As debate over the lawsuit against Paramount Pictures by Romeo and Juliet film actors Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey continues, Felix James Miller is perturbed that many commentators— myself included—have criticized the suit’s motivations and called into question its extremely high damage claims, which reach a staggering $500 million. Mr. Miller characterizes near-unanimous conservative objections to this extreme legal action as “poor moral judgment” and a failure to recognize what he believes to be “objective wrongdoing.” At worst, he fears that such objections are “representative of the moral degradation of the contemporary Right.”
In particular, Miller singles out an opinion piece I recently wrote for this publication, “Shakespearean Shakedown,” for raising his “ire” with what he describes as my “short-sightedness.” He concludes by arguing that “pornography,” a term he does not define, “in all forms should be illegal” and implies that those who disagree with his position do not qualify as “real” conservatives.
Miller’s critique of my essay probes many questions around the issue of what it is to be conservative, both historically and in today’s society. He appears, however, to rely upon a definition all his own, supported by subjective assertions and conclusory speculation about both the facts of the lawsuit as we know them and how they should be adjudicated in the American system of civil justice, glossed with a patina of moral outrage. In this, his article curiously mirrors much current thought on the progressive Left, which also appeals to subjectivity, feeling, perception, and assertions of moral correctness to impose viewpoints that only a minority of people share and that little or no empirical evidence supports. Strikingly, Miller’s apparent concerns about displays of the human form further concord with radical leftist gender ideology, which is also highly censorious of human expression and behavior regardless of inspiration, context, or aesthetics, and is elaborated in the supposed service of a larger ‘truth’ that its partisans believe they are uniquely qualified to determine, and with which they insist there can be no honest disagreement.
To begin with the largest issue in this debate, Miller appears to advance the view that all forms of nudity fall within the definition of pornography. Conservative thought has consistently rejected this viewpoint for as long as there have been conservatives, back to and including Old Regime societies ruled by absolute monarchs and, if one wills, antiquity. Disagreement with Miller’s viewpoint now is no sign of degradation, moral or otherwise, for the simple reason that the past offers no enduring polity or socio-political order from which this particular standard could have degraded. Regimes that aspired to such a standard—like Savonarola’s Florentine theocracy or England’s Puritan Commonwealth—were few and far between, failed in short order, and were then widely castigated as fundamentally anti-conservative projects because they broke sharply from well established traditions and were based on abstractions of political thought rather than the accumulated wisdom of experience that lies at the heart of conservative politics.
Even if that were not the case, nudity is an inherent and unavoidable feature of the classical Western tradition of art and expression—including those directly commissioned by kings and popes, feudal lords, and conservative republics (including America’s), which conservatives steadfastly defend—usually against leftists who advocate its destruction or abandonment for transgressing ‘woke’ norms rather than against each other in a contest for ideology purity.
In an American context, certainly the most important definition of pornography—and then only in its “hardcore” variant—was elaborated by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, a Dwight D. Eisenhower appointee, who in a famous majority ruling captured the vagueness of defining it by writing “I know it when I see it.” That ruling, a landmark free-speech case, came in 1964, years before the upheavals of the later 1960s and at the apogee of the post-World War II conservative society that Miller valorizes. As Justice Stewart recognized, since time immemorial the nude human form has been regarded by conservatives as a manifestation of beauty, innocence, and our divine origins as fashioned in the corporeal image of God. This includes the love of Romeo and Juliet, a pure and innocent love crushed by the wicked vanities of a brutal and corrupt society. While conservatives remember and teach that lesson with ever more desperate zeal, it is the Left that has degenerated into arguing that we should problematize Titian, cancel Gauguin, and, indeed, allow English majors to graduate from major universities without studying Shakespeare—all out of a sense of opposition to the traditional cultural forms conservatives value, including those of sexuality and the body.
