 Just think, maybe one day I will be popular and problematic enough to have one of these made about me. If you've ever wondered how to influence which videos I do or don't end up making for this channel, the blueprint has been set. First, say something in a YouTube comment that convinces me to respond in an actively unhelpful way to the point where I am literally screaming at my laptop. Next, become justifiably upset at my response and DM me on Instagram specifically to say that I was completely out of line and be entirely correct in doing so. Then, let me vent about the fact that I don't know how to write this stupid review of post-hardcore band falling in reverse that I had been working on for the previous few weeks, and finally, tell me that it's a bad idea and I just shouldn't do it. And I will believe you because you are right. I said in the past that I would never make a review of falling in reverse and I fully intended to stick to that plan until suddenly I didn't. I knew from the outset it was dumb, the very first words I put in that word doc were, this is a bad idea and no one will be happy. But I wrote 1800 words anyway before reaching the point where I had to dig into the various capital A allegations against frontman Ronnie Radke and in doing so realized that the largely positive video that the punk rock NBA did about him wasn't actually the cover I needed it to be. The reason it wasn't going to make anyone happy was because it centered on the question of separating art from artists which is a subject that I have alluded to periodically but never really given the time it deserved. And giving myself that time in the context of a review that would mostly be clicked on by people who were fans of the band who definitely didn't want to hear it resulting in an inevitable stream of textual hatred in the comments and probably elsewhere ultimately didn't seem productive or fun. My friend concurred and said sounds like this will hurt some people and help no one. And that was that. But I still wanted to say my piece on the broader subject because I have seen a lot of hashtag content about it recently and what am I doing here if not forcing myself into every possible conversation whether my opinion is qualified or warranted or whatever else. So it's what we're here to do. Talk about whether you can separate the art from the artist and instead of focusing on one example we're going to talk about several but more importantly talk about the bigger picture because like listing a bunch of people who did bad things and then trying to justify why I will or won't look past their misdeeds doesn't seem super interesting and if I'm not going to be interesting about it you may as well watch one of those dozens of other videos on the subject. Now I will inevitably reference some heavy subject matters like sexual assault and abuse because some of the people mentioned will have done those things but I'm not going deep on any specific person's allegations and won't be letting anyone speak for themselves so take that as you will. And with that settled let's do a fun video that won't make anybody mad. I don't know if that was a joke or just a lie but it's definitely not true. So should you or even can you separate art from artist? No absolutely not. I want to get that out of the way immediately because frankly it is the only acceptable answer. Anything else is selfish and cowardly but saying that you cannot separate art from artist is not the same as saying that your problematic faves must be relegated to the dustbins once you get past the initial obvious answer. Things become murkier. On some level the feelings I have about this whole debate are not unlike the ones I have around the eating meat debate. I used to eat a lot of meat at least once a day and more often twice and this continued from childhood into college throughout which I dated a vegetarian and beyond and during all that time I was completely disinterested in changing my diet. One of those I'd rather die than give up hamburgers types. And it's funny to think back on that because I have had two hamburgers in the past three years and regretted both of them immediately. Now I am still not even a vegetarian let alone a vegan but I am well aware that they are morally superior for their choices. It's why everyone hates them so much whether they're willing to admit that or not. The meat industry is awful for the environment and even worse for animals and you may not care about either of those things but that would be proving the point. And I do care about those things and learning all that has radically changed both the amount and type of meat that I eat but I've been unable to commit to separating myself entirely. And I could explain the logic behind my decision to still eat poultry and seafood but when we get right down to it it's all just me trying to convince myself that even though I know that what I'm doing is bad the badness of the thing is ultimately worth it and I am not a bad person for feeling that way. And it's bullshit. Life is a series of choices with the options limited by circumstances well beyond our control. Sometimes you choose right, sometimes you choose wrong, sometimes there are only wrong options and so you just go with the thing that lets you sleep at night. I am privileged enough that morality can play into my decision to eat meat or not. I live in a vegan friendly city with a vegan partner and have the money to buy alternative options and that is not true for a lot of people. The higher cost and complexity of even finding meatless cuisine in a society that has come to treat animals as the default protein source and subsidize that production at the expense of things that are healthier and more environmentally beneficial means that veganism is an impossibility for a lot of people. So anyone at their farmers market looking down on the people who need fast food to feed