Movie News | Movies.com: Few major films have caused as much premature outrage as the upcoming adaptation of Ender's Game, which was inspiring boycotts, protests and Internet petitions long before it hit the screens. People aren't angry at the movie itself, which tells the story of young soldiers being trained to repel a future alien invasion, they're angry at the author the source novel, Orson Scott Card. You see, Mr. Card is a bit of a bigot. His outspoken homophobia has been widely reported and he has done little to tone down his rhetoric in the months leading up to the film's release, surely causing more than a fair share of migraines at Summit's publicity office.
5 comments:
This article strays from the solid argument I thought it was going to discuss with its title! The title, which starts an argument I wholeheartedly believe, points out that juts because the person who made the art is bad, does not mean that the art is bad. If Hitler said that shooting puppies was bad, he is not wrong because he is Hitler. The entire Ender series is amazingly well written and was one of my favorites growing up. I was well aware that Orson Scott Card was a bad person but that really did not effect my enjoyment of the books. The same is true of the movie.
What the article did instead was to wag a finger saying "well these other people are bad and you liked their movies so ha!" I agree with their conclusion but they could have made the point in much better ways.
I think one of the beginning statements that this article made, "You have to separate artist from art" is at heart true. So many great works are made by people that we would not except in normal society. I think people should make and effort to see past the person who creates the art and to see a piece of art as an entity in itself. In the case of Orson Scott Card and Ender's Game, homophobia is an issue that is currently being attacked by the public on all fronts. His views however do not change the story that he wrote decades ago.
This turned out to be a sort of strange article. I think it starts off by presenting a good point, just because the artist may be a bad person or believe in something that you do not, it does not mean that they have not made good art. It also raises the question of how do you enjoy the art when you don't wish to support the artist? It seems like the conclusion there is to just go ahead and watch the movie. But I don't really know if the rest of the article made this argument more compelling. Mostly, when I finished I was focused on how much sexual assault is committed by these huge directors, and how, in many cases, they really didn't get in much trouble. This feels like it might be a bigger issue than whether or not people should go see Ender's Game...
Ahhhhhh this makes my brain hurt. I do not agree with the point of this article at all. Finding out these facts about the artists makes me like their art less. I want to watch Hitchcock's movies because they are thrilling, dark, and filled with interesting metaphors but I don't want to watch them if I know that Hitchcock is the villain of them! I don't think you can isolate the artist from the art. You have to know the intentions behind something in order to really know what it is. Separating the artist from the art just means you are not looking at the whole picture and you are a mindless consumer. There are different levels of how bad someone is but there has to be some cognitive dissidence going on when you are looking at the bad things someone has done and you still buy the art they produce. It's like saying "Mein Kampf is such a great read, it doesn't really matter that Hitler wrote it".
I definitely agree that art should be considered separately from its creator. It's a little bit like a logical fallacy that I remember learning about last year called ad hominem: "an attack on the character of a person rather than his or her opinions or arguments". The creator should have little impact on judgment of the work itself, unless maybe the opinions of the creator are reflected in it. We can't completely ignore the person behind the work either, but I think the author is right in that the art and the artist should be set apart.
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