The asshole license

The asshole license is alive and well.

The asshole license is the justification for people who have talent (or, more often, believe they have talent) to behave any way they wish. Woody Allen has an asshole license. Perhaps about 90% of Americans don't recognize its validity, but for the 10% who do, it is true and good and right to disregard his hypocrisy or misogyny or pedophilia or general creepiness because he's made films, some of which are fairly enjoyable.

The fact that the asshole license is not a tangible item does not make it any less real for those who believe they possess one, or are believed to possess one.

As a living legend, Paul McCartney has an asshole license, but one of the things I admire most about him is that he seems to have taken very little advantage of its privileges, and throughout his life seems to have behaved in a fairly moderate and reasonable way. This fact is rarely appreciated, which gives those who possess asshole licenses even less reason to behave well.

Thanks to the playwright Doug Wright, the Marquis de Sade has been issued a posthumous asshole license. The Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat who took advantage of the power of his class to sexually assault prostitutes and servants.

That de Sade also wrote about his desires to sexually assault apparently caused Wright to feel that de Sade deserved an asshole license, and so he wrote a play, Quills that ignored de Sade's actual crimes and portrayed him as the victim of phillistines and prudes. Since so few people know de Sade's true biography, Wright's view of de Sade is the one that is popularly accepted. The transformation of the Marquis de Sade into a hero of the First Amendment is, in spite of his Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright's most impressive accomplishment.

The asshole who is suing me, demanding that I give him money for producing my own play, Tam Lin, thinks he has a license to be one. He holds his own directing abilities in such high regard that he believes that any work that is touched by him is singed with his mystical brand and altered, profoundly, eternally and irrevocably. Although I directed Tam Lin in 2005 myself, starting from scratch with a completely new set and a revised script, he has the delusion that I used his blocking and "choreography" from the previous year. I will have more to say on this topic once the case has gone through the courts.

The asshole license doesn't really apply so much to women. Women are expected to be nice no matter what they accomplish or how talented they are. Ayn Rand is probably the only female to ever possess a widely-recognized asshole license. But I've known many women who do hope for their own asshole license someday.

I've run a writers group for five years. We mostly do cold readings of new plays. The membership includes beginning writers up to fairly accomplished ones. I've heard thousands of plays in the last five years and have come to recognize a genre of play I think of as an asshole license application. Here are three examples. Some of the biographical aspects of the authors and aspects of the plays have been changed. None of the authors mentioned are part of my group now.

• Example 1: a play written by a woman who originally came from the mid-West. She was usually rather sweet, but I occasionally found the feedback she gave to other writers pushy and overbearing. In her play, a sweet woman from the mid-West with ambitions to be a writer gets a job working at a feminist bookstore in San Francisco. The feminists that work in the bookstore have problems like anybody, and the mid-West woman begins to offer solutions to their problems and then proceeds to meddle in their lives. All through the play the feminists complain bitterly to the woman about her meddlesome ways and tell her to butt out. But then a remarkable thing happens. In spite of their complaints, by the end of the play, every single feminist has been helped by the meddler. She helps the woman who owns the bookstore leave her abusive boyfriend. She prompts the lesbian to find the courage to tell her parents about her sexuality. She teaches the victim of childhood incest how to love again. Then they all admit, begrudgingly, that the mid-West woman was right about everything.
• Example 2: a play written by a flakey and bitter woman. Her play was about a flakey, bitter writer and her love affairs. The writer's primary love interest, a handsome, charming and successful man says: "Dammit Genevieve, why do I keep coming back to you? You give me hope that we might have a future together, then the next minute you won’t even talk to me. But I can’t stop coming back. I’m fascinated." Genevieve replies: "I can’t explain myself, Bob." By the end of the play Bob is asking Genevieve to marry him.
• Example 3: a play written by a bright but immature thirty-something man. The play opens as a lovely, charming and successful lawyer finds her writer husband sulking in a deserted hotel game room, playing Pac Man. He has accompanied her to a legal conference but won’t socialize. She spends the next thirty minutes or so trying to find out why he is sulking. The guy tells his wife that although he loves her and wants her to be a success, he cannot endure all the creepy lawyers who have sold their souls to make big bucks. He tells her he used to spend hours alone playing Pac Man because he did not fit in with the other kids. His wife reassures him that she loves him because it is exactly his child-like integrity that makes him so endearing.

In spite of the obvious clues I did not realize at first that the protagonists of these plays were autobiographical until the mid-West woman told me later that her protagonist was based on herself when she was in her twenties. I asked the other two if their protagonists were autobiographical. They admitted they were. So what do these autobiographical plays have in common? Each one has a main character with serious personality flaws, but who is nevertheless loved and/or appreciated by one or more persons. In fact, strangely enough, the protagonists were not loved IN SPITE of their flaws, they were loved BECAUSE OF their flaws. The mid-Western woman was thanked for meddling and the bitter and flakey woman was loved for her bitter flakiness and the immature man's spouse was devoted to him for his immaturity. In real life the immature author was divorced and had been known to stalk his ex-wife.

At first it struck me as poignant and touching, but then I considered the fact that it's a popular belief that creative geniuses should not be held accountable by the same standards of morality that apply to ordinary mortals. This is best illustrated by William Faulkner’s observation:

If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

Try quoting this to a group of writers. Almost every head in the room will nod in agreement. This is the desire to be granted an asshole license. To be elevated to a creative Olympus where the gods are never punished for their crimes, to be counted among genii who don’t possess personality flaws so much as markers of creative excellence.

I suspect this attitude is part of the modern art movement that took art out of the hands of the working-class artisans trying to make a living and made it a status symbol of the upper classes: artistic success became a matter of who you knew, rather than your ability to create something that pleases people on a visceral level.