Those of Damned Memory

Never meet your heroes.
-- Michael Bentt


When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was Tales of the Gold Monkey, an action-adventure saga set in the South Seas in 1938. The hero was Jake Cutter, a handsome, cigar-chewing ex-fighter pilot who was portrayed by Stephen Collins. Due to a conflict of wills between the show's hard-nosed producer, Donald Bellisario, and its network, ABC, the series was abruptly canceled after its first season, but I never forgot it, and when Tales was finally released on DVD a few years ago, I wasted no time buying it and revisiting the famed Monkey Bar on the fictional island of Bora Gora, where Jake could always be found, smoking cheap cigars and arguing with his one-eyed dog.

Cut to late 2014, when Collins' then-wife, the actress Faye Grant, who had met him on the set of Tales, handed over an audio tape to the LAPD in which Collins' could supposedly be heard confessing to a marriage counselor that he had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with a female minor many years before. A nasty scandal followed, not leastwise because Collins had portrayed a paragon of fatherly virtue on the long-running television show 7th Heaven. One consequence of the scandal was that 7th Heaven was immediately pulled from the broadcast lineup on UP TV, a "faith friendly" network which relied on "7H" re-runs to pad its schedule. Another, on a strictly personal level, was that I received several private communications, not always tactfully put, from people asking me how I felt about the news. Did the allegations against Collins affect my feelings for Tales of the Gold Monkey? Would I continue to watch the show? Did I regret writing such a fabulous review of it on Amazon? How did it feel to know one of my childhood heroes had been portrayed by a man alleged to have sexually abused a minor right around the same time the show was being produced?

My answers have been consistent between then and now: No, my feelings for the show haven't changed. Yes, I would continue to watch it. No, I did not regret encouraging others to do so. As for the fourth question, the answer is direct and somewhat vulgar: It felt like shit. It felt like shit in October, 2014, and it feels just as shitty now, in July of 2016. But the questions themselves provoked a much more important question which still troubles me, particularly in the wake of the much larger and uglier scandal involving Bill Cosby, which is just now beginning to play out in the courts. Where, precisely, do we draw the line between the artist as a human being, and the art he creates? And what long-term risks are run when we place prohibitions on art because the artist himself has become tainted?

You will note above that I mentioned UP TV's decision to pull 7th Heaven from its lineup, and thus, in effect, remove Stephen Collins from public view.
A similar reaction took place in regards to Cosby Show re-runs on multiple networks, but there the reaction went deeper. An effort is actually being made to have Cosby's star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame removed, just as Penn State removed the statue of Joe Paterno in the wake of revelations that "Joe Pa" knew of, but did little to stop, sexual crimes being perpetrated by a member of his staff. The idea is not merely to prevent the show, or the individual, from being seen, heard or remembered, but to obliterate public references to them, to revoke their honors, to perform, in other words, what the Romans would have called damnatio memoriae -- a "condemnation of memory."

Damnatio memoriae was the somewhat Orwellian Roman practice of obliterating all public references to a once-powerful individual, so as to erase them not only from formal history but from human memory. Statues, murals, coins, scrolls -- anything which bore the likeness or the name of the damned person was defaced or destroyed, so that in a very short period of time it would be almost physically impossible, in an era where photography and audio recordings did not exist, to prove he or she had existed at all. It is safe to say that the banishment of Collins and Cosby from the airwaves, and the attempt to revoke Cosby's star and Paterno's statue, are part of our own version of Damnatio memoraie, but in all cases there is a deeper and somewhat less honorable motive at work than the desire to punish a wrongdoer for a shameful act. The real motive is to allow us, the public, to forget that we once idolized someone who is now in disgrace.

I never cared much for Bill Cosby or Joe Paterno, but I did admire Stephen Collins with the sort of starry-eyed admiration only a kid can have for someone who portrays his hero, and the trouble with Collins does make me wonder to what extent the past can or should be be rewritten or even erased by the circumstances of the present. Does The Cosby Show become less funny or less culturally important because Bill Cosby may have been a serial rapist while it was being shot? Do Tales and 7th Heaven disappear into the Orwellian memory hole because Collins admitted to three "inappropriate" sexual acts with minors? Should Paterno's entire legacy as a coach be obliterated because of his failure to stop a sexual predator? The answer in many people's minds seems to be yes: the inconvenient past is subject to the condemnation of memory. But this only leads to another question: where does it stop? Stephen Collins had a role in the classic film All The President's Men; must we pull airings of that from the television, too? And what about the idea of rebooting "Tales," which went around Hollywood a few years ago? Out of the question now! It seems that nothing whatever can grow from the soil of which are retroactively tainted by the alleged crimes of their stars, despite the fact that the shows themselves, both as concepts and as entities, are entirely separate from the actors cast to star in them. It is evidently not enough for people to say, "I'm not going to watch that show because such-and-such did so-and-so"; it now seems that people must go a step further and say, "Liability extends to the show itself and not just the actor. If the actor is disgraced, the show is disgraced. If the actor is erased from history, then the show must be erased, too."

