There have been long debates in the past over whether a work of art can be separated from its artist if that artist is a terrible person. There have been many popular movies, songs, books, and other assorted pieces of culture which have been created by people who have done and believed awful things. Does it shade the work and taint it? This dynamic has long been at the heart of any film made by Roman Polanski post 1977. Polanski has directed some of the greatest films ever made. But he also plead guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl and then fled the United States. This has been the basis to all sorts of moral arguments over whether the man’s actions can be separated from films like The Pianist, and if the actors working with Polanski, the industry which bankrolls his productions, and the audiences who still watch his films are condoning horrible behavior.
However, what if the issue is not the artist? What if it’s the art itself? And to this end, maybe the reverse of the above is possible. Can a culture’s faults taint a “classic” piece of art for future generations?
Time marches on. And so does a culture’s viewpoints on myriad issues. There are many examples of popular works which when viewed today have aspects which would never be tolerated by current standards. These might be movies or books people enjoyed as children, and then as an adult there might be one line or scene where it’s like: “Hey, I can’t believe that’s actually in there.” Or maybe the characters and their characterizations are depicted in ways which may or may not have seemed sexist or racist at the time, but have rather unfortunate implications when analyzed today. These works can be viewed as a window into the time period in which they were created, and the norms and attitudes which dominated at the time of production.
So I thought it might be interesting to ask which films, TV shows, pieces of literature, etc., have elements which are cringeworthy?
- Over at the A.V. Club, they once had an article which likened the character of Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind to Walter White from Breaking Bad, with the character arguably being one of the first popular female anti-heroes. For an early 20th century novel, the story is in some ways progressive in presenting a complex female protagonist who has goals and is willing to do whatever necessary to achieve them. However, it is the story’s depiction of race which makes things uncomfortable. Gone with the Wind filters O’Hara’s story through a revisionist view of Southern victimhood, where the plantation way of life is under assault and slavery is given a somewhat flattering portrayal. Although, the film adaptation of Gone with the Wind is nowhere near as objectionable as to how things are depicted in the novel on which it’s based, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Margaret Mitchell in 1937. This tendency to romanticize chattel slavery into a genteel aristocracy of the Old South definitely represented prevailing moods and attitudes of the time. And those issues are still with us today every time an argument over a Confederate monument occurs.
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s sweeping tale of the South between the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, is a work divided against itself. Its treatment of race is nauseating, a dismaying reminder of how recently blacks could be presented as inferior with essentially no controversy. At the same time, in Scarlett O’Hara’s vicious maturation from pre-war naivety to a ruthless titan of industry, it features the strongest and most complex woman in American entertainment, along with a view of gender politics without many equals today.
It’s this friction, between what society has moved away from and what it has yet to fully embrace, that makes the book so difficult and necessary to grapple with. Exhilarating moments of Scarlett head-butting the patriarchy are followed by depictions of animalistic freed slaves unleashing waves of rape, creating a kind of whiplash for offensiveness that’s difficult to square.
- A staple of the 1980s and early 1990s was R-rated erotic thriller and stalker thrillers. Either through the economics of PG-13 films being more profitable than more adult fare, or the ubiquity of porn making nudity and sex scenes with actresses in R-rated pictures less of a fascination, these movies really don’t exist anymore. Not even on direct-to-cable late-night Cinemax does one find this sort of thing now. But it is interesting to contemplate what these films and characters arguably represented. Ever notice the trait usually shared by Femme Fatales? They're sexually aggressive. In most works, if a woman likes to have sex, she will almost always either be vapid, treated like a whore, or ultimately fall into being depicted as the "crazy bitch" in the story. The first time I saw Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction as a teen, I thought Glenn Close's Alex was a monster, and that she's tormenting this poor guy and his family. And, to a certain extent, this is how the movie was marketed at the time. It was talked about as the movie that will scare married men into being monogamous. Now, every time I see Fatal Attraction I see how awful Michael Douglas's Dan is, and how he exacerbates the situation. He cheats on his wife, knows on day two that he fucked someone who is very unstable. And when confronted with the knowledge that she's pregnant, he does everything he can to sweep it under the rug and/or browbeat Alex into going away. There's a great case to be made that for the first two-thirds of Fatal Attraction, Alex is a victim of the story. But everything changes after the bunny rabbit on the stove. From that point on, the audience wants her dead.
