually quite different from the version of himself that many female comedians had to cope with is incredibly upsetting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you, like many of us, had heard the rumors but you’ve said that you compartmentalized it. There was Louis, the brilliant TV show, Louis C.K., the great standup comedian and auteur and Louis C.K., the creep.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah, and I remember feeling just this hope that somehow it wasn't true. I mean, it hadn't been verified yet. [SIGHS] I want to believe that I believe accusers when they come forward about something like this, and yet, you love that person so much and you just don't want to have to deal with the demand on you, as a critic, to really wrestle with that new idea of that artist and how it reflects back on what he's produced.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But let’s talk about our history as art lovers, of compartmentalizing. It’s a lot easier when the art we love was created by someone who, say died, 100 years ago.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I mean, tell me about John Milton.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Right. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, one of the most remarkable feats of the English-language literature in the Canon.
[CLIP]:
MILTON’S SATAN: …and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd
In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne.
[END CLIP]
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Just an unbelievably brilliant person, and yet, he was kind of a jerk, too. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kind of a jerk?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Well, he began to go blind at a young age and some of, actually, his most gorgeous painful poems are about the fear that he's not going to have the capacity to complete the work that he wants to. And so, instead of just giving up, he taught his daughters to be the scribes basically for his poetry and, in order to do that, they had to learn classical languages because he was a classically-trained thinker. And he did that [LAUGHS] but then didn't actually tell them anything about what those words meant.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In other words, they could read phonetically Greek but he deliberately denied them the meaning of the words they spoke.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For what reason?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: [SIGHS] He lived at a moment where he honestly felt like the role of a woman in a man's life was to be a helpmate. Take another example, Tolstoy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Uh huh?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: His wife was his secretary. They had many, many, many children, so she was also trying to raise their entire family. But she also wrote all of his novels. He wrote these like scribbled little tiny notes to himself.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: She transcribed them.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: She transcribed them, to make them into a readable prose. There are these accounts of her being up much later [LAUGHS] than he ever was, as she's like struggling to deal with his terrible handwriting. And so, we have this memory of Tolstoy [LAUGHS] as this remarkable novelist, and yet, there is this history of women's labor that is completely erased.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then in the modern day you don't have flawless biographies [LAUGHS] --
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Of course.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- for Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. It's easier to assess older works without that assessment being hijacked by the behavior of the creator.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: At this moment, many of us are confused by the Louis C.K. allegations, and it's a hard case because, as you noted, Louis wasn't only innovative, it was also really lewd. [LAUGHS] It explored the character’s bizarre and embarrassing and intimate sexual fantasies, which we know now aren't just fiction. Can we still love the work in the same way or in a different way or at all?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: I certainly cannot love the work in the same way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But if you enjoyed that intimate exploration before, why can't you now?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: That intimate exploration was built on trust that this was an artistic exploration of human sexuality that didn't actually connect to harm being done on real people, and that trust has been violated.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This, even though he depicted himself in his standups, often, as a creepy guy who was critiquing his own poisonous sexuality and those of his gender.
[CLIP]:
LOUIS C.K.: How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number-one threat to women!
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER/END CLIP]
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: What we thought we were listening to was a sheep wearing a sign that says, “Actually, I’m a wolf.” It turns out it was a wolf in sheep clothing wearing a sign that said, “Actually, I’m a wolf” and the whole time that was a predator staring at the audience, saying real things about how terrible he actually was.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I once knew a guy, a very good radio producer back in the ‘70s and he always had huge trouble with his wives because he was a jerk, but he always said, I am an artist, I am a creator, you got to put up with that. To me, that was a kind of personal brush against this idea of the myth of the artistic genius excuses all.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Louis, he is an artistic genius.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: He certainly is. Guess what? You don’t have to be an awful person to be a good artist. The artistic genius that I am always going to still be able to give him, out of everything that has happened, is that because Louis, the show, existed, there are now all of these amazing shows that would never have happened. Master of None, Atlanta, Take My Wife, they exist because somebody could go to a television studio and say, it's like Louis, but.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm. So do you think that he has the opportunity to come back and create again, and should he?
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: I think it's probable that he is going to try to have a comeback. I don't know if he should. [LAUGHS] I certainly know that whatever he makes in the future, I'm never gonna be able to recommend it to people who are looking for something to watch, without thinking about how the last time my trust was betrayed, their trust is potentially betrayed. And it is going to be really fascinating and really upsetting [LAUGHS] to watch the comeback tours of somebody like Louis C.K. or all of the other people who have been swept up in this wave.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much.
KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kathryn VanArendonk is a TV and film critic for New York Magazine.
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova—Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Monique Laborde, Jon Hanrahan and Sarah Chadwick Gibson. And our show was edited by me. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Sam Bair and Terence Bernardo. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Jim Schachter is WNYC’s vice president for news. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.
Bob Garfield will be back next week. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
* [FUNDING CREDITS] *
