Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

I went on to The Tenant, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. All films I had seen many times. I expected them to be radically altered by my deeper knowledge of Polanski’s crimes, but that’s not exactly what happened. The knowledge just sort of hovered there.

I found I couldn’t solve the problem of Roman Polanski by thinking. The poet William Empson said life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. I found myself in the midst of one of those contradictions.

This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings.

I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also myopic and limited in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter.

When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and strangely exciting.

This impulse—to blame the other guy—is in fact a political impulse. I talked earlier about the word “we.” “We” can be an escape hatch from responsibility. It can be a megaphone. But it can also be a casting out. Us against them. The morally correct people against the immoral ones. The process of making someone else wrong so that we may be more right.

In any case, calling someone a monster didn’t solve the problem of what to do with the work. I could denounce him all I wanted, but Polanski’s work still called to me. This insistent calling—and my unwillingness to throw away the work—disrupted my idea of myself. It made me (and others) question my claim to feminism. I had asked, at first, what we should do with the art made by monstrous people.

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. A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography.

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. 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.

We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either canceled or about to be canceled.

The phrase “parasocial relationship” is a previously somewhat obscure sociological term that has been batted about the internet with greater and greater frequency—a spreading usage reflecting the increase in the phenomenon it describes: the belief that we have real emotional connections with the artists whose work we love.

it’s the feeling that you know this artist personally, as a friend, and, what’s more, they possess the same knowledge of you.

We now exist in a structure where we are defined, in the context of capital, by our status as consumers. This is the power that is afforded us. We respond—giddily—by making decisions about taste and asserting them. We become obsessed with this thing, mega-fans of that.

Our selves are constructed from the shitty stuff of consumption, but we remain feeling people nonetheless.

The problem with broadcasting, or with art, is that the flow only occurs in one direction. From the speaker to the receiver; from the artist to the audience. Telepathy, perfect union, is what we seek. Art—unlike broadcasting or the internet—becomes a meaningful stand-in for that union. The artist undergoes the rigor of making, and that creates the conditions for the audience to consume. The audience member sets aside her own ego, her own self, and participates in the dream built by the artist. There is a right relationship there—the relationship takes place on the page or the canvas. Parasocial relationships don’t operate in that way, though. They create a state of confusion in the consumer: a belief in a relationship that exists outside the art. We’re all wandering around in a mistaken daze of failed telepathy. This can benefit the artist (she sells more books); but mostly it benefits tech behemoths that monetize these relationships and—in the words of the social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff—use your information to trade on “behavioral futures markets.” In this sense, all of us who participate in parasocial relationships are workers creating money for somebody else.

This dynamic makes the stain more destructive—the more closely we are tied to the artist, the more we draw our identity from them and their art, the more collapsed the distance between us and them, the more likely we are to lose some piece of ourselves when the stain starts to spread.

the books offered a navigable system for belonging—alluring, perhaps especially, for a person who didn’t entirely feel like she belonged in the real world. Which describes a lot of preteens, and especially a lot of preteens with a dawning sense of their own queerness. Harry Potter fan-ship twined with the growth of the Tumblr platform, which in turn twined with the growth of a new kind of LGBTQ+ movement…kids who found solace in un-embodied community, whether it was Hogwarts or online. It wasn’t quite telepathy, but it was the dream of telepathy.

Sarris is the person who took the French term auteur and applied it to American moviemaking. Sarris’s book introduced auteur theory to film enthusiasts in 1968, making way for the idea that a film had an author—the director—who could and should be venerated. The thing was, I couldn’t find a truly operational theory in the book’s pages. Theory and her earnest, helpful twin sister praxis, that was what I was after. Something to let me know how to proceed, critically.

This was how critic culture worked. It was not just that you, as a critic, were dispensing opinions. You were also a kind of priest, channeling and translating the word and the work of the he-man auteur.

Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni was neatly articulating the problem of the reviewer, in his preface to his tragedy in verse The Count of Carmagnola: “Every work of art provides its reader with all the necessary elements with which to judge it. In my view, these elements are: the author’s intent; whether this intent was reasonable; whether the author has achieved his intent.” This trinity of questions, a sturdy and seemingly eternal three-legged stool, is a useful structure for reviewing. But does it actually bring us any closer to objective truth about a work?

I didn’t know it when I was a young critic, but I now know this: my subjectivity is the crucial component of my experience as a critic, and the very best thing I can do is simply acknowledge that fact. It was a hard thing to learn, as a young female surrounded by men who saw their role differently. Indeed, they never had to question their subjectivity, because of course it was perceived as the universal, default point of view, and often as not the same point of view as that of the artist himself. Hence they were able to make pronouncements that, when examined closely, have the whiff of insanity about them. “Definitive,” “finest,” “best of the decade”—it’s bananas to make such statements.

The old-fashioned critic, like the Pythons, can’t see that he’s part of a group, because he’s never been left out. He feels unbounded by his own biases; the critic doesn’t even understand he has biases.

There’s a perfect example of this in an aside in Richard Schickel’s really upsetting 2003 book Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Schickel deals not at all with the idea that a woman’s response to Allen’s work might be different than a man’s.

me. I don’t come to these questions with a coldness or a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathizer 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 Chinatown or 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 strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one.

