Zander Dulac

Tolkien and Lewis: Two Christian Writers, Two Opposite Approaches to Fantasy

September 8, 2026 /

Few literary friendships have been as influential as that between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Both were Oxford scholars. Both were devoted Christians. Both loved mythology, fairy tales, and medieval literature. Both helped shape modern fantasy. Yet when one compares their major works, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, the differences are so striking that it is difficult to believe they emerged from the same intellectual circle.

The contrast begins with the most obvious question: how does Christian belief appear in the fiction?

For Lewis, the answer is straightforward. Christianity appears directly, almost openly. Narnia is filled with biblical themes that are barely disguised. Aslan dies to save a sinner, rises from the dead, and defeats evil through sacrificial love. The parallels with Christ are so clear that many readers understand them immediately, even as children.

Tolkien disliked this approach. He famously distinguished between allegory and applicability. Allegory, in his view, imposed a one-to-one correspondence between fiction and reality. A character stands for something else. A lion stands for Jesus. A witch stands for Satan. Tolkien preferred applicability, in which readers discover meanings for themselves rather than being guided toward a predetermined interpretation.

As a result, there is no Christ figure in The Lord of the Rings in the same way that Aslan functions in Narnia. Christian ideas are present everywhere, but they are dispersed throughout the story rather than concentrated in a single symbolic character. Frodo’s burden resembles a form of sacrificial suffering. Gandalf dies and returns. Aragorn is a healing king who restores the kingdom. Yet none of them is simply Jesus under another name.

The difference reflects a deeper divergence in how the two men viewed myth.

Lewis often used fantasy as a vehicle for communicating Christian truths. He once described his own conversion as involving the realization that Christianity was a “true myth.” Since myths could express profound truths, he saw no problem in employing fantasy narratives to illuminate Christian doctrine.

Tolkien viewed mythology differently. For him, myth was not merely a tool for conveying religious lessons. Myth possessed intrinsic value. Human beings, created by God, were themselves creators. Through storytelling they participated in what Tolkien called “sub-creation,” the making of secondary worlds that reflected the creativity of the divine creator.

This distinction explains much about their fiction. Lewis begins with theological ideas and then creates stories that illustrate them. Tolkien begins with the world itself. Middle-Earth exists before any specific plot. Tolkien spent decades developing languages, histories, genealogies, geography, calendars, cultures, and myths. Entire civilizations rose and fell before Frodo ever left the Shire. The stories emerge from the world.

Narnia works almost in reverse. Lewis creates exactly what the story requires. If Father Christmas needs to appear, he appears. If animals need to talk, they talk. If Bacchus and Roman river gods need to suddenly enter the narrative, they enter. Consistency is less important than the immediate imaginative or symbolic effect.

This difference often produces a striking contrast in tone. Middle-Earth feels ancient. Narnia feels improvised. That is not necessarily a criticism. Lewis was less interested in constructing a coherent secondary world than in creating a sequence of imaginative experiences. Narnia resembles a dream or a fairy tale. Middle-earth resembles an alternate history. Tolkien’s professional life probably pushed him toward the “world first” approach. He was a philologist. Languages came first, then histories to explain the languages, then stories to explain the histories. Middle-Earth almost grew archaeologically.

Readers who value worldbuilding often find Tolkien’s approach richer and more convincing. Readers who value symbolism and direct spiritual engagement often prefer Lewis.

The two authors also differed in their attitudes toward complexity.

Tolkien’s world is morally serious but rarely simplistic. Even villains possess histories and motivations. Boromir falls and is redeemed. Gollum is both pitiable and dangerous. Denethor is tragic rather than purely evil. Frodo ultimately fails in his mission and succeeds only because of events beyond his control.

Lewis tends toward clearer moral divisions. The White Witch is evil. Aslan is good. The theological lessons are usually easier to identify. This clarity is one reason Narnia is so accessible to younger readers.

The difference becomes even more noticeable when examining how the two authors handle evil.

