Mia Lasic-Ellis

As the leaves start to turn color, almost every conversation with friends seems to turn to the upcoming holiday season.

While they express their excitement for what is their favorite time of year, I sit and listen quietly, for the weeks leading up to Christmas are far from my favorite time of the year. Instead, my wait is longer, for my favorite week of the year falls in June. It’s a special week called Bleak Week. Organized by the American Cinematheque, it’s exactly what it sounds like—a week of incredible films that serve only to remind one of the despair of this world.

While I have gone to many Bleak Week screenings, one could even say too many, one screening stands out in my memory: a double bill of  “Chinatown” and “Sorcerer.”

Though I had seen the former many, many times, even going so far as to dress up as the protagonist of the film, J.J. Gittes, for Halloween one year (yes, I am a bit of a film nerd, if you couldn’t tell already), on this particular night, the film affected me in a way it hadn’t before.

As the infamous final line was spoken, and the haunting score began to play, I found myself overwhelmed. While the lights came on and my fellow cinephiles around me scurried to wait in egregious lines for the restroom, concessions or both, my dad asked me for my thoughts. I subsequently burst into tears.

But here’s the rub: “Chinatown” is not a movie that should be bringing me to tears. In fact, it’s a movie I probably shouldn’t even be watching, and if heaven forbid I am daring to watch it, I definitely should not openly publicize such illicit viewings.

You see, “Chinatown” was directed by, to put it mildly, a terrible, terrible man: The one and only Roman Polanski. Three years after the release of “Chinatown,” Polanski was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He later fled the United States and continued to make movies in Europe, even being nominated for an Academy Award for his Holocaust film “The Pianist” (a film of his, I regret to say, that has also made me sob).

Like how anyone with at least a moderate sense of right and wrong feels, thinking about what Polanski did disgusts and horrifies me. At the same time, his film “Chinatown” elicits a deeply emotional reaction in me. Watching his movie just a few days after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the fictional plight of the protagonist, Evelyn Cross Mulway, made me reflect on the diminishment of basic women’s rights in a powerful and affecting way, even bringing me to tears.

So the question becomes, how do I reconcile these two truths? I love the movie, but I hate the man. As many of us are asking during this fraught political moment: Can I separate the art from the artist?

I recently read a book called “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer in which the author expounds on the question of how to approach such “monsters.” As she writes, many of us long for a simple chart that weighs the gravity of the “monstrosity” of the artist compared to the greatness of their work. But such a chart would prove ineffective because it disregards individual experience and reaction to art.

Take, for instance, my sister’s boyfriend. He grew up watching Woody Allen films with his family and now in difficult times is able to turn to those films, as they provide him with a sense of nostalgia and flood him with childhood memories. This response is unique and personal—so for him, it would be unfair to expect him to stop watching something that he has such an emotional connection to.

And isn’t that connection why we engage with art? Movies provide with us an emotional experience, whether that be sadness, happiness or just simple amusement, and in this increasingly emotionless and cold world, any experience that does yield such a response should not be outlawed.

However, do not get me wrong: I am not saying that we should all go out and extol these artists. If the thought of engaging with such artists, even if that engagement is just watching their movies, feels absolutely repulsive to you, then that is your prerogative.

Art is all about the individual response, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer or simple chart for how to approach these “monsters.” Sometimes, some of us are moved by things we really don’t want to be, while other times, seeing Harvey Weinstein’s name pop up during the credits makes someone physically sick and incapable of finishing the film.

And that discrepancy is OK. That’s just the nature of humanity.

Or maybe this whole column has just been an insane rationalization, and I’m a bad person for liking Polanski movies. Who’s to say?