a beautiful movie. After viewing it I went directly to Wikipedia. I was confirmed; the American critics hated it — the film resembles none of the Hollywood slop that was being dished up in 1958. Everyone associated with the film must have felt privileged to work on it, because it’s about something important. It deals with human evil in a matter of fact way; Jean Seberg and David Niven drive Deborah Kerr to suicide — both Seberg and Niven are charming, beautiful and simultaneously odious people — and they get away with it. The only American film comparable to this is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours, in which the anti-hero gets off scott free after committing murder. Jean Seberg’s character and Martin Landau’s character (in Allen’s film), both experience remorse, but also relief that they can never be implicated. This is in contrast to the scores of Hollywood films in which good is rewarded and evil punished. That is the way Oscar Wilde defined fiction. It is something that hardly ever happens in real life — i.e. truly evil people like Donald Trump more often end up being worshiped like Gods. Stanley Kauffman (an idiotic American critic famous for an article in which he castigated Williams, Albee, and Inge for undermining American culture with their ‘homosexual influence’) found Bonjour Tristesse ‘tedious.’ Seberg was also ripped to shreds by critics, the British Film Institute accused her of merely 'speaking' her lines rather than acting them (it's called naturalism). There nothing to justify the general hatred of Jean Seberg, or her harassment by the FBI (they may ultimately have been responsible for her death). The FBI harassed her because she supported civil rights and and made contributions to the Black Panthers. The FBI's method of destroying Seberg’s life is worth noting; they spread rumours that her child (fathered by her husband Romain Gary) was actually her child by a member of the Black Panthers. She was characterised as not only a lefty but a whore; a double-misogynist whammy. The child in question subsequently died, and Seberg insisted on an open coffin so that the press could see that her child was not black. All this foreshadows social media; we destroy people today the way Vladmir Putin and J. Edgar Hoover did&do, that is -- not by shooting them with guns -- but by spreading lies about them on social media. Which brings us back to evil. I will make the argument here that all great artists are bad people — or at least deeply flawed. It is necessary for artists to know evil intimately in some way. This runs counter to the latest trend — that artists must be nice, good, moral people — i.e. not Woody Allen or Roman Polanski. Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger (he directed Bonjour Tristesse) were also infamous — not for molesting children — but abusing actors; Hitchcock tortured Tippi Hedren by demanding she be locked in a room with live birds (for The Birds) and Preminger fired Tom Tryon on the set of The Cardinal -- in front of the whole cast -- and later on told him denied it ('Didn't you know I was just joking?’) I have said before that I think we must not see the evil artists do in their lives as a reflection on their work as -- if we did -- there would be no art anymore. But I am going a step further by stating that a familiarity with evil is necessary for any great artist. Yes, that means artists are necessarily evil. I don't know if artists have to be 'evil incarnate,' but they have to have done bad things, and what is particularly important is that they must at the very least be fully conscious of — or at best plagued by guilt over -- their misdeeds. The does not necessarily redeem them as human beings. If you do something awful it only matters in a court of law if you are sorry, in real life one might find your apology irritating, frustrating or even a nightmare to listen to. I'll use myself as an example. I’m very ashamed of being a homosexual. That’s why I go on and on about how wonderful homosexuality is; it’s why the Black Panthers said that black people were better than white people, it’s why Lytton Strachey went on about ‘higher sodomy’ (he preached that homosexuality was superior to heterosexuality). I will always think it’s wrong to love a man, or to suck his you-know-what. I was born in 1952, for Chrissakes. Yes I go on and on about gay liberation and how wonderful gay sex is, but that is just overcompensation for my self-hatred. I have not done too many bad things (at least as far as I know), but what I have is a heightened sense of guilt, so that I am constantly accusing myself of wrongdoing, and I feel bad about everything in kind of a Lutheran manner (Lutheranism is the most poisonous religion of all -- original sin that can never be wiped away.) The reason a familiarity with evil is important for artists is that evil is the only thing that it’s important to write about — but the only reason an artist will write about it, is if he or she is appalled by their own evil deeds, which leads them to detest all human hypocrisy, and ergo, the artist tries to destroy hypocrisy by exposing it. (Hypocrisy is rampant nowadays; everyone thinks they are a good person, it’s what’s destroying the world.) Jean Seberg is a pretty cheery young French girl — but she ain’t no Gidget — she is perfectly willing to destroy someone’s life if she can’t get what she wants. This means she must welcome sadness into her life (i.e. 'bonjour tristesse!'). Perhaps what Francoise Sagan is saying in her novel — and Preminger in this film — is that being an adult means welcoming the sadness which comes with the loss of innocence. I still like to imagine though, that I am innocent, when I get naked with another man -- or kiss him -- but usually I am drunk -- so all is soon forgetten. Sad perhaps, that this is far too true for so many gay men; we are enslaved by our addiction to forgetting.