their kids can fuck right off. But don't get me started on the morality of having kids in the first place. Now this video is not a deep dive into the virtual impossibility of living ethically under capitalism but I think acknowledging that that's true is useful here. My decision to not eat hamburgers has had an impact on my carbon footprint but my carbon footprint is also genuinely insignificant in the grand scheme of things and my money is insignificant to the giant corporations that produce it. One person's boycott of an industry makes no material difference to the world but it does make that person's life harder and that is obviously not to say that there is no value in living your life the way you wish others did or speaking with your wallet. There is and you should but for someone who has a youtube channel where and I pass judgment on literally any and all kinds of things I am a lot less judgmental about all of this than you think because life is hard and if we are going to accept that life happening is good actually then we need some things in it to make it good actually and you know what makes life good food yeah but really music movies books video games fucking art I have thought so much about Emily St John Mandel's station 11 in the last year not just because it is about a deadly pandemic and so how could I not but because it centers on the importance of not merely surviving the apocalypse but actually trying to find joy in its wake. The book follows a traveling theatrical caravan that wants to remind everyone of the value of art and make the horrors of the world a little less horrible for just a few hours and it's not like art is the only way to be happy obviously who doesn't pretend to love long walks on the beach but even if you're a weirdo who likes just listening to the ocean and seagulls or whatever you'll still need something to get you from where you are now to the beach like are you not going to listen to music or a podcast or an audiobook of course you are because every second you are not taking in some sort of something is a second that you are faced with the bleak reality of existence and the futility of everything we need stuff to make existence bearable and ideally even valuable if you were to say that you would avoid the works of anyone who has ever hurt another person then you're going to have to live in a cave because everyone's got some shit and done some shit so instead you need to own it and not be an equivocating baby about it if you want to watch a roman plansky movie you need to look in the mirror and say i am okay with the fact that this man raped a 13 year old and fled the u.s instead of facing repercussions i think you're definitely a bad person if you could say that to yourself without shattering the mirror like in some over dramatic student film i said i am less judgmental than you'd think not that i am not judgmental at all but okay plansky is frankly a super boring example but there's a reason he's always brought up in these conversations his movies have had an enormous impact on cinema and if we are tbh-ing i am kind of annoyed that i couldn't have just waited a few more months to find out how awful he was and maybe have gotten to see repulsion and or rosemary's baby in that time but i found out when i found out and i will never watch another roman plansky movie for at least as long as he lives and probably as long as i do because i really don't think that plansky's death or the death of any artist changes much like if all i was concerned about was not financially benefiting and admitted rapist i could just acquire his films by other means he wouldn't benefit nor would anyone else but the fact that plansky has had the impact is the problem i can't be a part of all the conversations that people have about his films but being part of those conversations is arguably worse by even mentioning him as anything other than a monster i would be promoting this vision of a mythic auteur and for what this is where my role as a critic comes in and let us not overstate my importance here even if you squint i am pretty much a nobody but i can't use that as an excuse to say bad things even if it would make my life a whole lot easier and so i have to know is bringing attention to a bad thing and trying to knock it down a peg or to it more or less useful than not acknowledging the thing at all jim stephanie starling has spent many episodes of their excellent weekly series the jimquisition talking about ubisoft the massive video game publisher that among many other bad things protected sexual predation in its highest ranks for many many years when news of the misconduct was revealed it was a scandal for a few days everyone was outraged until one day everyone seems to have forgotten except jim all the publications that ran stories about it went back to fawning over ubisoft's upcoming releases as though it is all better now what should they have done what should they be doing when i reviewed cyberpunk 2077 for the daily beast i knew i couldn't just ignore all of the issues that had been raised throughout the game's development which is why the very first line of the review is about labor conditions at the company i didn't write the headline or subtitle my ignoring the existence of cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't do anything when literally no one else is ignoring the existence of cyberpunk 2077 and when we can be confident that most of those people will not be talking about the stuff that actually matters i think there's value in joining the capital d discourse to remind everyone that things wouldn't have been all hunky dory even if the game was good which obviously it wasn't and i do think that addressing ubisoft's failings in discussion of ubisoft's games could be a net good as well but i'm less clear on say discussing harry potter and the cursed child sure i made clear that i don't