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Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person? —Clarice Lispector
The poet William Empson said life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.
Polanski would be no problem for the viewer at all—just another example of how some men happen to be black holes—if the films were bad. But they’re not.
I wished someone would invent an online calculator—the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness
of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.
The real question is this: can I love
the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you.
I was finding I must also take into account biography; an artist’s biography as a disrupter of my own pleasure.
The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm.
Allen gives the same attention to Tracy he once gave to Annie, but because she’s object rather than person, his vision ultimately feels, to me, claustrophobic, constraining. I’m trying not to write “pervy.”
As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen: “I don’t feel great about men right now.”
Which of us was seeing more clearly: The one who had the ability—some might say the privilege—to remain untroubled by the filmmaker’s attitudes toward females and his history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn’t help but notice—maybe couldn’t help but feel—the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?
When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind.
The more I thought about the silent, invisible hordes of victims, the more I began to think that the word “monster” puts the focus in the wrong place. “Monster” keeps the focus on them—the charismatic megafauna, eating all the air.
I realized that for me, over the past few years of thinking about Polanski, thinking about Woody Allen, thinking about all these complicated men I loved, the word had come to take on a new meaning. It meant something more nuanced, and something more elemental. It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.
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. Indelibility is not voluntary.
Does the stain go so far that it touches the child who will become the monster?
We, the fans, perceive ourselves as allied with the artists. And so biography isn’t just omnipresent, it’s actually important. The stain comes to have meaning in our lives; we feel…some kind of way about the stain. We feel hurt.
The knowledge we have about celebrities makes us feel we know them. We feel we have the right to some intimate access to them.
In a 2010 paper on the nature of parasocial relationships, the sociologist John Durham Peters explores the way the phenomenon arose in the era of broadcast journalism.
"Broadcasting & Schizophrenia" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0163443709350101
Maybe shame is the ultimate expression of the parasocial relationship. Our emotions, collapsed together with those of the artists we love, leave us vulnerable in ways that are entirely new in the internet era.
you think about a situation or a person or a book as hard as you can and you keep thinking about it and you don’t stop until you find something wrong with it. You might find that difficult as you go through life.”
auteur
a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie.
This theory suggests that a director's unique style, vision, and recurring themes can be identified across their body of work, making them the central artistic figure. Essentially, the director's personal vision shapes the film's narrative, visual style, and overall artistic expression.
Authoritative criticism believes in the myth of the objective response, a response entirely unshaped by feeling, emotion, subjectivity.
And so, like many or most women, I have a dog in this particular fight: when I ask what to do about the art of monstrous men, I’m not just sympathizing with their victims—I’ve been in the same shoes, or similar.
Donna Haraway says that objectivity is “a conquering gaze from nowhere”; “an illusion, a god trick.”
“The word Jew is fine as a noun, starts to be a problem as an adjective, and is totally not okay as a verb.”
1977 documentary The Confessions of Winifred Wagner.
She glows with pride at being the exception. This is truly a female monstrousness—the joy at being accepted where others of your kind are not.
Making yourself the chosen one is a strategy: a bright circle drawn against almost all of the rest of the world.
The world has always been broken. Even as we sat here, with our good educations and our good intentions, we were in the midst of learning a terrible lesson. We were learning that we were part of history after all.
“There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”
Walter Benjamin
Only two classes of people are asked to be purely good: mothers and children.
“I am a feminist and a mother. I applaud the escape to freedom of a woman living her own life at such a time and in such a place, and her determination to fulfill her passion, to experience the power of her need to write.”
His salvation was told in the development of his style and voice. It was all laid out there for us to see: his transformation from miserable drunkard to saved man.
Many critics over the years have noticed this difference and explained it in terms of biography. The Carver of the early stories, it has been said, was in despair. As he grew successful, however, the writer learned about hopefulness and love, and it soaked into his fiction.
In other words: There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer.
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is the merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the bigger question: what do we do about the monstrous people we love?