In the specific case of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, the brief nude scene, which for a few seconds reveals Whiting’s buttocks and Hussey’s breasts, contains no sex act or anything that suggests the “fornication, adultery, pornography, masturbation, divorce, and venereal disease” Miller identifies with the year 1968, the year in which the film was released but not filmed. Further, if he recalls the film and Shakespeare’s play, the scene occurs the morning after Romeo’s and Juliet’s marriage. Both the nudity and the undisplayed and unsimulated sex act to which it alludes are thus well within the sacrament of holy matrimony as defined by the Roman Catholic culture in which the star-crossed lovers were united. Their ultimate fate is tragic, but neither the consummation of their marital union nor Zeffirelli’s depiction of it rises to any definition of pornography, unless one considers marriage itself to be pornographic.
Instructively, the only time either actor referred to the scene as pornographic came in a massive lawsuit seeking half a billion dollars in damages that was filed 55 years after the film was made and one day before the expiration of a temporary window raising the State of California’s statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims—a measure adopted by that state’s Left-controlled legislature and signed into law by its radical leftist governor. Miller concedes that this might contain a degree of opportunism, writing that the enormous sum and the vast lapse of time “understandably” has “raised eyebrows.”
Miller confesses that he is “of course, incapable of knowing the true mental and emotional states of these two actors.” No one can be capable of that, and that is precisely the problem: who would wish to be judged,or to judge others, based on an unknown state of mind? Nevertheless, Miller posits that
it is entirely possible that these nude scenes have negatively impacted them, particularly Hussey, the actress who played Juliet … This means, if I may speak frankly, that millions upon millions of men of all ages have ogled her 16-year-old bare breasts. To speak even more frankly, this means that Olivia Hussey wakes up every morning knowing that, quite possibly, tens of thousands of men have masturbated to images of her nude torso. This is enough to make any woman of any age distraught.
Miller is entitled to speculate, but it does not make him right or validate the lawsuit’s claims. Hussey’s frequent discussion of the scene over a period of decades—in film screening talks, media interviews, and her memoirs, among other occasions—all referred to it as tasteful and non-transgressive. Not even her court complaint—a partisan document seeking maximum advantage to gain vast sums from a corporate defendant—advances the scenario that Miller posits, in which perhaps a one-second frame of her breasts resulted in a mass phenomenon of strangers “ogling” and “masturbating” to her. And even if she did make such a claim, how would she then prove it in a way that would justify a high-value judgment?
Citing one tragic case of which he claims second-hand knowledge, Miller further posits that the actors may have waited more than half a century to file their lawsuit and enormous damage claims because they repressed the memories of the filming. The “repressed memory” line of thought, however, was debunked as junk science more than thirty years ago after it was proved to be methodologically flawed and destroyed a significant number of men’s lives without foundation. Even if it had credibility, however, both actors have made no such claim in their filing, likely because they have discussed the film and the scene at length and in public for decades and can easily be shown to have direct memories of it corroborated by other accounts. Again, Miller’s speculation is no substitute for evidence.
Miller asserts that my article “exonerates the studio and director of all wrongdoing.” It does no such thing. It merely points out that the available evidence does not appear to prove their culpability according to any applicable legal standard then or now, that the scene attracted no known legal or moral objections from the parties at any time between its filming in 1967 and the expiration of a highly advantageous legal loophole in 2022, that a significant body of evidence refutes the plaintiffs’ claims—including much evidence created by the plaintiffs themselves—and that one of their own lawyers stated to the New York Times that these factors will make their case difficult to win. For anyone interested in justice or common sense, these facts should speak for themselves.
Finally, Miller appears to reject a bedrock principle of American conservatism: tort reform. This specific tenet of the movement calls for limits on monetary damages that can be awarded in civil proceedings, both in absolute terms and in proportionality to a proved transgression. The reasoning for this is rooted in opposition to ‘activist’ courts, which can and have used civil judgments not merely to compensate for proved damages but to destroy the lives, livelihoods, and future viability of socially and politically disfavored defendants by imposing wildly disproportionate penalties. When Miller opines that “conservatives should stand up and support anything that goes against the hegemonic perversion of our media,” he appears to include subverting the fairest legal system in human history and discarding theories of limited government that have produced the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity humans have ever known. That is not conservatism.