For Tolkien, evil is corruption. It cannot create. It can only distort what already exists. Orcs are corrupted beings. Sauron cannot truly make anything new, he can only twist and dominate. This idea derives from a long Christian philosophical tradition, especially the thought of Augustine, who argued that evil is a privation of good (privatio boni) rather than an independent force.

Lewis accepts similar theological assumptions, but his fiction often presents evil more directly and symbolically. Evil characters function less as psychological studies and more as embodiments of temptation, pride, or unbelief.

One could say that Tolkien’s Christianity operates beneath the surface while Lewis’s Christianity operates on the surface. A reader can finish The Lord of the Rings without consciously thinking about Christianity at all. Yet the work is permeated by Christian ideas: providence, humility, mercy, sacrifice, free will, the corrupting nature of power, the dignity of ordinary people, and hope beyond despair. A reader can hardly finish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without recognizing its Christian foundations.

This distinction explains why Tolkien’s work often appeals strongly to non-Christian readers. The theological framework remains present but unobtrusive. Readers engage first with the story, characters, and world. The religious implications emerge gradually, if at all. Lewis, by contrast, frequently attracts readers who appreciate explicit spiritual themes. Those same qualities can also alienate readers who dislike being guided toward particular theological conclusions.

Ironically, Tolkien’s approach may have produced the more enduring mythology. Narnia remains beloved, but many adult readers eventually notice the machinery behind the story. The allegorical structure becomes increasingly visible. Once one sees Aslan as Christ, much of the symbolic puzzle is solved. Middle-Earth resists complete explanation. Its mysteries remain. Tom Bombadil remains enigmatic. The origins of certain beings remain uncertain. Ancient events echo through the narrative without being fully explained. The world seems larger than the story.

This may be the ultimate difference between the two friends. Lewis wanted fantasy to point beyond itself. Tolkien wanted fantasy to exist as a world in its own right. Lewis used myth in service of faith. Tolkien transformed faith into myth.

Both approaches emerged from sincere Christian conviction. Yet they produced radically different literary results. One created perhaps the most famous religious fantasy of the twentieth century. The other created a mythology so complete and convincing that many readers forget it was ever inspired by religion at all.

Favorite American Football Movies

September 1, 2026 /
  • The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich, 1974)
  • Everybody’s All American (Taylor Hackford, 1988)
  • Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999)
  • Remember the Titans (Boaz Yakin, 2000)
  • Friday Night Lights (Peter Berg, 2004)

In chronological order.

The Worricker Trilogy

August 25, 2026 /

David Hare’s Worricker Trilogy, consisting of Page Eight (2011), Turks & Caicos (2014), and Salting the Battlefield (2014), occupies a curious place in modern British espionage fiction. Produced for television by the BBC but filmed and performed with the sophistication of high-end cinema, the trilogy feels like a deliberate attempt to create a contemporary counterpart to the moral and political spy stories associated with John le Carré. It succeeds not by imitating George Smiley, but by asking what a Smiley-like figure would look like in the twenty-first century. The answer is Johnny Worricker, played magnificently by Bill Nighy.

The trilogy was written and directed by David Hare, one of Britain’s most respected playwrights and political writers. Hare’s career has been defined by a fascination with the intersection of politics, institutions, and personal morality. Works such as Plenty, The Absence of War, and The Hours reveal a writer deeply interested in how individuals navigate corrupt or compromised systems. The Worricker films continue this preoccupation, functioning as both espionage thrillers and political critiques.

The obvious comparison is with John le Carré’s George Smiley. Both Smiley and Worricker are aging intelligence officers. Both are thoughtful rather than physical. Both rely on observation, patience, and judgment rather than action-heroics. Both operate within bureaucracies where loyalty is constantly tested. Neither possesses the glamour traditionally associated with fictional spies.

Yet the differences are as important as the similarities.

Smiley belongs to the Cold War. His world is defined by the conflict between East and West, capitalism and communism, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. One of le Carré’s great achievements was to reveal that beneath the noble rhetoric of that struggle lay manipulation, betrayal, blackmail, and murder. Smiley’s victories often come at terrible moral cost. The Cold War may have been necessary, but le Carré never allowed readers to believe it was clean.

