Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

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I don’t come to these questions with a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathiser to the accusers. I am the accusers. And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Polanski’s Chinatown or Woody Allen’s Sleeper? This tension – between what I’ve been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and weirdness of great art – this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one. I have not struggled with my love for the art of male monsters, because I wasn’t shaped by their art, not like I was by the art of women. The women are more complicated for me. The antisemitism of Patricia Highsmith and Virginia Woolf has indelibly stained my experience of their work. When I revisit favorite passages, my wonder at their genius is sometimes tinted with disappointment and even disgust. Audre Lorde, by some accounts, could be awful in her intimate relationships. Susan Sontag, too. I still love all these women’s work, read (and in some cases teach) it regularly. The knowledge of Sontag’s bad qualities, if I’m completely honest, adds a slight frisson of further enjoyment to my readings. It is the same frisson of pleasure that almost every queer female artist I know felt watching Cate Blanchett in “Tár.” I have no doubts about the monstrous behavior of Lydia Tár, a female character modelled in the image of a monstrous man, replete with monumental entitlement. I took no pleasure in the depictions of her abuses against other women. I did take pleasure in seeing a queer woman exert so much professional power, enjoying the space to be grandiose and precious about her work. WOODY ALLEN: (As Alvy Singer) A relationship, I think is like a shark. You know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. These are just a few of the questions Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Expanding on her viral 2017 essay for the Paris Review—written a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s predation—Dederer’s latest offering is part-novel, part-memoir, and all provocation. Over the course of what can only be described as a book-length essay, Dederer turns her gaze first toward the artists, and then toward the audience—asking not only what we should do with the work of monstrous men, but also what consuming it does to us.

The impulse to farm out the decision to an external authority sounds hopelessly naive – but then, asks Dederer, isn’t there something equally ridiculous about thinking that whether we choose to enjoy a particular piece of art or not is going to change anything? That we might be able to ameliorate the harm of Polanski’s violation of a schoolgirl or Picasso burning the face of his “muse” Françoise Gilot with a cigarette?Billy Bragg captured something of the despair and rage felt by Morrissey fans when he described the singer as “the Oswald Mosley of Pop”, an artist who has betrayed his fans and empowered “the very people Smiths fans were brought into being to oppose”. What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them? Dederer has seemingly spent years working on Monsters and yet it is so thin, so ill-researched and, frequently, so crude. Part of her problem is that she struggles to convey the beauty and greatness of much of the art she describes, which makes it all the easier for the reader who disapproves of its makers simply to refuse to engage with it. She’s OK on the movies, and her account of Nabokov’s Lolita is fine (though why Nabokov is here at all, I’m not sure: whatever his most infamous narrator does, the writer committed no crimes against children or anyone else). But once she gets to Picasso and Wagner, she’s in trouble. Picasso, she says, sounding like an overgrown teenager, makes her feel (a favourite word, this) “urpy”. He was such “a rat”. What she knows of Wagner, included in the book on the grounds of his strident antisemitism, seems to be based entirely on a documentary about the composer made by Stephen Fry and Simon Callow’s biography. Ahot and urgent monologue structured around a problem without a solution. Dederer says out loud the things that are flitting through her mind as she prowls around her snarling beasts, prodding and poking, inspecting their fangs . . . immersive and doubtlessly important.” — The Times Literary Supplement(UK) After reading about the rape, Dederer began to rewatch Polanski’s œuvre. To her unease, she still found his movies beautiful. She knew that she “wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man” but her love of the films did not grow from any forgiveness of the crime. She loved them because they had shaped her as a critic and a viewer. That love would not be so easily expunged.

Many charged terms start resembling obscenity once they have been batted around long enough by the cacophonous Babel euphemized as the Discourse. Words can be twisted like linguistic taffy, often in the service of didacticism, until clear definitions become an exercise in futility. Then one is left in the exasperated state Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was in 1964 when responding to a request for a definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly? What’s a person to do if you love the art, music, or book but don’t approve of the behavior of the artist, musician, or author? And don’t get me started on asking the same question about politicians, preachers, and theologians. These are questions I’ve pondered myself, so when I came across this book that explores the morality of cancel culture I decided to see what the author had to say. Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen ( Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her publisher, went viral. Six years on, and it has now also been incorporated into Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, where it loiters alongside her thoughts on several other bad (or badly behaved) men who have made good art, among them Picasso, Roman Polanski and Richard Wagner.

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This books provides an insight into the human psyche, the human condition - regardless of gender identity. RASCOE: You got your start as a film critic. And so in a lot of this book, you talk about how you've struggled with some of the directors. A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" — Vanity Fair I found myself wishing Dederer had cast her net wider (Sylvia Plath – again?) and challenged some of her own assumptions more. Surely the lives of say, Toni Morrison or Cate Blanchett – genius-mother-artists – would throw some new light on the dilemmas Dederer poses as endemic and perennial among “writer-mothers” like herself and her friends. With a book to play with, Dederer fleshes out her concerns, but Monsters is not – or not only – an extended version of her viral essay, or a catalogue of the monstrous acts of male artists. Through a blend of memoir, cultural critique and feminist analysis, Dederer offers a hybrid form that is far more ambitious, wide-ranging, slippery and complicated.

Conversational, clear and bold without being strident . . . Dederer showcases her critical acumen . . . In this age of moral policing, Ms. Dederer’s instincts to approach such material with an open mind—and heart—are laudable.” — The Wall Street Journal In a world that wants you to think less—that wants, in fact, to do your thinking for you, Monsters is that rare work, beyond a book, that reminds you of your sentience. It’s wise and bold and full of the kind of gravitas that might even rub off.” Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new.”—Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet More than once, Dederer brings up David Bowie, who in life (and now in death) has largely escaped reputational damage from allegedly having sex with underage girls. She does so out of curiosity not condemnation, and with a sense of her own complicity and investment as a fan. Conversational, clear and bold without being strident... Dederer showcases her critical acumen...In this age of moral policing, Ms. Dederer’s instincts to approach such material with an open mind—and heart—are laudable."

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When she expresses distaste for Allen's Manhattan normalizing a middle-aged man in a relationship with a 17-year-old he tells her to "Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics." Dederer confesses to finding herself put off-balance in that conversation, doubting herself. This book makes the reader question their own ethics and moralities as the writer questions her own responses and behaviours to a delicate subject matter.