Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

Product Information

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. Geimer has forgiven Polanski. And just last month, in an interview with the director’s wife Emmanuel Seigner, she reiterated that “what happened with Polanski was never a big problem for me”. What weighs heavily on her is having to repeat that, over and again. RASCOE: But is this a solvable dilemma? Because when you talk about how deep that identification can be, you know, people may no longer listen to R. Kelly music. And then do you watch a Harvey Weinstein movie? Like, where are the lines? 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 worry

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. She also takes seriously the fandom of children who grew up obsessed with Harry Potter and the observations of her children and their friends. Her kids, she notices, are not tortured about Picasso the same way she is, or at all. At an exhibition of his work, curated to tell the story of “Picasso-as-asshole”, they ask to leave. 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.” That’s how the stain works. The biography colours the song, which colours the sunny moment of the diner. 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. I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times.Lolita: why this 'vivid, illicit' portrait of a pervert matters at a time of endless commodification of young girls After discussing numerous monstrous examples this book comes to a chapter titled "Am I a Monster?" in which the author admits that her writing career on cer BILL COSBY: And I looked, and there was chocolate cake. The child wanted chocolate cake for breakfast. Then friends and contemporaries of Humphries paid tribute. Film director Bruce Beresford described the Comedy Festival’s decision as a “disgrace” and Humphries as “one of the great comic geniuses”. 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.

Witty and insightful yet blunt when the moment calls for it, Dederer writes with transparent candor about her relationship with these artists. She starts with Roman Polanski, describing trying to research a book on the director but being unable to get past his admitted guilt of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Starting with the crime, Dederer works through Polanski’s films, unable to pretend they do not thrill her in the way of all great cinema. This proves a schizophrenic experience, marooning her between wanting to be a “virtuous consumer” who does not support criminals while remaining “a citizen of the world of art”. She tongue-in-cheek asks whether it would be permissible to watch a Polanski film as long as she wasn’t paying for it. Sensing in the “psychic theatre of public condemnation” against disgraced celebrities a “kind of elaborate misdirection” or deflection, Dederer turns her gaze to the audience, including herself. 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.Given the wandering routes she takes to her point, critic and author Dederer ( Love and Trouble) reads as more culture obsessive than a warrior. This is a good thing. Unlike those more dedicated to the hot take, she brings a starry-eyed belief and interest in art and the effects it has on people. When talking about the audience, she generally means herself, pointedly using the “I” and centering her subjectivity rather than using the vaguer authorial persona, which she skewers as being used by many male critics as a pretense to an authoritative “universal, default point of view”. The “fan” having the dilemma in the book’s subtitle is Dederer, who is comfortable putting aside her cool critical composure to engage with the hot brew of the post-#MeToo Discourse about artists termed “problematic” and admitting that, in the end, it’s complicated.

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. “The sense of trust between the consumer of art and the artist is in a state of flux right now; we’re living through this time where biography is inescapable, and humans are flawed and complex,” Dederer reflects, referencing a passage of the book in which she describes the internet as an operation, made up of disclosures about oneself and others—humming along, fueled by the monstrousness of individuals and the outrage of those who discover it. 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. 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?For me the answer is always firmly once I find out somebody has abused their position of power to harm others, their work is forever tainted in my mind. The name Woody Allen, for example, makes my skin crawl. I watched a documentary where Dylan and Mia Farrow spoke out about him and it actually broke my heart, whilst also admiring their courage and strength to speak out so candidly and publicly. No matter how “genius” some of his movies are considered to be, I personally won’t be jumping to put them on anytime soon. 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?

The author set out to write a book about the art of monstrous men—in the process, she rendered a complex portrait of humanity

About this book

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 My own fallen idols include the film director Woody Allen, who also happens to be one of Dederer’s. “When I was young”, she recalls, “I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This was one of the peculiar aspects of his genius – this ability to stand in for the audience”. 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. DEDERER: Right. And I think the reason the stain was such a useful image for me to think about was that I liked the idea that indelibility - like, that stain, that just, like, indelible mark is not a choice. Like, when you drop the wine on the carpet, you're not making a decision for it to spill across the floor, which I feel like is my experience when I learn something about an artist whose work I love. You know, I don't want to know it, but I do know it. And now I have to figure out what to do. Monsters follows an intuitive logic, guided by Dederer’s shifting sense of her own project. Early on, she re-watches Roman Polanski’s films, an exercise that confirms his talent but fails to ease her conscience. “Polanski would be no problem at all for the viewer,” she notes, “if the films were bad. But they’re not”.