Worricker serves a similar function for the War on Terror. By the time of Page Eight, the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century has been replaced by a murkier world of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, surveillance, disinformation, and political expediency. The enemy is less clearly defined. Governments themselves increasingly become the source of anxiety. Worricker discovers that the corruption he must confront comes not from foreign adversaries but from his own political leadership.

This distinction is crucial. Smiley’s tragedy is that he fights dirty because the enemy fights dirty. Worricker’s tragedy is that the dirt often originates at home.

The trilogy is therefore less interested in espionage tradecraft than in political accountability. The central question is not “Can we catch the spy?” but “What happens when democratic governments abandon the values they claim to defend?”

Bill Nighy is extraordinary throughout. His performance is among the finest portrayals of an intelligence officer ever filmed. He avoids every cliché. Worricker is intelligent but rarely showy. He is weary without becoming cynical. He is detached without appearing cold. Nighy communicates entire pages of thought through a glance, a hesitation, or the smallest shift in expression.

Much of the trilogy depends upon silence, and Nighy understands this instinctively. Worricker spends much of the story listening rather than speaking. He is a man who has spent decades gathering secrets and has learned that the most dangerous thing in any room is often the person saying the least.

The supporting casts are equally remarkable. Across the three films appear performers such as Rachel Weisz, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Christopher Walken, Winona Ryder, Judy Davis, Ewen Bremner, and Michael Gambon. Few television productions have assembled such a consistently distinguished ensemble.

The casting serves an important purpose. These films are built around conversation rather than action. Entire sequences consist of two people in a room discussing politics, loyalty, or fear. Lesser actors would have made these scenes static. Here they become the heart of the drama.

An often-overlooked aspect of the trilogy is the role of jazz. Jazz is not merely part of the soundtrack; it is part of Worricker’s identity. Like many classic jazz musicians, Worricker appears to improvise while actually relying on deep knowledge and instinct. He moves through situations indirectly. He dislikes rigid structures. He values nuance over certainty. Jazz becomes a shorthand for an older, more reflective intelligence culture, one rooted in ambiguity and individual judgment rather than algorithms, databases, and political messaging.

The books that appear throughout the trilogy perform a similar function. References to writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Georges Simenon are not accidental. Both authors specialized in characters who maintain personal codes of conduct in morally compromised worlds. Hemingway’s protagonists often discover that courage consists not in winning but in behaving decently when defeat is inevitable. Simenon’s characters, especially Inspector Maigret, focus less on legal guilt than on understanding human weakness. Both sensibilities resonate strongly with Worricker. He is not trying to save the world. He is trying to preserve a fragment of personal integrity.

This brings us to the ending. One of the most striking aspects of the trilogy is that almost nobody receives what might conventionally be called a happy ending. Careers are damaged. Relationships remain unresolved. Trust has been broken. Some characters escape punishment. Others pay prices they do not deserve. Even Worricker’s apparent freedom feels provisional and melancholy. The trilogy ends not with triumph but with accommodation. That choice reflects Hare’s worldview. Political corruption is not defeated once and for all. Institutions are not purified. History does not bend neatly toward justice. At best, individuals make moral choices within flawed systems. Worricker survives, but survival is not victory.

This is where Hare ultimately departs from the conventions of the spy thriller. The purpose of espionage stories is often to reveal hidden truths. The Worricker Trilogy reveals them and then asks a harder question: what do you do once you know? Its answer is neither optimistic nor despairing. One acts according to conscience, even when conscience changes nothing.

That is a very British conclusion, very much in the tradition of le Carré, and perhaps the reason the trilogy lingers in the memory long after its conspiracies have faded. The real subject was never intelligence work. It was the cost of remaining decent in a world that rewards compromise.

Favorite Baseball Movies

August 18, 2026 /
  • The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)
  • Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988)
  • Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)
  • Field of Dreams (Phil Alden Robinson, 1989)
  • For Love of the Game (Sam Raimi, 1999)
  • Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

In chronological order.

