Unfair Forgiveness

[Riley]

Forgiveness is a tricky, controversial subject. We humans either hold it away or give it willingly. And in the entertainment business, it's all about how much the people love you. Take...

Guys like Mel Gibson and Roman Polanski, for example. They had a hand in making some memorable films that many adore. They ALSO did...Not very nice things. Terrible things, in my eyes. Yet you have DOZENS of people willing to forgive them both.

Now, we got to Joel Schumacher. He's honestly done nothing wrong in his life. Yet dozens of Batman fans see him as the Devil. All because he followed the orders of the executives.

 

[Adder1234]

People tend to judge others based on achievements rather than actions.

 

[Mia]

Don't know if it is a question of forgiveness Riley, but perhaps it's more about black and white thinking or the good or the bad. Very few people in the world are thoroughly bad or thoroughly good, there is are miles of gray area in-between.

If a person leads a decent life, and then one day steals something and is caught, does that make them only a thief? Does everything they had done before or since become forgotten, all the good no longer existing because they pilfered something in a moment of weakness? So they are both a thief and a good person. Not just one or the other. In many people's opinion they are just a thief, but one illegal act seems to negate all the good things they have done.

 

[Riley]

I just hate them because people love them better than Joel Schumacher.

 

[WereBear]

Here's an article which explains what is going on:

Ego Defense: Splitting

Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism. It can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes.
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It comes from a lack of maturation. As a baby, we don't distinguish so well between Good Parent (Yummy food! Changed diaper! Cuddles!) and Bad Parent (Hey, I was playing with that electrical socket!)

As we grow, we learn how to merge the two aspects of a person into a recognition that they are the same person. This lets us make value judgements, understand moral gray areas, and react to the world in a nuanced way.

OR, we don't mature, and everything is GOOD or BAD. In extreme cases, this can happen in the same brain in the space of five minutes. We are baffled; we were just the best person in the world! Now, one slip, and we are the worst!

 

[Judge]

None of those concerns seem to really matter when you consider the most common denominator of film-making. -The almighty dollar.

Inevitably all film makers have to compromise in some way for the sake of funding and corporate oversight. It's a business. There is no "fair" any more than there is "forgiveness". There's just the next quarter which is either profitable or not.

How far must society go back in time to an era when art in general was created for art's sake without any kind of "middle-man" controlling their craft? About a hundred and twenty-five years or more.