When someone you really like turns out to really suck
I was rooting for you. And I thought you were rooting for me.
Julianna Margulies looms large in my household. My wife grew up loving E.R., and especially Margulies’s Nurse Carol. I was never an E.R. person, but I am a die hard fan of The Good Wife. That show spent five seasons being one of the best network dramas of its time. (Unfortunately, it ran for seven seasons, but nothing gold can stay.) I love its bone-deep cynicism about humanity and the systems we create. I love its scintillating sexual tension—Will and Alicia, of course; but also Denny from Grey’s and Alicia?? Sheesh.
Most of all, I love how realistically unpleasant the titular good wife is. As played by Margulies, Alicia Florrick is a judgmental, self-righteous, and petty protagonist. Watching her face clench into an icy death stare is one of the many joys of the show. She’s also smart, resourceful, surprisingly funny, and very sexy. And under her icy exterior, she is an absolute mess. What I’m saying to you is, she is a relatably complicated and thorny woman, and I loved seeing someone with a lot of my own shortcomings stride through five excellent seasons and two additional seasons.
So imagine my despair when I heard Margulies’s now-notorious podcast interview, where she:
passionately recites Islamophobic stereotypes as though they’re incontrovertible fact;
with alarming speed, conjures up the image of Black lesbians being beheaded and having their heads played with like soccer balls;
alleges that any queer or Black people who support Palestine (it’s me, hi) are brainwashed or ignorant; and
claims her role as a lesbian on The Morning Show as a legitimate identity to speak from (as in, “As someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew”).
That last one hit my wife particularly hard, since she is actually both Jewish and a lesbian, not just a Jewish woman playing a lesbian on TV.
This sucks. Finding out that someone whose art is important to you is actually kind of a shit? Sucks. Finding out that someone whose art is important to you holds you, your identity, and your beliefs in contempt? Really fucking sucks.
For me, this wasn’t like slowly and then suddenly finding out that Johnny Depp is a monster—I never liked him that much as an actor or a persona. And it was different to how I felt when I learned everything that Woody Allen has done and stands accused of. Separating the art from the artist would probably be easier here if the art weren’t so often about the awful things the artist has done, but Woody Allen’s art was never that important to me.
No, the Julianna Margulies villain turn falls in the same camp for me as Jonathan Majors, star of the only Western I’ve ever loved, who started to weird me out with his 19th century abolitionist red carpet style and insistence that he was 6’2” before turning out to be a violently abusive partner. It’s also the same camp as Vin Diesel and his hideous sexual battery allegations. I’ve spent hours watching, talking about, and loving media that these people brought to life. I wouldn’t go so far as to call these parasocial relationships, but they were and are very meaningful parts of my pop culture landscape. And right now, even the idea of watching their work that I love is painful.
The demand to separate the art from the artist only ever seems to go in one direction. It’s always telling us to ignore the artist’s personal failings, the harm they cause, in order to keep appreciating the art they’ve created or contributed to. So, not separating so much as using the art to protect the artist. But separating the art from the artist should actually go in the other direction. It should ask us to separate the good feelings we associate with the art from how we reckon with the humanity of the artist, and how we hold them accountable.
It is so easy to say “I never liked that person,” or “I always knew something was off about them.” I said both of those things, like, two paragraphs ago. There’s a nice moral ease to it—I don’t have to feel anything but smug in my good taste and disgust at the person in question. Unfortunately, humans are flawed, fallible, and capable of real monstrosity. Even the ones who are also capable of creating real beauty. There’s no way to keep your list of faves totally morally pure. If you’re willing to be honest, there’s no way you can avoid reckoning with one of your faves and their problematic aspects.
Maybe I’ll get to the point with Julianna Margulies and The Good Wife that I’m at with Tina Fey and 30 Rock. Tina Fey just loves being racist and transphobic so much, and I love 30 Rock so much, and I get to sit uncomfortably with those two realities whenever I rewatch the show. Or maybe this is it for me and The Good Wife. Either way, I can’t pretend it’s not a painful loss, much as I wish I could.
It’s so much easier to separate art from artist when they have been dead for 200+ years and the mayhem they sowed is long gone. I didn’t know about some of these things and wow, what trash people.
Across the arts we are told to seperate the art from the artist. Good on you if you cannot. I can’t. I cannot bear the thought of watching a Woody Allen movie because instantly his behaviour towards a woman who was for all intents and purposes his step daughter would be forward in my mind. The same with Neil Gaiman being aware of the allegations means I have no desire to read any of his works ever again.