Playing Old CRPGs Again: Divinity Original Sin

August 11, 2026 /

Divinity: Original Sin (2014), the fourth main entry in the Divinity game series, sits in an interesting place in modern RPG history. It arrived at a time when the genre was leaning heavily toward cinematic presentation and streamlined mechanics, and instead pushed in almost the opposite direction: systemic depth, player freedom, and a willingness to be awkward if it meant being flexible.

I did finish the game at the time of its launching, both with a party of four and with two lone wolves. This time I cheated a bit: I installed a mod that allows for a party of six instead of the normal four, so I could experience all the companion quests in one single run. It makes the game a bit easier, because this way you get more action points, but I have nothing against easy games. My main characters, Hawk and Raven, were a dual-wielding fighter and a pyro-geo mage (with a bit of witchcraft by the end, when there are more skill points available). Three of the companions, Madora, Jahan, and Bairdotr, I kept in their original roles of two-handed fighter, aero-hydro mage, and archer, respectively. Wolgraff, however, I kept in the homestead as a designated crafting and blacksmithing specialist. To replace him on the field, I hired the mercenary Seamus Black, who became the lockpicking and pickpocketing expert, as well as a second archer. It was fun.

At its best, the game feels like a playground for problem-solving. The combat system is the clearest example. It’s turn-based, but far from static. Surfaces (oil, poison, water, fire) interact in ways that encourage experimentation rather than optimization. You can freeze a battlefield, electrify puddles, or accidentally set your own party on fire. It’s messy, often unpredictable, and frequently satisfying. There’s a sense that the designers trust the player to discover possibilities rather than follow prescribed solutions, which gives even routine encounters a sense of improvisation.

The same philosophy carries into character building and progression. Instead of rigid classes, the game offers a toolkit. You can create hybrids that don’t quite make sense on paper but work in practice, and the system rarely punishes curiosity.

Cyseal, the opening city, deserves special mention. It’s dense, talkative, and full of small quests that interlock in subtle ways. There’s a slightly old-fashioned charm to how much time the game expects you to spend talking to NPCs, reading books, and piecing together clues. It evokes older RPGs without feeling entirely nostalgic.

That said, the same design instincts that make the game interesting also generate some of its most persistent frustrations.

The dialogue system, for example, introduces a mechanic where arguments with NPCs are resolved through a rock-paper-scissors mini-game. That shifts it from a quirky role-playing abstraction into something that directly affects outcomes: quest resolutions, rewards, access to information, and sometimes whether a situation escalates into combat. The problem is that this introduces a layer of arbitrariness at precisely the moment where the game should feel most responsive to player intent. You can invest in persuasion-related traits, shape your character’s personality, and choose dialogue options carefully, only to have the final result hinge on a short sequence of guessing correctly in rock-paper-scissors. When you lose, it doesn’t feel like your character failed, it feels like the system failed you.

Pacing is another recurring issue. The game has a tendency to overindulge in puzzles, especially toward the end. The Source Temple sequence is the clearest offender: a long stretch of multi-layered puzzles that interrupts the narrative momentum just as the story should be accelerating. Individually, some of these puzzles are clever. Taken together, they become exhausting, and the sense of discovery gives way to trial-and-error fatigue.

Inventory management and general interface friction add another layer of annoyance. The game predates some of the quality-of-life improvements that later entries would adopt, and it shows. Sorting items, tracking quest objectives, and managing equipment can feel more cumbersome than it needs to be, particularly in longer sessions.

Despite these issues, what remains is a game that’s easy to respect, even when it’s difficult to love consistently. It doesn’t aim for smoothness, it aims for possibility. Sometimes that leads to brilliance, sometimes to irritation.

In retrospect (and especially if you have played the sequel), Divinity: Original Sin feels like a prototype for something more refined rather than a perfectly balanced experience. But it’s a prototype with conviction. The systems are rich enough, and the ambition clear enough, that even its missteps contribute to its identity. It’s not a comfortable game, but it’s a memorable one.