We each bring our subjective experience to art and to love. If I were to give an exhaustive list of monsters and tell you my response to them, I would be acting out a kind of falsehood. I would be suggesting there is a correct answer in each particular case.

Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.

“Genius” is a spectral, sacred word, yet it lands with the thud of fact.

Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it; when we want our opinion to become fact. When we want to push our obsession onto the next guy. When we don’t want to hold our heroes accountable.

When it comes to balancing the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed, the word “genius” simply breaks the calculator.

It was going to take some doing to deprogram myself from the idea that genius follows its own rules.

Genius is an exclusive club, with stringent standards for membership, not all of which (gentle cough, slight averting of the eyes) have to do with the work itself.

Some of these parenthetical asides are annoying

The image of the genius in the throes of creation is easy to conjure. When I hear the word “genius,” I think of Jackson Pollock flinging paint around like a tough-guy loon. He’s not in his right mind. The genius is the one who is able to exert control over his materials and his helpers while simultaneously absolutely losing control over himself. He is masterful at performing a servitude to something greater than himself.

In his wonderful study The Success and Failure of Picasso, the critic John Berger talks about the way a young genius first encounters his own gift, making explicit the idea that there is an exterior energy that flows into the magician-like artist: “To the prodigy himself his power also seems mysterious, because initially it comes to him without effort. It is not that he has to arrive somewhere; he is visited. Furthermore, at the beginning he does things without understanding why or the reasoning behind them. He obeys what is the equivalent of an instinctual desire. Perhaps the nearest we can get to imagining the extent of the mystery for him is to remember our own discovery of sex within ourselves.”

Picasso’s friend the poet André Salmon wrote that Les Demoiselles “unleashed universal anger” when it was first unveiled, and I have to admit I still feel a little pissy when I look at it. A kind of jumped-up feeling.

And yet—isn’t the genius the person who changes everything about his or her field? Thomas Kuhn called this a paradigm shift, before the word “paradigm” got taken over by corporate dipshits and lazy undergrads. If you go by that definition, Duchamp is actually a greater artist than Picasso. If a Renaissance artist time-traveled to the twentieth century, he would’ve recognized what Picasso was doing as painting. But Duchamp would’ve made zero sense to him as art. Duchamp changed everything. But Duchamp doesn’t fulfill an image that we have in our minds of genius.

Not entirely sure I’m buying this argument of “genius as an expression of freedom/sex example: Duchamp/Picasso”

Picasso’s rise was contemporaneous with the explosion of mass media. Picasso became the image of art itself, transmitted via newsreel

Picasso found himself at the beginning of a movement—the movement toward biographical saturation. If we live in a biographical moment, Picasso helped launch and also rode that moment. Picasso and the screen rose concurrently, and the screen is what collapsed boundaries between people. A screen is what created the idea that we really know these people.

The exhibit at the Vancouver art museum started to seem less like an art show and more like a war memorial to the sacrifices of Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and the rest. Making our way through the galleries, we learned exactly how Picasso had destroyed each woman’s life.

Picasso’s masculinity colors every part of our viewing. You could argue that his masculinity justifies his effete interest in experimentation, even in beauty. Picasso is the man who had sex with two separate women on the same day, and painted them both. The sex is as important as the painting.

My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.

The genius’s freedom does not concern itself with the care or schedules or feelings of other people. The genius has absolute license. The genius gets to do what he wants. When I tried that, all I ended up with was a drinking problem and a lot of annoyed friends.

We allow the genius to give in to his impulses; he is said to have demons.

Researching real-life scientists for a book about physics, a novelist friend told me she discovered that eminent scientists sometimes seem to cultivate the image of the genius who lives just on the other side of a partially collapsed wall from lunacy. She spoke of meeting great scientists who demonstrated a flagrant, near-hostile disregard for conventions of dress or conversation, scientists who prided themselves on walking away mid-sentence. (Of course these scientists were never women. Women must continue to labor under the constraining, bland yoke of professionalism.)

Here, again, obviously, I am employing the word “we” to protect myself. I want these things. I drink in the spectacle of bad behavior. I have a penchant for assholes. Which is an uncomfortable thing to say. But important. To pretend that there’s no allure to bad men is to sidestep reality. The women around these men stack up like cordwood.

We imagine we would’ve been that person, the one who would’ve written the letter, who would’ve spoken out, would’ve hidden the Jews, would’ve provided the stop on the Underground Railroad. We say this to ourselves as the world literally burns, as militarized police forces murder citizens, as children are held in camps at our own borders.

my friend Tova: “One of the passages of the seder that haunted me was ‘in every generation an enemy will rise up to destroy us’—I was horrified that it wasn’t just the past but would happen to me too. This feels so central to Jewish identity, this dark awareness of history as not getting better.”

To put it another way: why did Nabokov, possessor of one of the most beautiful and supple and just plain funny prose styles in the modern English language, spend so much time and energy on this asshole?

My furious, fed-up thirteen-year-old reading of Lolita had actually been correct. Not the part of conflating Nabokov and Humbert. But the part where I had an almost visceral reaction to Lolita’s lack of real presence in the novel. I was reading the world’s most adept depiction of the erasure of a girl. Maybe it scared me because I, like so many girls, was living this story, in a smaller, quieter way.

The great writer knows that even the blackest thoughts are ordinary.

But for pete’s sake, that doesn’t mean you have to act them out.