Why do “bad” people make such great art?
As consumers of music and art, we seem to get easily disillusioned when our artistic heroes do something reprehensible. Whether it’s influential Pink Floyd and Beatles producer Phil Spektor shooting his wife in cold blood, jazz visionary Miles Davis’ pre-rehab pimping and heroin-pushing career, or film director Alfred Hitchcock’s obsessive, abusive treatment of actresses like Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, we have a difficult time listening to their music or viewing their art the same way when it’s made clear that certain artists aren’t people we’d like to hang out with.
…Hitchcock clearly had some deeply-rooted issues with women…
In the wake of Jian-Gate, I felt it appropriate to make this month’s edition of Jam Space about some reputedly “unsavoury” people, and how the much publicized errs in their personal lives dictate the reception of the art they make. Now, I’m not ready to strictly defend or condemn the people I’m about to discuss. That would take much more room than I’m allotted here, and I’m certainly no lawyer. This article simply aims to consider why we should or shouldn’t separate a creator from their creation, as well as what kind of dimensions can be gained or lost from doing this.
John Lennon is a prime example. For a person whose music is so preoccupied with world peace, and with the discourse on his work so preoccupied with this as well, Lennon was admittedly aggressive and domineering for much of his adult life. So, does this detract from the music itself, or the messages in the subtext? I think more so the latter – the Lennon/McCartney catalogue is, aside from overwhelmingly huge, some of the most influential music ever recorded. Debating that is difficult. However, Lennon’s personal life encourages us to really read into his music’s subtext, especially in his reactionary hipster phase before his death.
Did he, in truly antithetical and opportunistic fashion, just put money in the bank from promoting “peace?” Or did he really take himself to be some kind of conflicted global saviour? Either way, the man battered every woman he was involved with, and often found himself at odds with the darker side of his nature. Just listen closely to the lyrics in “Run For Your Life” or “Don’t Let Me Down,” and this darker side seems to speak for itself.
I mentioned Hitchcock, one of the most indisputably important filmmakers of the 20th century. Vertigo and Rear Window established a film grammar of interior psychology never seen in North American cinema before, and his films changed the game forever. But Hitchcock’s artistic practice took him to some twisted places – like launching live birds at Tippi Hedren while filming The Birds, and giving loads of unwanted attention to both Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. Ask anybody he worked with – he wasn’t really concerned with artistic and personal boundaries.
In a case like this, we can take Hitch’s actions off-screen to read further into the narratives he weaves for the screen. There’s a reason there’s hardly any strong-willed, independent women in Hitchcock’s movies – Hitchcock clearly had some deeply-rooted issues with women, and, again, a close reading of Psycho seems to affirm this more clearly than I could in this given space.
Saying “everybody is flawed” does not absolve these people of their wrongdoings. In fact, it does the opposite – it probes us, as consumers of culture, to consider the motivations of the final product the creators create and, furthermore, to consider how much of the creator is present in the final product. In the cases of Lennon and Hitchcock, two very different artists in very different mediums, perhaps there is more of them in their artwork than we credit them for, in all the wrong ways.