Three Times Carter

July 28, 2026 /

Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home (1970) occupies an interesting position in crime fiction history. It is not as famous as the film it inspired, yet it is arguably one of the foundational texts of modern British noir. Before Lewis, British crime fiction often retained traces of the gentleman detective, the police procedural, or the thriller. Lewis dragged the genre into something nastier, more provincial, and more psychologically damaged. His England is not the picturesque England of village mysteries but a decaying industrial landscape full of petty criminals, corruption, class resentment, and moral rot.

It begins with the blunt, almost absurd sentence “The rain rained.” That is a good miniature of the whole book: plain, ugly, repetitive, fatalistic. The world does not dramatize itself for Jack Carter. It simply happens, and he moves through it with the same inevitability. Carter is a London underworld figure returning to a dingy mill town after his brother Frank’s suspicious death. He is observant, nasty, sexually predatory, class-conscious, and practical. The opening train sequence gives us the essential Carter immediately: smoking, drinking from a flask, thinking about his brother and his bosses, and possible trouble ahead. He is not going home out of sentiment. He is going home because a criminal insult has been committed inside the family structure, and because Frank’s death does not add up.

Mike Hodges’s movie adaptation Get Carter (1971) keeps the essential narrative: Jack Carter, a London gangster, travels north after his brother’s death and uncovers a pornographic blackmail/murder network. But the film relocates the emotional center. Lewis’s book is more internal, grimier, and more trapped inside Carter’s voice. Hodges’s film is colder, more architectural, and more iconic.

The biggest transformation is Michael Caine as the protagonist. Caine does not make Carter moral, but he makes him elegant. The clothes, the stillness, the voice, the absolute refusal to waste movement: these turn Carter from Lewis’s vicious working criminal into something closer to a lethal professional instrument. He was “sure, fine, and vicious”, in the words of Roger Ebert.

Roy Budd’s score is also not decoration. It gives the film its pulse. Budd’s Carter Takes a Train turns the journey north into ritual: sparse, jazzy, mechanical, cool. The music makes Carter seem more controlled than he is in the book. It gives him rhythm, poise, and myth.

The ending is the film’s most important alteration. In the novel, Carter is left horribly wounded and abandoned, but alive. In the 1971 movie, Carter is shot dead on the beach. That change makes the film more classically noir. The book leaves Carter in a living hell, while the film gives him the clean fatal punctuation of tragedy. He has solved the case and punished the guilty, but there is no moral restoration available. Revenge does not redeem him. It merely completes him.

Stephen Kay’s Get Carter (2000) changes the story more drastically. It moves the journey from London-to-Newcastle to Las Vegas-to-Seattle. Carter, now played by Sylvester Stallone, is a Vegas mob enforcer returning to Seattle after his brother’s apparent accident. The remake also uses a remix of Budd’s original theme, with Tyler Bates composing the score. Michael Caine’s appearance as Cliff Brumby is a strange gesture: homage, stunt casting, and self-sabotage all at once. Every time he appears, the better film enters the room.

The central difference is Stallone 2000 versus Caine 1971. Caine’s Carter is predatory. Stallone’s Carter is wounded. Caine’s sexuality is part of his menace: he moves through women as he moves through rooms, using access, pressure, and appetite. Caine’s Carter has sex with three women (and a phone sex scene with one of them). Stallone’s Carter has sex with nobody. That tells us almost everything. The 1971 Carter is an active agent of corruption, while the 2000 Carter is a man being cleaned up for a redemption arc.

The smoking detail works the same way. Caine’s Carter is all cigarettes, booze, and death-drive. Stallone’s Carter quitting smoking is not just a character quirk, it is a signal that this Carter is already in recovery from being Jack Carter. The remake wants him to be damaged but salvageable. Lewis and Hodges are not interested in salvage.

That is why the 2000 film feels less like an adaptation of Jack’s Return Home than a late-Hollywood revenge drama borrowing its skeleton. It softens the central horror: the original Carter is not a good man temporarily forced into violence, but a violent man briefly given a legitimate target. (From roughly the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Hollywood became increasingly uncomfortable with protagonists who were simply bad people. The tendency was to retain the character’s skills and toughness while softening their motives and increasing their capacity for remorse. You can see that in remakes like The Taking of Pelham 123, The Getaway, The Italian Job, and many others.)

