More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and I found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon, huge and void-like and slightly incomprehensible.
Despite my knowledge of Polanski’s crime, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. Throughout the spring and summer of 2014, I watched the films, their beauty its own kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his crime. I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He was the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. Even so, here I sat in my living room, watching Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown.
My love of the films did not grow from any forgiveness of his crime. That forgiveness never happened, even though I understood the circumstances and the context: sex between grown men and teenage girls was normalized at the time, the subject matter of songs and films; Gailey has said she forgives him; Polanski himself was a victim, his mother murdered at Auschwitz, his father held in concentration camps, his wife and unborn child murdered by the Manson Family. There’s no denying the horror of Polanski’s backstory—after all, two of the terrors of the twentieth century happened to him,
...more
My conscience was bothering me. The specter of Polanski’s crime wouldn’t leave the room. 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.
I didn’t want to compile a catalogue of monsters—after all, wasn’t the history of art simply already that? I had a dawning realization—I was trying to find out not about the artists, but about the audience. Polanski had become not his own problem, but my problem. I had a glimmer of a thought: I wanted to write an autobiography of the audience.
If I were writing an honest autobiography of the audience—I mean the audience of the work of monstrous men—that autobiography would need to balance these two elements: the greatness of the work and the terribleness of the crime. 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.
They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and they made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or . . . we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption.
Here’s the thing about new eras: You don’t really recognize them as they show up. They’re not carrying signposts. And maybe “new era” is not quite the right phrase. Maybe we entered an era where certain stark realities began to be clearer to people who had heretofore been able to ignore them.
On that awful day, one good thing happened, a thing that foretold a growing movement: it happened on the Twitter feed of Kelly Oxford, a model and bestselling author, the kind of person who normally sort of chaps my hide. Where does she get off being so pretty and bestselling? But Oxford tweeted this out: “Women: tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” Especially powerful was one little word in Oxford’s original tweet: “first.” It implied a list.
I had my own list—my first assault, by a family friend, happened to me when I was thirteen. The first. Followed by two attempted rapes, multiple physical assaults on the street, and god knows how many unwanted gropings. I followed avidly as, over the next fourteen hours, Oxford received more than a million tweets from women describing their first assaults. At one point she was receiving a minimum of fifty tweets per minute. This was a year before the #MeToo movement exploded. All these women sorta rubbed their eyes and looked around and said, “Hunh. What she just called assault is what
...more
But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. 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.
When I brought up the idea that an artist’s behavior might prevent us from consuming their work, Woody Allen was the reference point. Almost everyone had a position on the Woody thing. Real quotes: “Midnight in Paris was glorious. I just put the other stuff out of my mind.” “Oh, I could never go see a Woody Allen film.” “I grew up watching his movies. I love his movies, they’re part of my life.” “It’s all a plot cooked up by Mia.” “I’m just glad his stuff sucks now, so I don’t have to worry about it.” (Okay, this one is from me.)
Annie Hall was, it turned out, still good. I’d watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d’esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. Annie Hall is a frivolity, in the very best sense. It’s no accident that the most famous thing about the film is Annie’s clothes. In her men’s vest, tie, chinos, her unsure, down-dipping eyes peering out from under a big black hat, Annie is a thief of the serious clothes of serious men; she’s snuck into manland and swiped its trappings. Not for empowerment, just for
...more
Even the love story stops making sense—it’s a love story for people who don’t believe in love. Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. The End. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Ultimately Annie’s refrain of “la-di-da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen’s dime-store existentialism and the inevitability of the death of love. “La-di-da” means: nothing matters. It means: let’s have fun while we crash and burn. It means: our hearts are going to break,
...more
Everything about Diane Keaton’s performance in Annie Hall is inimitable, and we know that for a fact because what happened next was that every woman in America went around trying to imitate her—and failed. Style looks easy, but is not. This is true about Annie Hall across the board. All the things that look easy are not: the pastiche form; the integration of schlocky jokes with an emotional tenor of ambivalence; the refusal of a happy ending, tempered by the spritzing about of a general feeling of very grown-up friendliness.
Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century—better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack—because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism lurking at the center of all comedy. Also, it’s really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to the human race. Watching, you feel almost mugged by the sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. A simulacrum that becomes more real than the thing it represents. And that’s how I define great art. Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to
...more
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. We arrange words around these feelings and call them opinions: “What Woody Allen did was very wrong.” But feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn’t thinking, I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.
Trump had been in office for months. People were unsettled and unhappy, and by people I mean women, and by women I mean me. The women met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and tweeting and going for long furious walks and giving money to the ACLU and wondering why their partners and children didn’t do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized even though the women
...more
Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue—the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics—someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian—suddenly becomes a dummy.
In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time about his then-new relationship, Allen delivered the line that became explosively famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings: “The heart wants what it wants.” It was one of those phrases that never left your head once you’d heard it; we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to or not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality.
If it was hard to watch Manhattan because it was too close to Woody’s real-life creepiness, the opposite held true as well. It was virtually impossible to watch The Cosby Show because of how far beloved gruff Cliff Huxtable is from what we know about Bill Cosby.
And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen’s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and in Manhattan he stumbles at a crucial hurdle of self-indictment, and also he fucks a teenager, and that’s the film that gets called a masterpiece? What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else? I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter.
The men say they want to know why Woody Allen makes women so angry. After all, a great work of art is supposed to bring us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. 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
...more
The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That’s what makes it an audience. And yet, as I looked around, I saw that the audience had a new job. At the particular historical moment where I found myself, a moment awash in bitter revelation, the audience had become something else: a group outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again. It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But
...more
I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question. The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: Nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.
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.
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. It would be easy to list all the monsters and all the terrible things they did, but to what end? I wondered: wasn’t calling them monsters, writing about their monstrousness, enumerating their monster sins, just a way of keeping them at the center of the story?
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.
I thought of the critic’s note about Michael Jackson a couple weeks later, when I was eating breakfast at a diner and “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 came on. I bopped a little on my stool, I couldn’t help it. It was exactly as my critic friend had said—I found it hard to resist the pull of the music, borne on the air. And yet the moment was ruined too. I was placidly forking hash browns and all the while feeling like something terrible was (sort of) happening. That’s how the stain works. The biography colors the song, which colors the sunny moment of the diner. We don’t decide that
...more
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.
The inevitability of monstrousness is a central occupation of the internet, which hums along, fueled by biography—the internet is made of disclosure about ourselves and about other people’s selves. The very phrase “cancel culture” presupposes the privileging of biography—a whole idea of culture built on the fact that we know everything about everyone. 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.
In the accelerated endgame of the age of mechanical reproduction, the fan is both debased and exalted. The work, designed to be reproduced, needs a large body of consumers. The “I” of the audience must become “we” in order for the market to work. As fans, we are crucial and yet not special. We are never alone; we are in a crowd. Our tears for the Beatles were always collective tears.
Obsession, real obsession, is not how you feel about labradoodles or Cool Ranch Doritos or even something truly great, like the poems of Richard Siken. Real obsession has tendons and guts and, and, and consequences. This new usage wants to steal the stakes of real obsession, and apply those stakes to something consumed. As a dedicated obsessive, I resent this! Yet this fandom, mysteriously, doesn’t make us more likely to prioritize the work over the biography. When what you like becomes important, becomes defining, becomes an obsession, then an artist’s biography has even more power than
...more
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. We all know how this feels. It’s a different feeling from simply loving an artist’s work—it’s the feeling that you know this artist personally, as a friend, and, what’s more, they possess the same knowledge of you. You are immersed in their biography and by some strange
...more
The backlash across the internet was a great fury. Many of the former Potter kids were trans and they were rightly very angry. But underneath the fury was a deep sadness; the sadness of the staining of something beloved. Rowling’s tale of a place where otherness was accepted didn’t in the end include them.