This frightens me in many ways, not merely because it is unfair to everyone else involved -- Malcom Jamal-Warner, who played Cosby's son on TCS, noted that by pulling it from syndication "they are taking money out of my pocket, too" -- but because of the implications for every other aspect of human life. It seems to me that the statement that the past is malleable, that its ugly or embarrassing aspects can be removed as easily as a wart, belongs, or ought to belong, more to the Oceania of 1984 than to the America of 2016. Because once this practice of toppling statues and prying up Stars on Boulevards starts, it may be impossible to stop, and the really frightful fact is that it
can be applied anywhere; to books, to paintings, to music, and, as Orwell repeatedly warned us, even to people and history themselves. At present, in this country, there is ongoing a systematic defacement of Civil War-era monuments, statues, plaques and so forth which is positively reminiscent both of the afformentioned ancient Rome and of the former Soviet Union circa 1991. Some would have you believe this is a de-glorification of the Confederacy, but as with any damnatio memoraie the true purpose is not the righting of a wrong but the destruction of unpleasant reminders and inconvenient -- or humiliating -- facts.

I myself will continue to watch "Tales" because I enjoy it, and because I can differentiate in my mind the actions of Collins the man from the doings of the fictional Jake Cutter. As Orwell said, the first thing you ask of a wall is that it stand up, which is a separate question from what larger purpose the wall serves. Well, the first thing we ask of television is that it entertain. This is independent of the larger question of whether an actor or a director is a despicable person or has committed despicable deeds. History shows us that many actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and suchlike have been disagreeable, dubious or even monstrous human beings. Erroll Flynn liked his women young -- as in "statutory rape" young -- but I will never take less pleasure in Robin Hood as a consequence. Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, but I won't switch off his music when it comes on the radio. Salvador Dali was a psychopath and a sexual deviant, but I won't hurry past his exhibits at the Getty or LACMA as a result. It is not a question of suppressing knowledge of their faults or of excusing those faults; quite the opposite, it is a question of placing one's admiration on the side of the creation rather than the creator. I think there are times when it is perhaps permissible to lump the artist in with his art, but by and large I believe we ought to differentiate the two. It should be possible for someone to say, "I love The Cosby Show -- I think it is funny and of enormous historical importance due to its groundbreaking portrayal of a black family as upper middle class rather than poor," while at the same time abominating the alleged acts of Cosby himself. The act of watching and enjoying his show is distinct, or at least can be distinct, from supporting the man.

The desire to destroy unpleasant reminders is as old humankind (who hasn't thrown away or incinerated photographs or letters from an ex?) but the habit of refusing to listen to music, or to read a book, or to see a movie or view a painting, simply because we dislike the artist rather than because we dislike his art, is relatively new one and has only been steadily gaining acceptability since about the time of the Russian Revolution. It began in large part because of the necessity for mental conformity among left-wing intellectuals who had to fall in line with Marxist (meaning Soviet) ideology. On the political right it seems to have begun somewhat later, during the Cold War. More recently it has seeped into all forms of thought, political or no, and can be found in people who have no political feelings whatever. It is a form of mental leprosy which is rooted in the belief that nothing anyone who disagrees with us or offends us says could be interesting or possess any validity. We see this diseased thinking most often in matters where someone's political or religious beliefs have been injured, but as the cases of Collins and Cosby (et al) show us, it also extends into subtler and more dangerous arenas. For what is more threatening to our own security than the idea of a malleable past, which can be reshaped, rewritten, sanitized at will? For anything to progress -- an art form, a person, a nation -- the past must remain objective and immutable, to serve as guidance for the future. It is by our failures -- placing trust in the wrong people, for example, or idolizing a human being we know to be as fallible as ourselves -- that we often learn the most painful, and the most valuable lessons.