In the riveting new documentary On the Record, in which former recording executive Drew Dixon recounts how being sexually harassed and assaulted by powerful producers drove her out of the music business, the journalist Kierna Mayo reflects on Dixon's promising career as a gifted young woman with a keen eye and ear for talent. Her eyes welling up with tears, Mayo wonders "what we're poorer for" in the wake of Dixon being forced to give up her dreams. Considering all the music that went undiscovered, all the songs left unsung, she observes, "we all lose."
It's a shattering moment in an already shattering film, and it offered a sobering flip side to a question I've been pondering for a while: Do we have anything to gain when alleged perpetrators are shunned, and their work is marginalized or erased?
The question isn't abstract: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski made movies that came out recently. Allen's is A Rainy Day in New York, a romantic comedy starring Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning. Polanski's is An Officer and a Spy, about the wrongful accusation and trial of French military captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Although both films were released last year in Europe and Asia, neither is available for viewing in the United States, with Allen having been dropped by Amazon, where he had a production deal, and with Polanski unable to acquire U.S. distribution.
It's not that anything new has emerged about either man: It's by now well known that Allen was accused of sexually molesting his daughter, Dylan, when she was 7, an allegation that was investigated but ultimately dropped without charges. The episode coincided with his publicly acknowledging an affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of Dylan's mother, Mia Farrow, who was also Allen's romantic partner. (Allen and Previn have now been married for almost 23 years.)
We can stipulate that "messy" doesn't begin to describe Allen's personal life. Although his most stalwart fans have compartmentalized his films far away from the most unsavory facts, plenty of others have been offended to the point of boycotting his movies in perpetuity. The same can be said for Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but fled the country before he could be sentenced, convinced that he was not receiving a fair trial. (He has since been accused of rape by at least two other women.)
In the absence of any satisfying form of private or public accountability, it has been left to the audience to sift through conflicting stories, argue about whom to believe and why, make categorical decisions about never seeing that man's movies again or separate the art from the artist to the point of cognitive dissonance.
Discomfort has now become an essential part of pop culture connoisseurship, and it has forced audiences to become much more sophisticated as they decide what, if anything, is worth salvaging in the films, music and novels they most cherish, by people they find fatally flawed.
Apparently, as far as Allen and Polanski are concerned, even that discomfort is now off-limits. There was a time when renegade distributors might have jumped at the chance to market a film by exploiting its perceived controversy. Today, in the context of heightened awareness around sexual harassment and abuse, cancel culture and scorched-earth media takedowns, not even the edgiest film company is willing to invite the kind of blowback that Allen's publisher received earlier this year for putting out his memoir.
Through one lens, this can be seen simply as the marketplace at its most ruthless and impersonal: No one is automatically entitled to a platform for their work.
As a reckoning, though, the disappearing of Allen and Polanski feels simultaneously draconian and woefully inadequate; a form of collective but inchoate judgment that infantilizes the audience and unfairly punishes the hundreds of craftspeople whose contributions undergird a supremely collaborative medium. It also, not incidentally, mirrors a form of denial that powerful men have engaged in for centuries when it comes to one another's misdeeds. Too icky. Too difficult. It might hurt my career. Let's ignore it.
Perhaps most importantly, it does little to provide genuine healing, restitution and restorative justice to those who have been harmed.
In the absence of authentic due process for victims and the accused, we get ... absence. And within that vacuum, movies have taken on outsize importance, not just as chronicles of injustice but as their own means of redress. That can be enormously satisfying, as in the case of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's 2012 documentary The Invisible War, which led to 35 congressional reforms having to do with sexual abuse in the U.S. military. On the Record, which was directed by Dick and Ziering, feels like a life-giving gust of fresh air in the face of long-buried secrets. By the end of the film, 20 women have come forward with sexual misconduct accusations against Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, who has never been charged.
I remain uneasy with allowing fear -- of criticism, bad press, a trending tweetstorm -- to relegate anyone's work to cinema non grata. But watching On the Record this week made me refine my objections.
I still believe that more speech is better than less speech and that critical thinking should be encouraged, not stifled. I think it's possible to deem a movie worth seeing, despite ambivalence -- or outright anger -- toward the person who made it. Work lost is a loss, worth at least marking, if not mourning.
MovieStyle on 06/05/2020