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. Slyly funny, emotionally honest, and full of raw passion, Claire Dederer’s important book about what to do when artists you love do things you hate breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new. Monsters elegantly takes on far more than ‘cancel culture’—it offers new insights into love, ambition, and what it means to be an artist, a citizen, and a human being.” — Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED/BEST BOOK OF SPRING BY: The New York Times (twice!), BuzzFeed,Entertainment Weekly,TIME Magazine,Bustle, i-D, Nylon, Kirkus, The Millions,LitHub,Alta,Chicago Review of Books,The Philadelphia Inquirer For teenagers, music makes a kind of repository for feeling, a place for feelings to live, a carrier. So a betrayal by a musician becomes all the more painful – it‘s like being betrayed by your own inner self. In certain ways this is a book about broken hearts, and teenagers are the world‘s leading experts on heartbreak.“ If you are like me, and have conflicting feelings about what to do with art done by terrible human beings or cancel culture or even woke warrioring, or simply find it interesting to muse on the subject of art and the people who make it being less than perfect, all I can say is run. Run, don't walk to the place where you like to get your books and get your hands on "Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma". It should be the book for you, all I know for sure it was THE book for me.In 1979, the feminist writer and activist Pearl Cleage was thirty, newly divorced, and dating for the first time in more than a decade. After a late introduction to Miles Davis’s famous album “Kind of Blue,” she started playing the record on dates. She was “in need of a current vision of who and what and why I am,” and Davis’s music, she wrote in the title essay of her 1990 collection, “ Mad at Miles,” promised that its listener was “a woman with the possibility of an interesting past, and the probability of an interesting future.” “Kind of Blue” helped Cleage redefine herself. During this “frantic phase,” she “spent many memorable evenings sending messages of great personal passion through the intricate improvisations of Kind of Blue.” Davis’s music “became a permanent part of the seduction ritual,” and Cleage built a new self on the foundation of his songs. What I’m interested in is the audience’s experience. You want to be thinking about it in one way, but your felt experience is real, and it keeps asserting itself as such. The body insists on its own reality.” She asks important questions . . . [and] skirts categorical answers. Subtle and adroit.” — The Atlantic

An] insightful exploration . . . Dederer’s case studies include Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Miles Davis, whose work she considers brilliant and important. What’s a fan to do? Dederer offers nuanced answers, challenging the assumption that boycotting is always the best response.” 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. 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) 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. That’s not how everyone sees it, though. When I started to explore this problem, I discovered that male critics wanted the work to remain untouched by the life. The voice of authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.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.

Thus near the end of the book the author stopped being a fellow judge with me as a reader viewing others, and instead changed into an author confessing her own monster-hood. Suddenly the question of whether monsters deserve forgiveness became intimate and personal. (It's interesting to note that the public is more forgiving of alcoholic fathers than they are of alcoholic mothers.) Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new.”—Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet Reading) Obsession. When we say we're obsessed with something, it means I am a fan, a super fan, an intergalactic fan. I am verily defined by this thing. It is my personality. It is me. I am it.I originally thought I was going to devour this in one sitting, but boy oh boy was I wrong. After the first couple of chapters I realised that I wanted to take my time with this one. I wanted to sit and think about the chapter I had just read, dissect it and let it sit in my thoughts. 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.