Conservatives Should Not Support the Romeo and Juliet Lawsuit
“The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the Dead Bodies of Romeo and Juliet” (1855), a 177.8 x 231.1 cm oil on canvas by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896).
As debate over the lawsuit against Paramount Pictures by Romeo and Juliet film actors Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey continues, Felix James Miller is perturbed that many commentators— myself included—have criticized the suit’s motivations and called into question its extremely high damage claims, which reach a staggering $500 million. Mr. Miller characterizes near-unanimous conservative objections to this extreme legal action as “poor moral judgment” and a failure to recognize what he believes to be “objective wrongdoing.” At worst, he fears that such objections are “representative of the moral degradation of the contemporary Right.”
In particular, Miller singles out an opinion piece I recently wrote for this publication, “Shakespearean Shakedown,” for raising his “ire” with what he describes as my “short-sightedness.” He concludes by arguing that “pornography,” a term he does not define, “in all forms should be illegal” and implies that those who disagree with his position do not qualify as “real” conservatives.
Miller’s critique of my essay probes many questions around the issue of what it is to be conservative, both historically and in today’s society. He appears, however, to rely upon a definition all his own, supported by subjective assertions and conclusory speculation about both the facts of the lawsuit as we know them and how they should be adjudicated in the American system of civil justice, glossed with a patina of moral outrage. In this, his article curiously mirrors much current thought on the progressive Left, which also appeals to subjectivity, feeling, perception, and assertions of moral correctness to impose viewpoints that only a minority of people share and that little or no empirical evidence supports. Strikingly, Miller’s apparent concerns about displays of the human form further concord with radical leftist gender ideology, which is also highly censorious of human expression and behavior regardless of inspiration, context, or aesthetics, and is elaborated in the supposed service of a larger ‘truth’ that its partisans believe they are uniquely qualified to determine, and with which they insist there can be no honest disagreement.
To begin with the largest issue in this debate, Miller appears to advance the view that all forms of nudity fall within the definition of pornography. Conservative thought has consistently rejected this viewpoint for as long as there have been conservatives, back to and including Old Regime societies ruled by absolute monarchs and, if one wills, antiquity. Disagreement with Miller’s viewpoint now is no sign of degradation, moral or otherwise, for the simple reason that the past offers no enduring polity or socio-political order from which this particular standard could have degraded. Regimes that aspired to such a standard—like Savonarola’s Florentine theocracy or England’s Puritan Commonwealth—were few and far between, failed in short order, and were then widely castigated as fundamentally anti-conservative projects because they broke sharply from well established traditions and were based on abstractions of political thought rather than the accumulated wisdom of experience that lies at the heart of conservative politics.
Even if that were not the case, nudity is an inherent and unavoidable feature of the classical Western tradition of art and expression—including those directly commissioned by kings and popes, feudal lords, and conservative republics (including America’s), which conservatives steadfastly defend—usually against leftists who advocate its destruction or abandonment for transgressing ‘woke’ norms rather than against each other in a contest for ideology purity.
In an American context, certainly the most important definition of pornography—and then only in its “hardcore” variant—was elaborated by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, a Dwight D. Eisenhower appointee, who in a famous majority ruling captured the vagueness of defining it by writing “I know it when I see it.” That ruling, a landmark free-speech case, came in 1964, years before the upheavals of the later 1960s and at the apogee of the post-World War II conservative society that Miller valorizes. As Justice Stewart recognized, since time immemorial the nude human form has been regarded by conservatives as a manifestation of beauty, innocence, and our divine origins as fashioned in the corporeal image of God. This includes the love of Romeo and Juliet, a pure and innocent love crushed by the wicked vanities of a brutal and corrupt society. While conservatives remember and teach that lesson with ever more desperate zeal, it is the Left that has degenerated into arguing that we should problematize Titian, cancel Gauguin, and, indeed, allow English majors to graduate from major universities without studying Shakespeare—all out of a sense of opposition to the traditional cultural forms conservatives value, including those of sexuality and the body.
