Politics & Power Quote by Isabella Rossellini

Rossellini is pricking a very American balloon: the belief that the dead deserve a kind of legal defense, even when their lives shaped the living. Her wording flips the usual moral script. We tend to call posthumous criticism "disrespect"; she calls the protective impulse "cruel and morbid". Cruel, because the real victims of powerful people are often alive, still paying the bill, while the deceased gets an honor guard of euphemisms. Morbid, because the culture’s fascination isn’t really about truth-telling or justice; it’s about the thrill of transgression wrapped in faux decency, the guilty pleasure of whispering what we "shouldn’t."

The line "once they are dead and cannot answer back" is doing double duty. On paper, it’s the standard argument for restraint. Rossellini uses it as an indictment: Americans act as if the inability to respond creates innocence rather than simply removing accountability. The subtext is that reputation has become a form of property, guarded by estates, PR teams, and fan bases long after the person is gone. In that system, biography turns into brand management.

Context matters: Rossellini comes from a European cinematic lineage where art, autobiography, and scandal have always mingled more openly, and where the myth of the auteur (or star) is less protected by puritanical optics. Her refusal - "I do not want any part of it" - isn’t just personal boundary-setting. It’s a rejection of an American ritual: sanctify the dead, then consume them anyway, safely packaged as controversy.