I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about how to approach Ender’s Game, Summit Entertainment’s forthcoming adaptation of the beloved science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card about children who are trained to fight off an alien invasion at an elite military academy to which they’re removed early in their childhood. I think I’m not alone in finding Ender’s Game to be a foundational text—Valentine Wiggin, the younger sister of the main character, who becomes a sort of proto-blogger, is one of the reasons I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing. And at the same time, I find the political views that Card holds abhorrent: he’s a member of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, and has publicly committed to fighting back against a government that, to his interpretation, would change the established definition of marriage. As someone who’s volunteered with Freedom to Marry, and who holds marriage equality as one of my political priorities, I have no interest in giving Card any of my money to pursue an agenda I find hateful and dangerous. I’m trying to figure out if Card has points on the back end, and if purchasing a ticket would mean, even in an extremely small way, giving him money above and beyond what he’s already received for the film rights to the novel.

But at the same time, Card’s involvement as the creation of the work that’s the basis for the movie isn’t my only interest in it. As someone who thinks the emergence of Abigail Breslin, who will play Valentine, and Hailee Steinfeld, who will play Petra Arkanian, one of the child soldiers in Battle School, as young action heroines is a significant tool in bending the curve on career trajectories for Hollywood actresses, I feel a strong desire to see Ender’s Game succeed as a way to credential them for an audience of genre movie fans. I’m also curious to see what Gavin Hood, as a politically engaged South African director, will do. Card, to me, is not the only person who matters here.

But he’s also a particularly noxious illustration of a paradox that plagues politically engaged consumers of culture: a terrible person who has made significant art. I’ve never given Roman Polanski any of my money, even though I think he’s unlikely to commit sexual assault again, because I have no interested in financing his ongoing mockery of the American justice system—but I also haven’t felt particularly drawn to any of his recent movies, with the exception of The Ghost Writer. I don’t believe in piracy as a means of consuming art while causing economic harm to someone I find objectionable, if only because it’s a form of subverting the system that isn’t targeted: lots of other people suffer losses when someone who was legitimately potential customer, as opposed to someone who never intended to purchase the product in the first place, pirates a work rather than purchasing it. So what’s a customer who wants to consume ethically to do? All of these suggestions come out of my thinking about Ender’s Game, but they’re equally applicable to almost any situation where a person with deeply harmful views has created something worth consuming on its own merits.
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I suppose it’s nice that Roman Polanski is expressing contrition for raping Samantha Geimer in his new documentary memoir. But I think that declaring her “a double victim: my victim and a victim of the press,” is perhaps not quite as effective as it could have been. The press doesn’t get involved unless Roman Polanski gives a 13-year-old drugs and alcohol and rapes her. In any case, it’s important to recognize that the reason Polanski can’t come back to the United States and has to circumscribe his travel is not solely because something happened between him and his victim: it’s because something happened between Polanski and the state. Our rule of law does not—and shouldn’t—depend on individual offenders and individual victims making peace. It’s good for her to get some matter of personal peace. But it’s not enough for the rest of us.

There are times when I’m profoundly relieved that my personal Roman Polanski boycott means I don’t have to watch something:

I didn’t actually see God of Carnage onstage, where it strikes me that its manneredness might have seemed a bit less cloying — I tend to like dialogue that feels a bit bigger than life, but I think it does work a bit better in a setting that’s foreign, whether like Deadwood because it’s a time that’s lost to us, or Angels in America, because the divine is invading New York. And perhaps I will think differently if and when I have children, but I’m just not sure that the dark heart of humanity truly lies in a well-appointed living room in Brooklyn.

In our discussion about the unattractive behavior of athletes, Dirk Lester asked “How do you think this compares as a dilemma to the deciding whether or not (or how) to consume media created by the likes of Roman Polanski or Charlie Sheen?” It’s a good question, though not one with a simple answer, I think, because of the different power dynamics when an objectionable person is a decision-maker than when they’re a role player. And my calculations here are personal, and not meant to tell anyone else how to watch sports or movies or television.

Charlie Sheen feels to me like a good analogue to how I feel about Albert Haynesworth. Both are objectionable men whose salaries I don’t really want to contribute to. But they also both work with people who don’t have a demonstrable track record of enabling dreadful people. As Saul Tannenbaum wisely pointed out in that same thread, Myra Kraft personally vetoed Christin Peter’s continued membership in the New England Patriots after learning about his extensive and disturbing record of violence against women, and the team released him three days after drafting him. Chuck Lorre has a somewhat difficult reputation, but Sheen aside, he doesn’t seem to have extensively coddled any stars who behaved far outside the bounds of propriety. So I weigh the individuals as exceptions against the overall lived values of the organizations that employ them, and against my affections for the folks who end up having to work with them, who likely don’t get much say in it. It’s not Angus T. Jones’ fault his Two and a Half Men star has a record of violence against women, and it’s not Wes Welker’s fault that Albert Haynesworth once stomped an opponent in the face. In those cases, I can keep watching the Patriots, because I think on balance, the team still shares my values. Fortunately, I don’t care enough about Two and a Half Men to agonize over whether I’m justified in watching it, and most of Sheen’s other work I want to engage with is available through Netflix Instant, where I don’t have to feel like I’m directing additional income in Sheen’s direction.

Polanski feels like a different case to me. I’ve read extensively on the subject, I’m aware of the problems with the trial, but I can’t reconcile myself to the idea that he’s a victim. And I find it fairly distasteful the number of prominent and well-paid actors and actresses who insist on treating him as such, or insist that once you get to know him, he’s really a lovely guy, because it’s a way of convincing themselves that it’s all right to work with him. Roman Polanski may be popular in Hollywood, but I don’t really think politely turning down a chance to work with him is a career-ender. And it’s not like Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, or John C. Reilly, who are starring in his next movie, Carnage, are vulnerable or in need of a career boost such that an opportunity to work with Polanski is critical to their future success. So I’m much less inclined to treat the involvement of untainted people in Polanski’s movies as a reason that I should excuse his past behavior and send money his way. I still haven’t seen The Ghost Writer, though I very much want to, and hope to find an occasion where I can see it for free, or on an airplane, or in some other context where I don’t have to direct any additional money in Polanski’s direction. I suppose if I was invited to a critics’ screening of a Polanski movie I would go.

This is a messy industry, and a lot of my job is assessing content that I don’t think is perfect (much less the stuff that’s downright offensive). I don’t have a blanket rule to extract from either Sheen or Polanski, and as with sports, I take them case by case, though I do keep an eye out for patterns. If the Patriots, as an organization, made the collective decision that a record of repeated violence against women wasn’t disqualifying for team membership and started signing a lot of folks with domestic violence and assault convictions, I’d stop watching. My approach here isn’t perfect, and it hasn’t shamed Polanski into submitting to justice or Sheen into doing redemptive work for domestic violence groups, nor do I expect that it will. Fixing them is not what this is about. Instead, I’m searching for positions that make me comfortable in the long term, with all the compromise and shading that inevitably entails.