In the specific case of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, the brief nude scene, which for a few seconds reveals Whiting’s buttocks and Hussey’s breasts, contains no sex act or anything that suggests the “fornication, adultery, pornography, masturbation, divorce, and venereal disease” Miller identifies with the year 1968, the year in which the film was released but not filmed. Further, if he recalls the film and Shakespeare’s play, the scene occurs the morning after Romeo’s and Juliet’s marriage. Both the nudity and the undisplayed and unsimulated sex act to which it alludes are thus well within the sacrament of holy matrimony as defined by the Roman Catholic culture in which the star-crossed lovers were united. Their ultimate fate is tragic, but neither the consummation of their marital union nor Zeffirelli’s depiction of it rises to any definition of pornography, unless one considers marriage itself to be pornographic.
Instructively, the only time either actor referred to the scene as pornographic came in a massive lawsuit seeking half a billion dollars in damages that was filed 55 years after the film was made and one day before the expiration of a temporary window raising the State of California’s statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims—a measure adopted by that state’s Left-controlled legislature and signed into law by its radical leftist governor. Miller concedes that this might contain a degree of opportunism, writing that the enormous sum and the vast lapse of time “understandably” has “raised eyebrows.”
Miller confesses that he is “of course, incapable of knowing the true mental and emotional states of these two actors.” No one can be capable of that, and that is precisely the problem: who would wish to be judged,or to judge others, based on an unknown state of mind? Nevertheless, Miller posits that
Miller is entitled to speculate, but it does not make him right or validate the lawsuit’s claims. Hussey’s frequent discussion of the scene over a period of decades—in film screening talks, media interviews, and her memoirs, among other occasions—all referred to it as tasteful and non-transgressive. Not even her court complaint—a partisan document seeking maximum advantage to gain vast sums from a corporate defendant—advances the scenario that Miller posits, in which perhaps a one-second frame of her breasts resulted in a mass phenomenon of strangers “ogling” and “masturbating” to her. And even if she did make such a claim, how would she then prove it in a way that would justify a high-value judgment?
Citing one tragic case of which he claims second-hand knowledge, Miller further posits that the actors may have waited more than half a century to file their lawsuit and enormous damage claims because they repressed the memories of the filming. The “repressed memory” line of thought, however, was debunked as junk science more than thirty years ago after it was proved to be methodologically flawed and destroyed a significant number of men’s lives without foundation. Even if it had credibility, however, both actors have made no such claim in their filing, likely because they have discussed the film and the scene at length and in public for decades and can easily be shown to have direct memories of it corroborated by other accounts. Again, Miller’s speculation is no substitute for evidence.
Miller asserts that my article “exonerates the studio and director of all wrongdoing.” It does no such thing. It merely points out that the available evidence does not appear to prove their culpability according to any applicable legal standard then or now, that the scene attracted no known legal or moral objections from the parties at any time between its filming in 1967 and the expiration of a highly advantageous legal loophole in 2022, that a significant body of evidence refutes the plaintiffs’ claims—including much evidence created by the plaintiffs themselves—and that one of their own lawyers stated to the New York Times that these factors will make their case difficult to win. For anyone interested in justice or common sense, these facts should speak for themselves.
Finally, Miller appears to reject a bedrock principle of American conservatism: tort reform. This specific tenet of the movement calls for limits on monetary damages that can be awarded in civil proceedings, both in absolute terms and in proportionality to a proved transgression. The reasoning for this is rooted in opposition to ‘activist’ courts, which can and have used civil judgments not merely to compensate for proved damages but to destroy the lives, livelihoods, and future viability of socially and politically disfavored defendants by imposing wildly disproportionate penalties. When Miller opines that “conservatives should stand up and support anything that goes against the hegemonic perversion of our media,” he appears to include subverting the fairest legal system in human history and discarding theories of limited government that have produced the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity humans have ever known. That is not conservatism.
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