This weekend's New York Magazine cover story was such a substantial piece of reportage and witnessing that, of course, the internet immediately conspired to take it down; once the DOS wonks are in play, I think we can consider the verifiability aspects of the conversation finished.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and I have mine, which - like most opinions - isn't terrifically important in the actual perspective of the thing. What those women reported, however, was not opinion. It was storytelling. Moreover, it was reclamation of the narrative, in public, in a way that we've (nearly) never seen before.
Toward the bottom of the NY Mag piece, there is a musing on the lasting legacy of O.J. Simpson, and the way that the river of public association can forever be thwarted by forces such as these. That is what we are witnessing here: 35 women who are reclaiming the narrative of a popular, folksy, flawlessly branded comedian, at the very least to say: those things may remain true, but the story has more parts in it, and those parts belong to him as much as they belong to us.
Do I know him? No. Do I know from my own firsthand observations that the accusations against him are true? No. If those are going to be your arguments, please skip to the end (or go away altogether). This is not about that.
For my part, though, I have made up my mind. I have decided that there is enough common description among the accounts reported this week and previously, to propose with reasonable believability that a standup comedian whose work I absorbed in great quantity when I was much younger has a serial history of raping women.
There is nothing I can do about this, and it does not impact me directly, besides presenting another stanchion of rape culture whose perceived invincibility against the charges against him needs to be torn down.
For myself, though, I want the man out of my head.
This is particular and tricky. If you are like me - a person whose thoughts unfold in words, and chains of words, and cadences of words, and the ways that words can be strung together like music to create rhythms and beats and tensions and jokes and grand, complicated melodies of ideas - you probably have a few people in your head who are like he was in mine.
They're the ones you absorbed at a young age, whose mannerisms, verbal and otherwise, permanently inflected the way your own mind assembles speech; words, and thoughts, and jokes, and ideas. Moreover, being comedians (in this case anyway), the way they thought got into your head too.
Comedians look at the world and recontextualize the narrative, usually to point out its inherent amusements. That's the tricky part for me, because that teaches a way of thinking, just as much as a literature class can teach a way of reading or a media class a way of seeing. Comedians taught me a lot about how I think.
David Letterman was one. Seinfeld, too. Robin Williams, god dammit, and we are almost a year out from that gaping hole in my heart, which I will need to reckon with too, eventually.
But today, this man. This man who was in my home at 8:00 on Thursdays for a lot of my childhood. This man who also produced a sitcom about college life that I am still bloody glad I got to watch when I was young, because it's still ahead of the curve in some of its commentary on how race works in America.
This man whose tapes of comedy shows played in my parents' car, and then in my car, on a loop, for a lot of years. Me and my best friend, rattling off line after line and joke after joke with beseeching, practiced fidelity.
This is the man who, I believe, has sexually assaulted a great number of women. And I don't want him in my head any more.
Digging down into the substructure of the way you speak, the way you think, the way your mind responds to the goalposts in day-to-day situations through which one might toss a joke, is scary business. Truly, until the charges resurfaced last year (and yes, I hold it within my lingering shame that it took a re-surfacing to get my attention on this), I didn't understand how much of my external personality this man had written.
Internal personality too? I don't know. That's a scary thought. What does it mean if some portion of your persona was influenced by a rapist? Does it matter? Should it matter?
I know what rape culture is - but this is something on the far other side of that. This is the internalization of something beyond, seemingly benign, whose beneficence one can never trust again, because of what it layers up to.
So, I started with the easy parts. I threw out the tapes. I got rid of the DVDs. Deleted audio files and video files.
Then I started steeling myself against the rest. I resisted the clickbait, because I didn't want to fuel the Clickbait Industrial Complex that is now making money off this man's crimes. I started making note of unrelated, but marred, content. (Comedian is a wholly different experience when that guy shows up in the final act to preach to Seinfeld on what he might have called the meaning of life.)
The hardest part, though, is the jokes. The fucking jokes! Stupid little jokes, riffs, sounds, noises, things I've been peppering into my speech with regularity since I was twelve or thirteen years old. Stuff I stole, sure. Stuff I came up with because of something else I stole, too. Whole ideas of how comedy works that I internalized, synthesized, and transformed into some of the building blocks of how I interact with other people.
How do you tear that scaffolding down? What do you keep, what do you kill?
This is the terrific, terrifying power of popular culture, in its most humbling form. This is a wake up call to the degree to which we are all inculcated, all the time, by the people who built and reinforce the corrupted system, the pyramid of privilege, on the other side of which there may never be a perfect, just world. Only more people like him.
I don't write any of this as a manifesto. No one else is required to feel the way I do about the bits of that man's soul that I gobbled up before I found out what else his soul was capable of. It's just, I can't have those things inside me anymore. And I'm starting to wonder what else I'll need to cut out.
Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.