So which adaptation is closer to the spirit of the book? The 1971 film, clearly. Not because it is literal in every detail. It is not. Caine is too elegant, Newcastle is not quite Lewis’s industrial town, and the ending is materially different. But it understands the moral temperature of the novel: rain, smoke, porn, class resentment, dead industry, bad sex, bent power, and revenge without purification.

Lewis gives us Carter as a thug with intelligence. Hodges and Caine turn him into an dark icon. The 2000 film turns him into a man looking for absolution. Only the first two really understand that Jack Carter is not there to be absolved.

Judging the Artist, Judging the Art

July 14, 2026 /

One of the most persistent questions in aesthetics is whether it is possible to appreciate a work of art created by someone whose actions or beliefs we find morally reprehensible. The debate is hardly new, but in the age of social media and cancel culture it has acquired renewed urgency. Every few months, a novelist, filmmaker, musician, philosopher, or painter becomes the subject of public controversy, and the same question returns: should their work still be read, watched, heard, or admired?

The issue is often framed as a choice between two extremes. One side argues that art should be judged solely on its artistic merits, independently of the creator’s personal conduct. The other contends that moral considerations are inseparable from artistic evaluation and that celebrating the work of a bad person amounts to excusing or normalizing their behavior. Both positions contain some truth, but neither is sufficient on its own.

A useful starting point is the observation that many of the greatest figures in cultural history were, by modern standards, deeply flawed individuals.

Consider the painter Caravaggio. Today he is regarded as one of the founders of Baroque painting, a revolutionary artist whose dramatic use of light and shadow transformed European art. Works such as The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Supper at Emmaus remain among the masterpieces of Western painting.

Yet Caravaggio also accumulated a remarkable criminal record. Court documents reveal repeated involvement in assaults, illegal weapon possession, vandalism, and public disturbances. In 1606 he killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, during a violent confrontation and spent the rest of his life as a fugitive. Few would defend his conduct. Yet it is difficult to argue that knowledge of his crimes somehow alters the technical brilliance of his paintings. The paintings themselves do not advocate murder. Their artistic value does not depend on the moral character of their creator.

The same dilemma appears with Benvenuto Cellini, one of the great sculptors and goldsmiths of the Renaissance. His bronze statue Perseus with the Head of Medusa remains one of the landmarks of Florence. In his autobiography, however, Cellini openly boasted about killing several people. He treated violence almost as an extension of his artistic ego. Yet few visitors standing before Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi judge the sculpture according to the moral failings of its creator. They admire the sculpture because of its artistic achievement.

Another extreme example is the composer Carlo Gesualdo. Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover after discovering their affair, a crime carried out with the assistance of his servants. The killings were notorious even in his own time. Nevertheless, centuries later he is remembered primarily for his astonishingly experimental madrigals, whose harmonic innovations anticipated musical developments that would not become common until much later. The horror of the crime does not erase the originality of the music.

These examples suggest that artistic achievement and moral character are not necessarily linked. A great artist may be a terrible human being. A virtuous human being may produce mediocre art. The qualities required for artistic excellence are not identical to those required for ethical excellence.

The problem becomes more complicated when we turn to modern figures because their victims, controversies, and consequences remain part of living memory.

The filmmaker Roman Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl after providing her with alcohol and drugs. Many people regard this as sufficient reason to boycott his films. Others argue that films such as Chinatown, Tess, and Rosemary’s Baby remain important artistic works regardless of Polanski’s crimes.

The disagreement often stems from different understandings of what it means to watch a film. Some view it as a purely aesthetic experience. Others see it as an act that confers prestige, influence, and possibly financial support on the creator. The question is therefore partly aesthetic and partly political.

The philosopher Louis Althusser presents a different challenge. In 1980 he strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann. Should that fact affect the evaluation of his theories about ideology, state power, or Marxism? Logically, the answer would seem to be no. A philosophical argument is either sound or unsound regardless of who makes it. If a mathematician commits murder, his theorem does not become false. Likewise, Althusser’s ideas must stand or fall on the strength of their reasoning. To reject a theory solely because of its author’s crimes is a version of the genetic fallacy: judging a proposition by its source rather than its content.

