Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

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The book is tangled and fascinating, chasing down arguments and questions that can’t always be easily resolved. Dederer’s shrewd, vivid descriptions of movies and books suggest just how much they mean to her and how deeply any sacrifices on the altar of contemporary sexual ethics might cut.” — Slate RASCOE: And so, to me, I do feel like that is just so key because it feels like when people say they are a fan of someone these days, they're not just saying, oh, I like their music, oh, I like their art. They're saying this person is a reflection of me and my values, and if this person is bad, then that means I'm bad, right? Like, is - am I reading that correctly? This book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us here I think. Claire Dederer asks all the right questions and rounds up all the usual suspects, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Hemingway, Picasso, JK Rowling…. Huh? What’s that you say? The author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Incorrect Opinions? Monsters is a lot of things--smart, incisive, insightful, absorbing--but more than anything, it is such an impressively thoughtful book in so many ways.

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, then, is the very, very specific thing that students want to know: can they listen to David Bowie? The question is urgent. They need him. Young people are not dealing with nostalgia. They’re dealing with their own all-too-current feelings. For teenagers, music makes a kind of repository for feelings. So a betrayal by a musician becomes all the more painful – it’s like being betrayed by your own inner self.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. There were times when I wanted a deeper engagement with the content of the works under consideration. There is a passage, for example, where Dederer wishes she could watch the early Polanski classic Knife in the Water without the stain of Polanski’s crime. To separate out Polanski, “predator, rapist” from Polanski, “preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor.” Dederer’s point is that this is not possible. But reading the passage, all I could think was that Knife in the Water is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, a movie of barely contained violence, horror seething beneath the surface of every shot. What could it possibly mean for such a movie to be “unstained”? This is in no way a defence of Polanski, or even a point against Dederer. But there is an absence, here—a set of assumptions around authorship, and what art means and is for, that go unexplored. To be fair, the book isn’t about art—that’s right in the subtitle. The book is about fans, about audiences. RASCOE: You invoke your kids at points in this book, their friends. There is a generational thing to it because it does seem like there is a - been a shift in fandom and in the way we process, you know, fandom and being obsessed with something. You talk about this in the book. I'm going to have you read a little bit of it.

I mean, I was surprised with the Wagner mention that she didn't mention Leni Riefenstahl. Especially when she glossed over the Allen-apologists for how 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 must be looked at for its aesthetics. Riefenstahl was the very queen of aesthetics, a female champion of her time, while also being a nazi.The author uses the memoir format to trace her own experience feeling betrayed by artists. At one time she enjoyed Woody Allen’s movies, but was relieved to learn of a little free library filled with Woody Allen stuff so she had access to research materials for writing this book without needing to pay for them. 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. 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. Listening to this book, mostly the end but also at certain points throughout, was a less uncomfortable version of watching that scene in Tár where Cate Blanchett continuously bullies a non-binary Julliard student of color for deciding to opt out of performing and promoting the music of people who would've had no respect for them as brown person and for their non-patriarchal gender identity. They want their respect for the artist to be met with an artist's respect for their inherent humanity. Tár is threatened by this both because she gained and maintains her power in the industry through her complicity in upholding these oppressive power structures despite her oppression under these same structures and therefore does not meet this requirement and because she has deep emotional "art love" (Dederer's phrase) for these "important" "genius" composers. Like Tár, it does not feel like Dederer is interested in exploring what happens if we decide to open our heart to "art love" for people who are (to our knowledge) not exploiting the power they have been given in society. If we, like the Julliard student, want to opt out of this system how do we find the people to replace the monsters? How do we help them exist in a fundamentally exploitative system? Can funding art and creators through platforms like Patreon disrupt these exploitative systems or does it reproduce them differently? Are so many celebrities monstrous because monstrous people are drawn to power and acclaim or because the system that they are in encourages or even creates monstrous behavior? Dederer might not be interested in these questions but many people are interested in these questions and are evaluating them. This is where the discourse is going, not "is it ok to like David Bowie?" Hemingway I would consider to be one of the the greats of classic literature with his earlier works, not so much the later stuff. But no matter how much you love a piece of their work, of course it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. A lot to be discussed here. There are two names I could bring up right now who work in television currently where it’s an open secret amongst the public what they have done, with concrete proof by victims, and yet they have kept their careers firmly afloat. As I finish this book and review - the net is slowly closing in on one of them actually. Weirdly enough, he just lost his main job as of 20/05/2023! So hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Time’s up. Your actions have consequences, especially if it ruins people’s lives.

RASCOE: And the way that you talked about it - and I think that this is kind of an apt metaphor - is that you kind of said it's like a stain. The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That's why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make. 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. This is where the sense of cynicism comes from. The system is corrupt and this thing that we think can do something actually won't do anything and instead of spending time evaluating alternative systems or looking at work people are doing to dismantle it or listening to the people who are actively being harmed, she says we should just stop worrying about it and just watch/read/listen to the things by bad people. Which makes sense if you think, like she states, that people are fundamentally interested in this for some sort of virtue signaling. What she fundamentally fails to grasp is that these strategies and conflicts exist because people want to do better, people want to fix injustice. It's not just about convincing yourself and others that you are not a monster but understanding the practical effects of what is happening to people and trying to create a better world. "Voting with your dollar" is the only avenue that some people have been exposed to to make a difference and if you truly feel like we should throw that strategy in the trash, the most practical thing you can do is expose readers to things they can do instead.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. However, as mentioned above, Claire Dederer seems ultimately disinterred in actually evaluating a lot of the deeper questions around these phenomena and I think this is for two reasons. Part of this is her personal desire to humanize the category that she identifies with - monster - and the other is because she seems to believe that people are fundamentally interested in this question for some sort of desire to be "good" and promote their morality and separate themselves from those they call monsters. Dederer seems to be interested in evaluating this as a philosophical question and therefore her answer is a philosophical answer about theory and ideas. But real people were and are being hurt by these people. She quotes a woman who experienced sexual abuse's changing relationship with Miles Davis, but not those who experienced sexual abuse by prominent artists. Everything is one level removed. Were none of Danny Masterson's victim's available for comment? Could you not find anyone actually working on enacting alternate means of justice willing to be interviewed? Raymond Carver is one of your “beloveds” — an artist whose work has made a big impression on you, in that he was a “monster” who recovered (from alcoholism). Can you say more about the artist who “recovers”? Monsters is an incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time. It’s thrillingly sharp, appropriately doubtful, and more fun than you would believe, given the pressing seriousness of the subject matter. Claire Dederer’s mind is a wonder, her erudition too; I now want her to apply them to everything I’m interested in.” This is what I tell the students: consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the consuming of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. Your biography, your feelings are important. Not just your feelings of abhorrence for the deed, but your love for the work. The sense of beauty it brings into your life. Beauty is a fragile principle. It looks silly when it’s brought up against utility – or morality. When we mull over what to do about the art of monstrous men, beauty seems like a dandelion puff – the merest nothing – next to the loud j’ accuse of saying how awful these men were in their personal lives. And yet. Beauty matters too. We don’t make decisions about beauty. Like the stain, beauty happens to us.