Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey as the list of harassment cases in Hollywood grows, can we any longer separate cinema from the morality of its makers?
The 1949 film The Third Man casts Orson Welles in the role of smirking Harry Lime, a black-market racketeer who sees himself as an artist. War-torn Vienna is his canvas; its desperate people his oils. He needs a climate of fear and darkness in order to paint his masterpiece. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime explains. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene, but its most famous speech was improvised on the spot. Welles would later say he’d pilfered it from “an old Hungarian play” the name of which he’d forgotten, but there are more philosophical echoes here, too. He might have been referencing Walter Benjamin, who argued that “at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism”, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt that “the strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity”. True artists, in other words, are ruthless and amoral. They make their own rules and leave casualties in their wake. But what would you rather have in your life? The soaring genius of the Italian Renaissance or the bland precision of the cuckoo clock?
I used to think I knew the answer: Italian Renaissance, without a doubt. But these are difficult times for tyrannical artists and the idiots who support them. The lid has been lifted, the list of sexual harassments grows ever longer and there’s only so much you can read about the supposed misdeeds of Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman before one starts to feel complicit. There have also been denials from James Toback, Louis CK and Lars von Trier. These are men whose work I admire. Some (Polanski, Von Trier) have produced art that I love. If they come up dirty, that means that I’m soiled, too.