Feature - 'Am I Still Allowed To Like It?': The Kevin Spacey Factor

And like that, he's gone.  - 'Verbal' - The Usual Suspects

I saw The Usual Suspects on its 1995 release and was bowled over by it, not least because of Kevin Spacey's performance. As talkative criminal Roger 'Verbal' Kint he was the connective tissue that held the film's complex plot together. His conversations with Detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), in which he spun the story of a near-satanic crime-boss named Keyser Soze, were compulsively watchable. You hung on this actor's every word, even if like me you'd no idea who he was, and knew instinctively he was a special kind of talent. Long before that explosive conclusion. 

Within months he showed up uncredited in Se7en, and the audience's response was Oh crap, look! It's the guy from The Usual Suspects! And in that moment an already thrilling movie upped itself a couple more gears. A latter-day screen great had arrived, and we were witness to it.

So it was gutting for me along with many others to read reports that this unassuming giant of modern cinema (and of TV, and of London theatre) may have behaved in a less-than-magnificent Weinsteinian way in his off-screen life. We always want our heroes, be they political or sporting or cultural, to live private lives that match what we admire about them professionally. When they fall far short of that, we feel a peculiar sense of betrayal. Their achievements, all that we have admired about them, seem permanently tarnished. More than that we may feel that it's some form of moral compromise to actively enjoying their work anymore, or that they don't deserve us to do so. 

'I'll never be able to watch that film again.'

'I don't think I can finish House of Cards now.'

'Baby Driver's a great movie. Even though... You know.'

And so on. 

I understand the emotion, truly I do. Something is inevitably lost when we associate the person on-screen with reprehensible behaviour, particularly when it's of a sexually predatory nature. However there's an additional impulse on the part of some people (and TV networks) to erase all traces of the accused actor's professional output. And that I can't be dealing with.

Don't misunderstand me. When an actor's illegal sexual predilections are brought to light, it's a just consequence that they never work within that industry again. If they happen to head up a project that will fall apart without their input (as seems to be happening with House of Cards) then that will be an unfortunate but unavoidable loss. And if, as happened in All the Money in the World, the offending contributor's role can be replaced by a different actor's performance to avoid commercial disaster, call it a valid business decision made in difficult circumstances. 

However, I'm talking about something rather different than any of those scenarios.

What I'm referring to is the actor's body of work already out there in the public domain - the DVDs nestling in people's personal collections and the movies doing the rounds of network TV. Can LA Confidential and American Beauty and (to a much lesser extent) Horrible Bosses 2 never be enjoyed again? Well of course they can. In fact they should be, for a number of reasons.

Art is very seldom created in a vacuum. Take The Usual Suspects. That film is a highly regarded ensemble piece with a clutch of fine performances. It's arguably the best work of director Bryan Singer (who, I have sighed at being reminded, is also enmeshed in allegations of abuse) and a memorable piece of screen-writing by Christopher McQuarrie. Add to that the hundreds of others who were employed in the movie's creation - the production designers and lighting crew and foley artists. Are the results of their Herculean labours (and any motion picture is a huge feat of combined strength) no longer to be appreciated, because one member of the team, however high-profile, behaved in some unconscionable way? If the Best Boy turned out have the Worst off-set proclivities, would that invalidate the work everyone else had done? (Can too many rhetorical questions be used in one blog post?)

That kind of thinking, logically pursued, would result in any film produced by Harney Weinstein being off-limits. Goodbye Shakespeare in Love, The King's Speech and Paddington. We might feel similarly reluctant to watch Roman Polanski movies again, including greats such as Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist. Those two names alone establish one potentially lengthy cinematic hit-list. 

Of course it's easier to set aside our reservations if the offending party is not slam-bang in front of the camera. My own response to certain actors has been coloured, for example, by reports of their diva-esque on-set behaviour. (You were great in Hostiles, Christian Bale, but that tantrum of yours recorded on the set of Terminator: Salvation lives long in the memory. Longer, it turns out, than the film itself.) Yes - you may feel uncomfortable watching Spacey as 'Verbal' these days, but that brings up a whole other question. To what extent are we able to view someone's creation as a separate entity?

If you were to discover that the artist of your favourite National Gallery painting had been a serial spouse-murderer, would that make it any less beautiful, objectively speaking? Look - there's their signature on it, and removing that signature won't make it any less theirs. So the options are to stop visiting the Gallery or to deal with the mental conundrum. Take it a step further and imagine that the electrician who wired your house turns out to have a huge walk-in closet's worth of skeletons (real or metaphorical) rattling around. Are you going to rip out all the wiring, because every time you flick a switch you benefit from his workmanship? Not unless your reservations have evolved into fully-fledged psychosis.

None of which deals with the discomfort factor of watching an actor credibly suspected of having done something horrible. Perhaps there's a trick to it - some kind of 1984-style double-think. To throw your mind back to when you first watched the film/TV show, ignorant of that actor's off-set behaviour, and enjoy it as you did then. Or to imagine a parallel reality, where the individual was as decent in their private life as you'd hoped. 

I've yet to experiment with The Usual Suspects in this regard, so I can't say for sure. But I'm reminded of a recent comment made by a friend - that she can't imagine never watching American Beauty again. I hope she finds herself able to do so, and to take pleasure in what she loved about the movie first time around, including Kevin Spacey's performance as Lester Burnham. I hope I can do the same for 'Verbal' Kint in The Usual Suspects. May we all somehow keep loving those performances, even if sadly we no longer feel able to love the guy who performed them.