Affleck doesn’t need your moral OK

After Casey Affleck won the Academy Award for best actor on Sunday night, many commentators and viewers took to news sites and social media to criticize the Academy’s choice.

Affleck was sued civilly twice in 2010 for alleged sexual misconduct and harassment; the suits were eventually settled for an undisclosed amount of money and an agreement that all parties to the actions would remain publicly mum about the matter from then on out, which means we’ll likely never know exactly what happened.

It’s fair to say, however, that what Affleck was accused of doing by the two women who sued him is gross, ugly, and disturbing.

Before the gag clause of the settlement, cinematographer Magdalena Gorka alleged that one night while she was working with Affleck on his mockumentary I’m Still Here, she went to sleep in a private room, then woke to find an uninvited guest. Affleck, she claimed, was “curled up next to her in the bed wearing only his underwear and a T-shirt. He had his arm around her, was caressing her back, his face was within inches of hers and his breath reeked of alcohol.”

According to producer Amanda White, the other woman who sued Affleck, the actor encouraged a member of the I’m Still Here film crew to take off his pants and show White his penis.

These are just a couple of examples of the alleged incidents in the women’s complaints.

We can’t know the validity of the allegations. (Before the settlement, Affleck denied them and at one point threatened to countersue.) But we should all be able to agree that any person who actually did the things Affleck is accused of having done could be considered a complete ... well, let’s just keep it clean and say he’d be a “contemptible individual.”

Similarly, there’s no way to arrive at any sort of objective definitive answer about whether Affleck’s acting performance in the 2016 film Manchester by the Sea warranted an Oscar. Artistic beauty (and genius and wonder) lies at least partially in the individual eye of each individual beholder. created that performance … only to come across the detestable allegations and have to sit with a profound feeling of disillusionment.

I have a tendency to idealize artists who display sensitivity in their work, assuming that if they move me with their writing/music/acting, they will be similarly thoughtful and compassionate in real life. This is of course completely illogical and untrue — they aren’t their characters or their songs — and also usually of nominal relevance since I will never meet them anyway.

Yet, I don’t think I’m the only one who does it.

Certainly, most of the critics of Affleck’s Oscar win seem to take it for granted that bestowing an acting award on him is an endorsement not only of his work, but also of his morality and character.

Why? The list of irredeemable jerks who have won Oscars is long; some of them are even convicted criminals (Roman Polanski, I’m thinking of you and your statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl).

Do these jerks deserve social condemnation? Absolutely. Some of them actually deserve prison time (see above).

However, their work may also deserve recognition. Let’s not conflate valuing an artistic contribution with approving of an artist as a human being. Sadly, excelling at creative endeavours and at being a decent person don’t necessarily go hand in hand — I’d even speculate that they overlap less often than not, for reasons that precede Hollywood and its vapid and macho culture.

“By endlessly forgiving and validating abusive men,” Sady Doyle writes for Elle in an article about Affleck’s win, “we tell women that the abuse they suffer is less important than some white guy’s right to get his point of view across.” Is that true? Or by not passing over Casey Affleck for an acting award he has rightfully earned artistically, have we actually made the conversation about sexual harassment in Hollywood more public?

It’s hard to argue that Affleck’s alleged victims would have had their voices heard by nearly as many people — and the problems with Hollywood culture discussed as openly — if not for Affleck’s win.