agree with the transphobic rhetoric that jk rallying has been spewing and i guess i could justify the broader decision to purchase the tickets because they predated the camel's back moment that led to the en masse condemnation that i bandwagoned onto but it still feels weird there's literally nothing i can say or do that would hurt rallying financially but in retrospect i'm not sure that the callout is enough to justify the existence of that review i don't know is the world better if i reviewed the backstreet boy so i can let folks know that nick carter was accused of rape because i i would bet you probably hadn't heard that one and that a not significant portion of y'all are very unhappy that you just did and look for the purposes of everything let us be super clear that as a rule i believe women because even if it is technically the case that something like one percent of accusations turn out to be false it almost doesn't matter when 97 percent of rapists face no punishment for their actions like if we as a society trusted every accusation and treated people reporting assaults with dignity and respect and were like electrocuting alleged predators instead of electing them to office absolutely innocent until proven guilty burden of proof all that shit but that's not the world we live in the experience of reporting a sexual assault against anyone is absolutely horrendous and doing so against a public figure jesus fucking christ because that stays with you the name of the woman who made a rape allegation against ronnie radke is right there on his wikipedia page under a subheader called defamation because radke later filed a defamation case that seems to have silenced the entire thing it genuinely bothers me that this anonymous editor went with that heading but clearly he was on ronnie's side and now she is the woman who defamed him but if you read the interview with her linked in that section it is incredibly hard not to believe her and the only reason you'd want not to is because you don't want it to ruin how you feel about falling in reverse's music and that is a pretty fucking garbage reason but these cases while certainly unpleasant are also pretty straightforward they cross a line or they don't so you look in the mirror and deal with that or you don't but there are a variety of reasons that situations might not be so easy to write off take the case of azalea dying and frontman tim lindbises he sure did try to hire a man to kill his ex-wife and that is that's bad that's something should have gone to jail for something he did go to jail for it is well established that and i just gave a prime example of how the american justice system is bad at dealing with things but thinking in those terms is also kind of unhelpful i am unconvinced by the whole abolish prisons movement but i also think that we should be focused on reformation as opposed to simply punishment and for as long as we think of prison as purely punitive it will be impossible for people to actually perform because they will still be treated like dirt on the other side of it and that perpetuates the cycle and is just societally really bad and maybe this doesn't apply to famous people because even the ones who do go to prison tend to come out the other side doing pretty all right but if someone did go to jail serve their time and upon release said yeah i did a bad thing and i want to be better now that seems like a net good so is it okay for me to listen to azalea dying the copy of an ocean between us i got from circuit city as it fire sailed back in 09 was the first metalcore album i paid actual money for and might actually be the only one since i am now all streaming all the time it was hugely important for me as my taste in music shifted heavier and heavier yet i haven't listened to the band in years because of what lambises did but if you don't care about that then it's still a pretty straightforward case the true merc comes when trying to draw lines around individuals who are part of a larger project and how much their conduct matters to your overall relationship to the work like do you remember the controversy around kasey afleck when manchester by the sea was doing its rounds dude sketchy as fuck and all of the news made me feel hugely conflicted about going to see that movie but i did it anyway because as critical as afleck is to the film he is a part of someone else's story and not the storyteller himself had he written or directed or even produced the film it might be a different conversation and there's also the question of when this behavior becomes public i don't love seeing kevin spacey in old movies but watching the usual suspects is fundamentally different from watching whatever project he may try to bring himself back with and i certainly won't be watching that i must say that i am a fan of this maybe trend towards replacing bad people in unreleased movies as seen in the addition of the late christopher plumber to take over for spacey and all the money in the world and tignataro being added to zack snider's army of the dead to replace christalia this becomes more complicated when you're dealing with projects based on the works of problematic figures especially if they weren't problematic at the time jk rowling is the obvious example both because literally everyone knows who she is and because her only value to society at this point comes in the form of this very conversation which a lot of people a lot smarter than me have already delved into in far more detail like james summerton released a 57 minute video on her as i was finishing up the initial draft for this video and i have got nothing to say about her that he and contra points and all them folks haven't said better so instead i'm going to make the same point about a different beloved albeit much smaller franchise created by a monster ronnie kenchan i loved ronnie kenchan the anime was one of my