The theory that it’s all right to depict immoral acts if you have the correct intent is bogus

People are terrible at judging the intent of others. We are trapped in our own heads, each behind the distorting irreplicable lens of our own unique experience. Nobody knows why anyone does anything. We don’t even know why we ourselves do things.

Even if we could see with perfect clarity into each other’s minds, intents cannot be judged. Intents don’t exist.

Intents are at best the monkey describing the path of the rampaging tiger it sits backwards atop. Reading the mind of the artist is a child’s fantasy of omniscience. Intents are unknowable.

It’s truthful to say you don’t like a work of art because of the way it made you feel. It is disingenuous to blame the artist for creating this disliked feeling in you. The artist doesn’t know you, your feeling is not the only feeling.

It is both flattering and infuriating as an artist to be told that I tricked a reader into seeing something evil as not evil. Romanticizing such-and-such a crime. If only I had such power. Unfortunately I do not. At most I can illuminate some unexamined corner.

The perennial “Scorsese romanticizes crime” takes are nothing more or less than the stoned guy from the Onion article who thinks everyone on TV is also stoned. You think crime is romantic. YOU think that.