Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

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.)

lunacy can give a kind of cachet, as long it is practiced by the right person in the right way.

The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people. When the latest news comes out and we’re all aflutter with outrage, we’re ignoring a truth: Part of the reason so much attention has been trained on men like Picasso and Hemingway is exactly because they’re assholes. We are excited by their asshole-ness. Wasn’t that what we saw with Trump? We kept pointing out, over and over: This guy is an asshole. And of course that was what people loved about him in the first place.

We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness. Not just because the gatekeepers and publishers and studio heads have traditionally been men, but also because we ourselves yearn for plot and action. We yearn for events! And then we are furious when this eventful asshole commits a crime.

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. Certainly some part of the allure comes from the man’s badness.

It’s easy to think of the quality of genius as justifying bad behavior, but maybe it works the other way around too. Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness. Maybe we ask these artists to live out our darkest fantasies—and if we give it the label “genius,” then we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle. We can get off on the performance of badness, we can consume the biography, and remain in good taste. Well, he’s a genius. You can’t blame him. (Or me.)

One of the great problems faced by audiences is named the Past. The Past is a vast terrible place where they didn’t know better. Where monstrous behaviors were accepted. Sometimes the Past seems incredibly far away, sometimes it seems to have ended last year or even last week; more difficult to accept is the idea that we are living in it right now—if by the Past, we mean a moment in history when injustice and inhumanity reigned.

We tell ourselves that was the Past and it was normal then. We tell ourselves they didn’t know. We use the word “mores.” In other words, our reckoning with the past is dependent on two central ideas: 1. These people were simply products of their time. 2. We’re better now. Sitting in my cozy house, a house wrapped in the endless shimmering ribbon of social media, I feel I’m at the apex of history. I know things no one knew before. Or if I don’t know something, then I can find it out quickly, easily, with no trouble at all. This is part of why I kept trying to solve the monster problem by thinking harder, by finding an expert, by applying reason, by building a calculator, by locating the correct answer. Because of this feeling that I must be the natural outcome of the Enlightenment. I am a citizen of the Present, where we know better.

The Winifred of the film is a chilling spectacle. She’s a still-lovely woman despite her years, with strong good teeth and an upright carriage. Whether or not speculations about an affair are true, her joy at her relationship with Hitler remains pure and evident. The footage was shot in 1975—when anyone would know better. And yet she doesn’t. You can see it in her naughty grin, her conspiratorial asides about what can and cannot be shared with the public.

Winifred says she does not care for “politics.” She complains about the intellectualization and politicization of art that, to her mind, started after World War II. The director here interjects an apt quotation from Walter Benjamin—“Thus fascism aestheticizes politics and communism answers with the politicizing of art”—clearly indicting Wagner and his family as instruments of fascism. The politicization Winifred decries is a response, an “answer,” to that fascism. But of course Winifred doesn’t see her role at Bayreuth as an aestheticization of politics—like a good fascist, she believes she and her kind are the ones who are free of politics, free of “fuss.” Winifred Wagner’s attitude echoes her father-in-law’s—she believes she is only saying what’s true, and those who don’t say it, don’t know it, are simply not admitting the truth.

Why has Woolf’s anti-Semitism been forgotten? It’s far from the first thing we think of when we think of her. And it’s a small thing, a casual thing, a buried thing. As with T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton and Dostoevsky, we think first and foremost of literary output. When confronted with their anti-Semitism, we think of it as something that has to do with their moment in history—as if the anti-Semitism were the weather of the era, and it simply blew over these writers.

That’s why the Access Hollywood tape was so shocking—not because it happened, but because no one really seemed to mind. There was no uproar. The nation did not rise up with a single voice to say: This is not who we are anymore. We know better. Instead, we elected the grabber president. Over the following years, the proof escalated that the things we thought we’d transcended were still there, lurking like bad fairies. But that makes them sound alien, and for the last few years we’ve been confronted with the fact that the evil fairies are us.

What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there—in the monstrousness. Look for mirrors of what we are, rather than evidence for how wonderful we’ve become.

When Stephen Fry describes the letter he’d like to write to Wagner—“Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the nineteenth century and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing”—he’s actually describing the dynamic that we call cancel culture. The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a historical figure that he might not say to someone alive.

What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?

Is it some kind of Greek myth–like trade-off where we don’t get one without the other? If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful. This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.

The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?

