We Do Not Know Our Celebrities, At All

We’ll never stop pretending we do, though.

This week, a massive feature on disgraced television showrunner (and blockbuster auteur) Joss Whedon dropped in New York magazine (where, full disclosure, I am a contributing editor). The piece, written and reported in fantastic, thorough, utterly fair fashion by Lila Shapiro, is more complex and nuanced than I think it has been discussed as being by social media. Shapiro’s ultimate point doesn’t seem to be that Whedon is an asshole (though he may or may not be) or that he should be driven out of the business (though he may or may not be). Shapiro’s feature is too smart for that. The piece seems much more about fan culture than the specific’s of Whedon. What the piece says, quietly, subtly, is that we should be careful, always, both in deifying our artistic heroes and also in disconnecting and disavowing them when they disappoint us. Once the creator makes the art, it doesn’t belong to them anymore: It belongs to us. This puts the responsibility on us to reckon with what that art meant to us, whether it was real, whether the effect it had on us feels less legitimate once that we know its creator was not the hero we had told ourselves they were. Why must we venerate the creators of the art we love? Why can’t the work stand for itself? Or can it? On the whole, Shapiro’s piece argues, convincingly, that we…