Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

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All of this is to say: when I come to this question – the question of what to do with the art of monstrous men – I don’t come as an impartial observer. I’m not someone who is absent a history. I have been a teenager predated by older men; I have been molested; I’ve been assaulted on the street; I’ve been grabbed and I’ve been coerced and I’ve escaped from attempted rape. I don’t say this because it makes me special. I say it because it makes me non-special. And so, like many or most women, I have a dog in this particular race. When Bowie died, an interview with the groupie Lori Mattix resurfaced, telling how she lost her virginity to him at 15 The degree to which this is awful is also hilarious. There’s a whole chapter on Nabakov that suggests the author was a closet pedophile because of Lolita, goes through a lot of information that determines if he was then he hid it entirely, and ends by saying, well maybe not, but also maybe! Of course, this also tacitly argues that writers can’t possibly write about anything not directly reflective of them, which is of course insane, but given the astounding level of narcissism on display here, it’s clear that Dederer certainly can’t. Another chapter starts out discussing alcohol abuse in certain writers, and then turns into Dederer talking about her sobriety at length. Because nothing pertains to the art of monstrous men more than her affinity for wine. Dederer also waxes ad nauseam about the importance of subjectivity when it comes to responses and interpretations of art so that she has a built-in defense against any and all criticism. Smart, funny, and surprisingly forgiving . . . You can’t read it without thinking of your own literary loves and hates—and wondering how to know the difference.” — 4Columns Bowie was important to me in the same way when I was a weird kid. David Bowie was, in fact, the patron saint of weird kids. I played Bowie’s fourth album, Hunky Dory, every day in 10th grade – it seemed to stave off the inexplicable howling aloneness – and then my daughter did the same. For kids like me, there was a sense of ownership; Bowie was ours. His very existence was an assertion that aliens walked among us, so that when we ourselves felt alien, we might take comfort in the idea that we lived among a secret race, our true family. I brought all that to my listening to Bowie; I brought it as well to my digestion of the news of his stain. Monsters is] profoundly cathartic. The book feels simultaneously like having the deepest, artiest conversation with the smartest people you know and like having an intense shit-talking session with your closest friends.” — Alta

My own feelings were murkier, and it was convenient that the quality of his movies started to descend with his reputation. By the time his daughter Dylan Farrow’s account of his alleged sexual abuse of her started to be widely publicised, I was no longer a fan. (Allen has long denied these allegations). 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. 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? At the same time: “The stain—spreading, creeping, wine-dark, inevitable—is biography’s aftermath. The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained” (50). “When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work. We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet” (45). Dederer’s approach radiates humanity—or, in other words, subjectivity . . . Throughout the book, Dederer mines the tension between how she thinks she should feel as a feminist, and how she actually feels as an artist; how she wants to feel as a mother, and how she truly experiences motherhood. She isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, approaching these issues with rigorous curiosity instead of intellectual authority—and this willingness to challenge her own contradictory thought process is a welcome antidote to the dominant discourse surrounding the work of problematic figures, the societal mandates around which vacillate with the politics of the time.” — Document Journal

‘Maybe I’m not monstrous enough’

Strange idiosyncratic personal rules arise from such knowledge – I have a much easier time watching films that Polanski made before he raped Samantha Gailey. And yet at the same time, Polanski – predator, statutory rapist – collapses into Polanski the preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor. When we stream his 1962 psychological thriller, Knife in the Water, we wish we could give our few dollars to that blameless young Polanski. We wonder: how can we bypass this terrible old criminal? We can’t. We can’t even bypass our knowledge of what he’s done. We can’t bypass the stain. It colours the life and the work. 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.

Her act of making herself both judge and victim of these men’s wrongdoings twists the whole endeavour out of shape. She, and the other women she mentions in anecdotes, blithely overwrite the opinions and attitudes of the actual victims. The 13-year-old girl raped by Polanski is now an adult woman, who has requested that people stop using what happened to her to keep punishing her rapist; the now-woman who had sex with David Bowie when she was 15 has said she doesn’t consider it to be a violation; the estate of Ana Mendieta has requested that people stop talking about her solely as a murder victim and talk of her as a major artist. All of this is ignored, because Dederer is responding “as a fan”: “My response wasn’t logical. It was emotional.” Logic, she insists, is how we ended up with institutions and audiences deciding that good art made it worthwhile to enable artists to do bad things. 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. David Bowie has largely escaped reputational damage from allegedly having sex with numerous underage girls. Andy Rain/EPAA lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" — Vanity Fair Somewhere in the middle of the book, Dederer goes on to target monstrous women, shaming those that abandon their children. This comes off as round-about and personal as we finally understand why Dederer took this path. Integral to this argument is the smug assumption that we live in a more enlightened present. Dederer encourages readers to ponder their own participation in such a liberal fantasy. She asks important questions . . . [and] skirts categorical answers. Subtle and adroit.” — The Atlantic 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."

From the outset, the question of “do we separate the art from the artist?” opens up other, more interesting questions – like, who is this “we” that proposes such a separation is possible, or desirable? 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. 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 Bringing erudition, emotion, and a down-to-earth style to this pressing problem, Dederer presents her finest work to date.”

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 rare polemic that’s full of greedy love for the good stuff in this world, Monsters is an expansion of Dederer’s instant classic Paris Review essay from 2017, ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men.’ With a larger canvas, she lets both her cast of monsters and our culpability grow, and manages to one-up herself over and over again. Cooly pensive on an overheated subject, Dederer writes powerfully about art’s ability to move us, teach us, and entrap us.” — Bustle 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.” The book explores the suggestion that being a monster is part of being a creative genius. In other words, if they were forced to behave properly they would no longer be creative. Pablo Picasso is discussed as a supposed example of such an artist. The author sarcastically notes (spoiler alert) this type of genius does not include women per prevailing social standards. Where is the line here when excluding pieces of art/media/work for people? That’s up to the individual to decide if they can separate it mentally from the creator’s views or actions. The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worryI too had once felt like Woody Allen – I was a teenage girl living in Sydney’s western suburbs, and he was a then-middle-aged Jewish New Yorker who played clarinet in a jazz club every Monday night. But somehow, like Dederer, I identified with him. I also aspired to one day live in Manhattan in a book-lined apartment in the vicinity of Central Park. My future life would be filled with dinner parties, love affairs, shrink sessions and one-liners.