This is how the memoirist and essayist Vivian Gornick describes her own relentless critical faculty: “My voice, forever edged in judgment, that also never stops registering the flaw, the absence, the incompleteness.” This is the voice I would grow up to possess. But it’s not exactly the voice of authority. Just a never-ending flow of judgment, which nestles together with subjectivity.
This critical structure has been in place for a long time. As early as 1819, the 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
...more
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
...more
John Cleese accused Mr. Allen of “social engineering.” But of course giving a group of white male fancy-pantses all the breaks for years is the ultimate social engineering. Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a
...more
When I come to this question—the question of what to do with the art of monstrous men—I don’t come as an impartial observer. I’m not someone who is absent a history. I have been a teenager predated by older men; I have been molested; I’ve been assaulted on the street; I’ve been grabbed and I’ve been coerced and I’ve escaped from attempted rape. I don’t say this because it makes me special. I say it because it makes me non-special. 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
...more
I noticed that a certain kind of person appeared to be immune to the stain. A certain kind of person demanded to be loved, no matter how bad his behavior—and we (oh, we) all agreed he was worthy of love. This was the person called the genius. This person might be stained—in fact almost always is stained—but the stain seems not to dent his importance. His primacy.
The genius is a proposition. He’s a fantasy that we have collectively. The genius isn’t so much a kind of person as a status of person: a person who can do whatever he wants. A genius has special power, and with that special power comes a special dispensation. Genius gets a hall pass. We count ourselves lucky he walks among us; who are we to say that he must also behave himself? Our fandom is a necessary ingredient of his greatness. “Genius” is a spectral, sacred word, yet it lands with the thud of fact.
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.
The thing is, freedom and energy can become confusing, morally or ethically speaking. If you are handsomely rewarded for giving in to some of your impulses, doesn’t it begin to seem like all your impulses ought to be honored? Especially because it’s hard to tell the good from the bad. Why would you quash an impulse, no matter how savage or destructive, when it might be one and the same thing as the impulse that allows you to do this mysterious, free thing that everyone says is genius?
The genius, presented for public consumption, was not an entirely new phenomenon. Dickens was as mass market a phenomenon as could be managed with the tools at hand in his era. Oscar Wilde, too, shaped his own image, touring America and having photographs made of himself, as far back as 1882. Wilde is supposed to have announced, upon arrival in America, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” That’s debatable, but he certainly spoke often, if parodically, of his genius, almost as if it were an animal, and wrote, “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
As we walked through the museum, I had a mounting feeling of discomfort. The paintings were not the cause of the discomfort—or not any more than you’d expect, given Picasso’s determination to discomfit the viewer. No, it was biographical information, telling us what Picasso had done to each of the women in his life, that was causing the uncomfortable feeling. I read with a strange growing dismay. My children, who at this time possessed the fierce moral sense to be found in teenagers and maniacs, were starting to look a bit nettled. They were ominously silent. Something was fomenting. The
...more
But the Nobel came to Hemingway when he was acting most Hemingway-ish—most like the man who whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick. Hemingway’s particular stain was a kind of brutish, careless masculinity; this was the image that accompanied him. In The Old Man and the Sea, he seems to be doing an impersonation of himself, bringing that toughness and vigor to the page. The Old Man and the Sea is nothing if not terse, oracular, male. The spectacle was, upon revisiting the work, deeply embarrassing.
The performance of masculinity, and its conflation with genius, has not been a great thing for women, who are simultaneously the genius’s victims and forever excluded from the club of genius. But The Garden of Eden makes us wonder about the cost to the genius himself. What did it cost Hemingway to be so much one thing (a man) and never its opposite? Why does all this matter? Because genius informs our idea of who gets to do what. Who gets to have license. Who gets to give in to their impulses. Whom we choose to aid and abet when they do indulge in those impulses. When genius is tied to
...more
The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. 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.
Of course, when license goes too far, it can devolve into lunacy. The question is, I suppose, whether lunacy makes a great artist, or whether all that freedom makes a person crazy.
