Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer is a 2023 book of feminist essays and memoir that addresses the ethical conundrum of how best to consume art made by problematic artists, and more broadly, whether to consume it at all. The book is an expansion of Dederer’s 2017 essay published in The Paris Review, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Dederer, a former film critic, memoirist, and frequent contributor to publications such as the New York Times, places her personal experiences of art at the center of these ethical questions, writing what she calls an “autobiography of the audience.” Through this form, she explores Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption, an artist’s Biography as “Stain” on their work, and Misogynistic Structures in the Art World. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose in 2023, conferred by the Los Angeles Times.

This guide refers to the 2023 Kindle edition of the text, published by Knopf.

Content Warning: This guide contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, suicide and suicidal ideation, antisemitism and racism, anti-trans bias, genocide, domestic violence, and alcohol use disorder.

Summary

In 2014, Claire Dederer sets out to make sense of a question that is bothering her: whether to consume the art of “monstrous men,” and if so, how best to do it. She is inspired to explore this question by the films of Roman Polanski, which she finds to be immensely beautiful at the same time that she feels angered and upset by Polanski’s sexual crimes against underage girls. At first, she turns to other scholars of art for answers to the dilemma that problematic artists present their audience but is surprised to find very little writing on the subject. She realizes that trying to think through the issue logically will not resolve her complex feelings on the matter and decides to write an “autobiography of the audience” to chronicle her feelings about problematic artists and their art.

Thus, Dederer begins a series of deep dives into “monstrous” artists. Following Polanski, she tackles the films of Woody Allen, another deeply influential filmmaker whose treatment of underage women remains widely regarded as predatory. Dederer has a more personal history with the work of Allen, whom she professes to have identified with as a young girl, and whose romantic relationship with adopted stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn, she regarded as a violent betrayal. She finds that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot divorce her viewing of Allen’s films, especially Manhattan, from her knowledge of Allen’s personal life. What’s more, she finds them to be “creepy” in their own right. While she knows that the other women in her life have the same feelings about Allen, she discovers that the men around her are vehemently dismissive of her viewpoint, repeatedly insisting that she needs to regard the films solely on their aesthetic merits. Dederer wonders whether the men’s responses to Allen’s oeuvre are equally as emotional as hers but presented under a pretext of logic.

These initial forays into the subject lead Dederer to wonder what exactly it means to be a “monster.” In the context of art, she ultimately decides that a monster is someone whose actions in their personal life prevent audience members from receiving their art in a vacuum. While discussing Michael Jackson—another celebrity accused of the sexual abuse of children—with a friend, she encounters a metaphor that makes frequent appearances throughout Monsters: the stain—the idea that an artist’s wrongdoings place the audience in an involuntarily uncomfortable position of reception. Just as a stain on clothing or a carpet cannot necessarily be removed, neither can the context of unsavory behavior or personal ideology. Dederer explores the stain metaphor more specifically with a case study of J. K. Rowling, whose outspoken criticism and dismissal of transgender identity as invalid has undermined her public reputation, especially with fans of the Harry Potter franchise. Using the specifically digital circumstances of Rowling’s fame as evidence, Dederer argues that 21st-century culture is particularly occupied with an artist’s biography because digital platforms have made biography highly accessible to the point of inescapability.

Having established the technological context that facilitates a rise in cancel culture and preoccupation with the lives of artists, Dederer turns to the past to consider why prior eras of art consumption were not as condemnatory. She remembers how, as a child growing up in Seattle in the 70s and 80s, she was desperate for access to the biographies of any cultural heroes, especially female ones. In an age without the internet, art lovers were forced to scour libraries for any information about the lives of artists that they loved. She moves even farther backward, exploring how artists such as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso forged a particular image of artistic genius in the early 20th century that was dependent upon an ideal of brutal masculinity. Enacting violence against women in their personal lives, Hemingway and Picasso both accrued clout from their own monstrosities by tying their violence explicitly to their artistic prowess. This ideal of artistic genius, Dederer argues, carries forward into the present, such that consumers are often actively attracted to problematic artists. She also argues that modern consumers are under the false impression that they are more morally enlightened than the historical artists they love; the thought that those artists did bad things because they simply did not know better is, in Dederer’s estimation, a lie commonly told to assuage guilt about enjoying historical art.

In the second half of the book, Dederer subverts the very premises of monstrosity that she establishes in the first half. She begins this process by addressing Vladimir Nabokov and his most famous novel, Lolita, which is often used as evidence that Nabokov must have been a predator. Close-reading the book, she asserts that Nabokov’s decision to tell the story from the perspective of Lolita’s rapist was an artistic decision that he made to shed light on how common pedophilia is, and how the crime functions as a violent erasure of innocent children. She argues that Nabokov made this decision knowing he was putting his reputation at risk, and as such, is an anti-monster. Dederer continues her examination of the erasure of victims in her account of the death of feminist artist Ana Mendieta, allegedly murdered by her husband, fellow artist Carl Andre. These case studies of victims and their victimizers lead the author to begin asking whether she herself is a monster.

For Dederer, such a question demands consideration of what it takes for women to be considered monsters. In Chapter 10, she posits that, in society, the ultimate female monster is the mother who abandons her children. She cites great female artists of the 20th century who abandoned their children—Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, and Joni Mitchell—as belonging to this category of female monsters. Furthermore, she argues that these artists abandoned their children because the demands of motherhood are incompatible with the demands of artistry and that these women entered into a form of monstrosity for the sake of their art. A mother and artist herself, Dederer wonders if she has not been “enough” of a monster to make great art.

In the final chapters of the book, Dederer reveals her struggles with alcohol use disorder. She says that in allowing herself to be consumed by alcohol, she became a monster. She also says that coming to terms with her own monstrosity through recovery forced her to recognize the humanity of monsters. Stepping away from her emphasis on the artist’s cultural status, she decides to treat them as ordinary humans. She concludes, “What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them” (254).