By the end of that first day of reading, I was suffused with disgust: at Humbert, at Nabokov, and most of all at what I saw as the one-dimensional depiction of the girl in the book. Lolita was not what I thought of as a real character, and her failure to materialize made me angry. My response was emotional: I was sad about Lolita’s absence from Lolita. The question I didn’t ask: why had Nabokov disappeared her?

But Nabokov is clearly saying something different—Humbert is, in reality, ordinary as dirt. He’s the dirty old man who walks by you every day, disguised in this case by a fancy prose style. Humbert is not special. Humbert is not extraordinary. He’s Frank Lasalle. He’s everywhere. If Humbert is ordinary, then Lolita is too. She too is everywhere. She’s all around us—the girl whose life has been destroyed. The ubiquitous victim of the ubiquitous monster. And it’s her ubiquity that ultimately concerns Nabokov. The clue is in the title. The book is actually about what it says it’s about: a mere girl.

The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.

The idea that my ambition might be a virtue and not a symptom—that didn’t occur to Gerald. To be fair, not every man pathologizes every woman’s ambition. One day, while out for a walk with a male writer, in the midst of a very serious heartfelt conversation about my memoir, I screwed up my courage and blurted: “I want to write a great book.” Without breaking his stride, he said expressionlessly, “Welcome to the Thunderdome,” and we continued our walk, with me feeling secretly buoyant, as if I’d swallowed a balloon. Even the idea of trying to be great was thrilling to me.

Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some giving part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written. Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of any real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters.

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

How many days or weeks or months would have to pass in such a manner before it would be called abandonment? And what if I just . . . didn’t go home? What if I stayed and was driven mad by the distance between what I am—a mother—and what I am trying to be—an artist? I missed my son and felt off-kilter. I missed my son and felt happy. My arms yearned to hold him. At the same time, I dreamed idle dreams about buying a truck and driving off into Mexico. Horizons were shifting.

The thing is, each of us can draw a line across the page at any point on this list, and say: Here. Here is where abandonment begins. Where is that line for you? Day care? Surrendering custody? Flight? Why is that the line, for you? Is it an ethical thought, or a moral feeling? Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men. This is extra-true if the men in question are artists. As Jenny Diski so rightly points out: men do this all the time.

Men leave their children to pursue their art, or their whatever, so often that it hardly bears noticing. And it’s certainly not perceived as monstrous enough to disrupt our experience of their work.

Whenever a protagonist got pregnant, I experienced a sinking feeling—in fact, I felt a vast boredom utterly unique to this reading circumstance. Now the protagonist would lose her options; now her world would be constrained to the four walls of a house, and what kind of plot would that be? I wasn’t one to abandon a book midway through—once momentum caught me, it held me—but a full-body yawn would overcome me if I encountered this plot point, and the book’s velocity would simply die. Who cared about a pregnant lady? Not me. When I was young, I saw it, or rather felt it, like this: pregnancy was the very definition of the death of options. I was emotionally absolute on this score, as Doris Lessing had been with Jenny Diski. Even to this day, I feel my interest in a story waning if a pregnancy occurs.

I even liked being pregnant. But as a reader, a pregnancy makes my heart sink. Pregnancy is the end of narrative. All the doors shut at once. Don’t cut yourself off from options! I want to yell at the pregnant characters in these books. If motherhood is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, in large part that’s because of—not despite—its optional nature. I got to choose.

Rich makes it sound so balanced: act and text, of equal import, in a kind of equilibrium with each other. That’s not how the world has seen it—Harron’s film title I Shot Andy Warhol says it all—it is the shooting for which she is remembered. But Solanas believed her text to be as important as her act. Her words eerily conjure a new way of looking at the problem of separating the art from the artist: Does the manifesto justify the shooting? Or does the shooting vindicate the manuscript? Is she the manifesto? Or is she the shooting? Text or action? Word or woman? Of course, we’ll never be able to answer these questions, because we can never encounter the manifesto without the shooting. Solanas is her act.

What if Sylvia Plath had shot Ted Hughes instead of gassing herself? How would we read her work?

Sylvia Plath, like Solanas, is a staggeringly pure example of an artist who can’t be shaken free from her biography. Despite our best intentions of separating art from artist, Ariel flies to us on papery wings made of the famous stories of Plath’s famous death. Plath, as an author, is imprisoned by her own biography. And we are imprisoned there with her. We don’t get to choose that imprisonment. It just happens. We hear “Plath” and we think, in a tumble: oven, children, beauty, Ted Hughes, and at the same time we think of those poems—if we are poetry readers. If not, we just think the rest of it. But either way, the knowledge of the violence with which she ended her life crowds our brains, whether we like it or not.