As Susan Faludi wrote about the movie in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women in 1991, Fatal Attraction preached “the incompatibility of career and personal happiness … Women’s lives were framed as morality tales in which the ‘good mother’ wins and the independent woman gets punished.” The movie engendered feminist outrage about the depiction of “crazy career women,” much to the bewilderment of studio executive Sherry Lansing, who had to keep noting that she was a career woman herself—and had been drawn to the story out of sympathy for the mistreated, lonely Alex.
Fatal Attraction became a flashpoint because it so cleverly rode the discussion of what Time called “retrenchment along the sexual front lines”; due to collective terror about AIDS, “folks on dates don’t know whether to cross their legs or their fingers.” The film was released one year after “The Marriage Crunch,” the controversial Newsweek cover story that claimed that statistically women over 40 were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to ever reach the altar. (Alex is 36.) The movie also came out the year that our last big stock market crash put a temporary end to Yuppiedom, the exaltation of ritzy, childless urban living. When Dan and Alex walk back to her apartment in the meatpacking district, the street is a maze of bloody beef; the couple practically has to shadowbox the cows to get to the apartment door. Humans, Lyne would have you know, shouldn’t live in such a place.
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Revenge of the Nerds is one of the big ‘80s teen comedies, but it has a scene which plays terribly. And I guess no one who watched this in the ‘80s thought anything of it that one of the main protagonists performs oral sex on the main antagonist's girlfriend through deception (i.e. rape). And the way the film justifies it is that Lewis (Robert Carradine) is so good at oral that Betty (Julia Montgomery) doesn't care that a guy she barely knows has just raped her. In fact, she falls in love with him. In a lot of ‘70s and ‘80s films, there's a weird trope where the way the uptight female antagonist is redeemed is through sex. Basically all the female antagonist needs is for someone to pleasure her properly and she stops being an antagonist and so uptight. Although, just like the scene in Revenge of the Nerds, a lot of these characters and the sex border on or actually cross into rape fantasies.
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Speaking of how sexual assault is treated in the 1980’s, look no further than Back to the Future for some weirdness. Most of the commentary usually gets hung up on the ending, with the film positing George McFly (Crispin Glover) would hire Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) to wax his car after attempting to rape his wife (Lea Thompson) in high school. However, if one goes back even further, remember the original plan was for Marty (Michael J. Fox) to fake sexually assaulting HIS OWN MOTHER and traumatizing her so George could play the hero. And all of this could of have been worse. In a scene deleted from the movie, Marty worries that by fooling around with his mom he might return to 1985 and “end up being gay” (Doc’s response: “Why shouldn’t you be happy?”). Having Biff there at the end working for the McFlys can be argued as a writing shortcut in order to have all the characters together. However, the fact it took some time before any critics really pointed out how icky it is just might indicate how people 30-years-ago treated attempted date rape as something more like a bad experience going out with a bad guy than they saw it as an actual crime.
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The work of John Hughes is indelibly linked to pop culture representations of what it meant to be a teenager in the 1980’s. With films such as Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Weird Science, Hughes defined a certain type of white, teenage, suburban fantasy lifestyle. However, some of these movies have issues people have pointed out look problematic with 20/20 hindsight. With The Breakfast Club, the theme of the movie is about deconstructing social barriers. The relationship which develops between preppy princess Claire (Molly Ringwald) and Bender (Judd Nelson) is presented as two people connecting in spite of their social statuses being diametrically opposed (i.e., rebellious loser and homecoming queen). However, watching it again, the relationship which forms is formed by abuse and still seems abusive by the movie’s end. But the story tries to sell it by attempting to position Bender as a dude Claire is attracted to as a bad boy who she finds interesting because he’s keeping it real with her. However, viewed with today’s standards, it’s a love affair resulting from sexual harassment. Hughes’s Sixteen Candles also has some interesting windows into 1980’s ideas of teen sex. One of the subplots involves Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) ending up with a drunk popular blonde from school, Caroline (Haviland Morris), in a Rolls Royce. Caroline is blasted out of her mind most of the night, and when we last see them they’re waking up in a church parking lot, implied to have had sex over the course of the night. This is pure geek fantasy, which would also be defined as rape by today’s standards.