The case of Woody Allen is even more contentious because public opinion remains divided. Allen’s marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, generated widespread condemnation. For many observers the relationship itself was sufficient to permanently taint his reputation. Others distinguish between moral discomfort regarding his private life and artistic appreciation of films such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Again, the central question is whether the quality of the films changes because of what we know about the filmmaker. The films themselves remain exactly the same objects they were before the scandal became public.

Political controversies raise another set of questions. The poet Ezra Pound openly supported fascism and made antisemitic radio broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini’s regime during the Second World War. The novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa supported Alberto Fujimori at one point in Peru’s political history before later becoming a critic. Jorge Luis Borges accepted an honorary degree from Pinochet’s government in Chile and made statements that many considered politically naïve or objectionable. The Brazilian novelist Rachel de Queiroz supported the military government that emerged after the 1964 coup.

Do these political positions diminish the literary value of their work? Many readers would answer no. Pound’s influence on modern poetry remains immense. Borges remains one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. Vargas Llosa’s novels continue to be admired for their narrative sophistication. Rachel de Queiroz remains a major figure in Brazilian literature. Their political judgments may have been mistaken, even profoundly mistaken, but literary quality is not determined by political correctness.

This leads to an important distinction: there is a difference between condemning an artist and condemning a work.

Suppose a novel explicitly advocates racial supremacy, political persecution, or sexual exploitation. In that case the objection is directed at the work itself. The ideas being criticized are embedded in the artistic object. The reader is not merely reacting to the author’s biography. The problematic content is present on the page.

The same would apply to a film that glorifies rape, a painting intended as propaganda for genocide, or a philosophical treatise defending slavery. Here aesthetic judgment and moral judgment become intertwined because the objectionable ideas form part of the work’s substance.

But many controversies involve works that are unrelated to the artist’s misconduct. Caravaggio’s paintings do not teach murder. Gesualdo’s madrigals do not defend adultery killings. Borges’s stories do not promote military dictatorship. Althusser’s theory of ideology does not depend on strangling one’s spouse.

In such cases, rejecting the work because of the creator’s behavior risks confusing two separate questions:

“Was this person morally admirable?”

and

“Is this work artistically, intellectually, or aesthetically valuable?”

The answer to the first may be no while the answer to the second remains yes.

This does not mean that audiences must ignore biography. Knowledge of an artist’s life can enrich interpretation. It can also create discomfort. A viewer who cannot enjoy Polanski’s films because of what Polanski did is not making an irrational choice. Moral emotions are part of human experience. Likewise, a reader may decide not to buy books by a living author whose views they find abhorrent. The mistake lies in assuming that personal revulsion automatically settles questions of artistic merit.

The strongest position may therefore be a middle one. We should neither excuse wrongdoing because someone produced great art nor pretend that great art ceases to be great when its creator proves morally deficient. Human beings are complicated. Artists are often worse than we would like them to be. Some are criminals. Some are political fools. Some are predators. Some are all three.

Yet if cultural history teaches anything, it is that artistic genius and moral virtue are independent variables. We may wish they coincided more often than they do. But they do not.

The challenge for modern audiences is to hold two ideas simultaneously: that certain actions deserve condemnation, and that certain works deserve admiration. The ability to maintain that distinction may be uncomfortable, but it is arguably essential for any serious engagement with art, literature, philosophy, and history.

An additional irony is that society routinely separates art from artist when enough time has passed. Millions admire Caravaggio without thinking about the man he killed. Visitors to Florence do not boycott Cellini’s sculptures because of his confessions of murder. Concertgoers rarely discuss Gesualdo’s crimes before listening to his music. Yet contemporary artists are often judged by different standards. Whether this reflects moral progress, media saturation, or simply the emotional proximity of recent scandals is debatable. What is clear is that time has a remarkable ability to transform criminals into historical figures and controversies into footnotes. The question, therefore, is not whether we separate art from artist, but when.

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