earliest introductions to the form and freckles will be stuck in my head until i die i own all 28 volumes of the manga lined up neatly on the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom i purged a lot of books and manga about a year ago but i couldn't bring myself to get rid of any of my complete sets and certainly not my biggest i haven't cracked the spines on any of them in many years but the series was important to me in 2017 the creator of ronnie kenchan was found to be in possession of child pornography a crime for which he was fined less than $2,000 and i know i said that maybe people who have faced punishment should be forgiven but child exploitation feels like a pretty significant exception to that rule some of my lines are a little more flexible than others but that one is built into the very fabric of my being also that punishment is fucking pathetic so i can't read ronnie kenchan anymore but what about the 2012 live action film based on the series or its two sequels they were made well before anyone knew and the creator had minimal involvement none of those people are at fault for what he did and as far as legacy goes it's not like the man's a public figure who is writing articles arguing that actually he is the victim here he's gotten his paycheck for those movies and presumably for the pair of new ones that are coming out later this year so me wanting to see the awesome sword fights of the earlier entries and almost inevitably the new ones ultimately doesn't matter to his bottom line but also fuck that right like i can't in good conscience support that series going forward and i still don't know how to feel about it going back and that's really the problem i don't even know my own feelings on all these situations because trying to interrogate every fucking possible option is just exhausting generally speaking i go with my gut if i hear that a person did something bad i don't shy away from it i look at what the bad thing is and then either say i'm not okay with that or i am sometimes there's a logic to it and other times there isn't now cards on the table and i know a lot of people will not like what i'm about to say i probably won't feel good supporting someone who has bad opinions or is part of an organization i don't like but as a straight white cis man who is almost never actually the target of those bad opinions they aren't really dealbreakers for me the way that active abuse will almost always be and of course it depends on how odious those opinions are and also how prominently the person expresses them and the amount of influence they wield but when it really comes down to it i'm gonna watch the next mission impossible movie no matter how bad Scientology is sorry but even if people generally agree that active abusers shouldn't get a spotlight people disagree over what that word even means i remember bringing up louis ck in a live stream a while back and though most people in the chat felt the same disgust towards the man that i do as someone who paid actual money to see him perform at madison square garden one person said she didn't feel like what he did counted as abuse and so she was willing to give him a pass as the line she drew and i get it even if i don't agree i had plenty of other examples i thought about while conceptualizing this whole thing but when i reached this point in the script i just i didn't really want to do it anymore this has already been 20 something minutes of helpless shrugging we don't need 20 something more so to close this whole thing out i want to talk about a tangentially related subject that has been bothering me for the better part of a year and i haven't had a way to shoehorn it into one of these videos yet south korean director hong sung su is a beloved filmmaker whose work shows up on every fucking list of good south korean movies you're ever going to find except for mine and probably multiple times because dude is prolific as hell i've never understood the appeal finding what i'd seem to be okay at best but i've given him a shot a few different times because i felt like i had to i don't feel that anymore and the straw that broke the camel's back was when i watched what critic pierce conran considers his best film 2015's right now wrong then for the most part it's fine or whatever like i can almost see why people like it so much but there is a sequence in which the protagonist himself a film director as many hong sung su protagonists are takes off all of his clothes in front of a pair of women screaming at him to stop and i thought that's a big yikes for me dog but hey maybe there'd be consequences right like showing someone doing a bad thing isn't inherently bad as long as there are consequences but no shortly thereafter we are told that the women won't be pressing charges or doing anything at all because he's an artist literally that's the reason given in the film because he's an artist and when you're an artist they let you do it and this could be a inviting moment of satire shoving into our faces the fact that we have this gross double standard for famous people that i've spent this whole video failing to address but it's not it's literally just a thing that happens and then goes away because it's not a big deal it's an awful mindset that hong sung su decided to celebrate without the slightest hint of self-awareness and an industry celebrated him for that because of course it did fuck that and fuck hong sung su thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom hammer and marco cat saracotta benjamin schiff anthony coal magnolia dentin eliot fowler greg lucina liam knipe cojo phil baits willow i am the sword tomatown one timmoe and the folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video that's great if not oh well if you want to see more please subscribe i'm going to go back to actual reviews the next video i promise hell yeah i hope to see you then