Molly Ringwald: At one point in [“The Breakfast Club”], the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher. While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire’s skirt and, though the audience doesn’t see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately. I was quick to point out to my daughter that the person in the underwear wasn’t really me, though that clarification seemed inconsequential. We kept watching, and, despite my best intentions to give context to the uncomfortable bits, I didn’t elaborate on what might have gone on under the table. She expressed no curiosity in anything sexual, so I decided to follow her lead, and discuss what seemed to resonate with her more. Maybe I just chickened out … If I sound overly critical, it’s only with hindsight. Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was, given my limited experience and what was considered normal at the time. I was well into my thirties before I stopped considering verbally abusive men more interesting than the nice ones. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in “Sixteen Candles,” when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear. The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she “enjoyed it.” (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did.” She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.
Thinking about that scene, I became curious how the actress who played Caroline, Haviland Morris, felt about the character she portrayed. So I sent her an e-mail. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since she was twenty-three and I was fifteen. We met for coffee, and after we had filled each other in on all the intervening years, I asked her about it. Haviland, I was surprised to learn, does not have the same issues with the scene as I do. In her mind, Caroline bears some responsibility for what happens, because of how drunk she gets at the party. “I’m not saying that it’s O.K. to then be raped or to have nonconsensual sex,” Haviland clarified. “But . . . that’s not a one-way street. Here’s a girl who gets herself so bombed that she doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
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An interesting aspect of comedies of the aughts is a good number of them have elements of gay panic. On the one hand, many of the characters are meathead males who arguably would talk this way to each other (e.g., “You know how I know you’re gay?”). On the other, maybe it’s a sign of how much the culture has changed in so few years that it’s jarring to hear characters who are supposed to be likable throwing around the word “faggot” or using “gay” as a negative when watching again.
- Not too long ago, Vertigo overtook Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound's poll of film professionals and international critics for the best films of all-time. On Quentin Tarantino's ballot, he listed The Bad News Bears(1976) as one of the ten best films ever made. The one thing that’s striking about the movie is its honesty. And it's probably the reason it still holds up, while its de-fanged remake didn't work. This is a film with flawed children, being coached by a flawed man, in a flawed little league system that wants to look down their nose at the Bears at every turn. The Bad News Bears was directed by Michael Ritchie, and it's an interesting contrast to Ritchie's other best-known film: The Candidate. In both films, the lead characters, Walter Matthau's Buttermaker and Robert Redford's Bill McKay, are not taken seriously at first, but become seduced into becoming what they hate the most by the chance of winning. Buttermaker decides there are things more important than winning, where McKay doesn't. Also of note is Vic Morrow, who's great and just nails his part in this movie as the coach of the Yankees. Anyone who's ever been around little league baseball or pee-wee football has met the kind of asshole coach/parent he plays in this movie. Arguably, the problem he represents has gotten worse, not better, since 1976. And yet, there is no way in hell a major Hollywood studio would put the following scene in a movie today, especially not the dialogue in the mouth of a child.
- The Verdict is considered one of the finest performances of Paul Newman’s career, with the film boasting talent both in front of and behind the camera (Sydney Lumet), as well as in the writing room (David Mamet). The movie follows Newman’s Frank Galvin, an alcoholic attorney who’s seen better days, and finds himself arguing a longshot case which is his chance for redemption. Without giving too much away, towards the end of the film there is a scene where Galvin’s character punches a woman in the mouth after he realizes her betrayal. Newman’s character is a flawed man, but the way the movie plays it is sort of a “she had it coming” attitude that almost excuses the character’s actions. And The Verdict is not the only movie from around that time where violence against women is sometimes rationalized and sorta deemed acceptable by the narrative.