Nope, not kidding. Sincerity is entirely subjective, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think he might have perfectly valid opinions on a great many topics, and be utterly wrong about others. Who knows what goes on in his head? For that matter, who knows what happened during all these alleged instances? He knows, from his point of view, and his victims know from their point of view. We sitting here don’t know jack shit, but we can choose to believe (or not) one thing or another based upon our understanding of the evidence presented.
But I’m not interested in defending Bill Cosby, the man. You think fourteen accusations leveled at him are sufficient to try and convict him; that’s your own lookout. This is a situation where “innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t roll right off the tongue with ease, since the likelihood that fourteen women are all lying about Cosby for whatever reason is vanishingly small (even if I weren’t already inclined to believe individual claims like that–which I am–I don’t pretend that there’s a whole lot of gain to be made from false claims of rape, and never have), but still I am loath to pick up torch and pitchfork under any circumstances. Even a tiny chance is a chance, and a day in court is apparently the least-bad system we’ve engineered in centuries of trying to suss out the truth, even in cases of he-said-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-&-she-said.
But again, I am not defending Cosby. If he did it, he should be punished, and I leave it to better-qualified minds than mine to figure out if he did. But I still maintain that his art exists on a different plane, the same plane on which all art exists. The Cosby Show is still one of the best sitcoms of the 1980s. Our enjoyment of it will probably be colored by these allegations, often to the point where we can’t even bear to look at it anymore. But a sizable fraction of the all-time audience of that show may never realize that Cosby probably did these things. In that vacuum, the show stands as it did for us years ago, in that innocent time when many of us thought he was a good guy.
I’m not telling you that you should enjoy his work to the same degree you ever did (if you ever did at all). But our distaste for the man should extend solely to the man himself, and by extension to the hypocrisy he may have practiced by displaying himself as a smart and successful and compassionate guy in the public eye while having raped and assaulted and abused people who put their trust in him. Should the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences take back his Emmys? Or should they simply not invite him around anymore (particularly if he gets convicted)?
Keep in mind now I’m no longer talking about rape and rapists. After serving an eleven-month sentence for contempt of Congress, Dalton Trumbo could not get screenwriting work for a decade. In order to keep his family fed and housed, he wrote under pseudonyms, and sometimes sympathetic friends would act as “fronts,” putting their name on the byline of his scripts and splitting the money with him. During this period, he won two Oscars, one for Roman Holiday in 1953, and one for The Brave One in 1956. Since Roman Holiday was “fronted” by Ian McLellan Hunter, he (Hunter) collected the Oscar for that one. Not until 1993 was Trumbo posthumously awarded that Oscar, and not until 2011 did he receive full credit for the screenplay. For The Brave One, Trumbo used the pseudonym “Robert Rich,” and since nobody under that name existed to receive the award at the ceremony, the next morning a whole bunch of guys showed up at the Academy claiming to be the real “Robert Rich.” Trumbo eventually was awarded that Oscar the year before he died, in 1975.
One of the reasons why the blacklist eventually ended was because Trumbo won those Oscars for Best Screen Story when he was “officially” considered too evil to work, as a card-carrying Communist. No doubt several Academy members in Hollywood, who voted for those movies as having the best screen stories of their respective years, came to recoil in horror at the very idea that they voted for the work of a dirty pinko Communist without knowing it. It’s a pretty safe bet that those movies would not have won, had Trumbo’s name been attached to them at the time. Were those viewers deceived? In their ignorance, was their understanding of the artworks they were viewing sufficiently ill-informed as to render invalid their prior high opinions of the movies in question? Should Trumbo not have received those Oscars? What if, instead of a Communist, he was revealed as a rapist?
I don’t pretend to have an easy rule of thumb. I’d never bothered to read Ender’s Game, so I was never a fan of Orson Scott Card, so I didn’t have to wring my hands about whether or not to see the movie when it came out. It’s easy for me to avoid the movie on principle, since I have no idea what I’m missing. It’s harder for me to consider Chinatown or other movies by Roman Polanski. There’s a guy who was tried and convicted (and pleaded guilty, no less) for unlawful sex with a minor, and skipped town and country to avoid being locked up. I have no desire to line that guy’s pockets, nor help him in any way. Still, Chinatown is a hell of a work of art, and has much to teach budding filmmakers about that artform. Polanski’s sins as a human being don’t enter into the quality of his art any more than Trumbo’s Communism (and defiance of the legislature, which is what they nailed him for) inform the cinematic qualities of Roman Holiday and The Brave One.
That’s the distinction I have been trying, in my tiresome and long-winded way, to make.
You and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’d like to think we argue with a degree of intellectual honesty. I just went on at some length about the differences between defending a man, and defending his art. In Cosby’s case, I’m not passionate about either. I haven’t really enjoyed his work since Fat Albert went off the air, and since I’ve never met the man, I’ve never had much of an opinion of him one way or another, except to raise an eyebrow when he seemed to go off on some judgmental rant about black men with loose pants or something.
Here’s someone I have met: Rebecca De Mornay. Worked with her once. Can’t stand her. Over the course of a long, three-month shoot she managed to alienate just about everyone involved, and made her 8-year-old costar cry (out of character) on more than one occasion. I really think she’s about the most awful person I’ve ever met. And yet my opinion of her as a person does not color my opinion of her work. I think she’s very talented, and I appreciate most of the work she’s done that I have seen. But I’ll be damned if I ever work with her again, or even stand in the same room.
Uh-oh. Look out: I’ve just given a woman a pass.