A manifesto needs a goal, a green pasture where you’ll presumably go when all your revolutionary acts are discharged. Solanas’s goal was global slaughter, but it was also an intimate fantasy of female comradeship. Her green pasture was filled with freewheeling women. In the meantime, her happiness was made safely impossible by the unmanageable scope of her revolution. Solanas is saying she’ll be happy personally after her political needs are met. Since this can never happen, she’s perfectly justified in her misery and loneliness.

Solanas was the decisive woman who attacked silently, ruthlessly, in the dark. Her real-life shooting lacked a basic unifying intention. It was a flailing. The SCUM Manifesto is a document of profound vulnerability, written in a voice of profound empowerment. It’s a brutal call to arms, written by a woman in a world of hurt.

They are dreaming worlds free of the violence of men, and their dreams are still proscribed by men, like a perversion of the line from the theorist Mark Fisher: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of patriarchy.

The idea of having empathy for the monster—this was uncomfortable for me. I consumed the art of monsters, but it was with a bit of steel in my heart. How could I have empathy for Polanski or Woody Allen? Their misdeeds—their biographies—were something to be ignored. To lock the door against. My feminism—which was elastic enough to allow me to consume the work—was not elastic enough to countenance empathy for these men. They had behaved terribly; they had abused positions of power; they had brought shame upon themselves. They had me as an audience; they did not also deserve my sympathy.

The misdeed was a biography-ender. A full stop. Redemption was not something that entered my imagination; you messed up and you were out. You were finished. The internet agreed with me. It was waiting for you, with its deathly arms spread wide; once it embraced you, you were dead. So much for second acts in American lives.

I guess all of this is a long way of saying: monsters are just people. I don’t think I would’ve been able to accept the humanity of monsters if I hadn’t been a drunk and if I hadn’t quit. If I hadn’t been forced, in this way, to acknowledge my own monstrosity.

In light of all this, I came to see the question “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” in a new way. The initial thought of how to take responsibility is to boycott the art—the liberal solution of simply removing one’s money and one’s attention. But does that really make a difference? To say someone else is consuming improperly implies that there’s a proper way to consume. And that’s not necessarily true. When we ask “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” we are putting ourselves into a static role—the role of consumer. Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works. A series of decisions is made—decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics—and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave.

Becoming overly focused on what we do about monstrous men turns attention away from the real work of #MeToo. By immediately responding, “Well, are you going to throw out the work of X?” critics become handmaidens of capital, moving the focus from the perpetrator and the systems that support the perpetrator to the individual consumer.

Biography, in this moment of what Guy Debord calls “appearances,” reigns supreme. We created a media that thrived on biography, that watered and fed our parasocial relationships, that told us our fandom was ourselves. This, combined with the internet’s undreamed-of ability to disperse information, created a condition where we knew everything about everyone, for good or ill. Biography defined our relationships to our faves. Then came #MeToo. When it was time to criticize the system—to hold power accountable—we remade ourselves in the image of the broken system. We canceled individuals—canceled individual biographies, that is. We were shocked over and over by what these men had done, and reinstated them in the role of charismatic megafauna—this time the glorious animals transformed into terrible monsters. Their downfall was ultimately a reaffirmation of the powers in place—these guys and their biographies remained central. Meanwhile, I pretend that it matters whether or not I stream Knife in the Water.

Condemnation of the canceled celebrity affirms the idea that there is some positive celebrity who does not have the stain of the canceled celebrity. The bad celebrity, once again, reinforces the idea of the good celebrity, a thing that doesn’t exist, because celebrities are not agents of morality, they’re reproducible images. The fact is that our consumption, or lack thereof, of the work is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture. We are left with feelings. We are left with love. Our love for the art, a love that illuminates and magnifies our world. We love whether we want to or not—just as the stain happens, whether we want it to or not.

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. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. 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? We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible. Sam went to the real problem at the heart of everything: the problem of human love. The aesthetic and ethical issues presented by men from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson are a kind of parable for this larger problem.

In her haunting little book Love’s Work, the British philosopher Gillian Rose writes: “In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. . . . There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” That is: Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.