When I heard about Claire Dederer’s book, “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” I knew I had to read it. The book’s synopsis is: 

How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art. 

~ From Amazon 

I first rented it from the library as an e-book and kept highlighting it. By page 40, I decided I needed to buy this book because one read is not enough. I went through it quite a few times, highlighted, bookmarked, referenced it, and brought it up during countless lunches and dinners with family and friends. This book is indeed a conversation starter. Can it end the conversation? Well, probably not and I think that is Dederer’s point. 

At the beginning of the book, she shares how no two people can feel the same way about something, even if it seems so simple. For instance, she shares that a friend in high school was gang-raped. This friend believed that any artwork that exploited violence should be destroyed. A gay friend who also was brutalized said that he could separate the art from his experience. These two people’s experiences are not the same but they do have something in common. What they went through should not have happened and they see what they went through being used in “art” which is making a profit. One didn’t mind, the other did. 

Chapters of the book also are named of famous people who were controversial like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen or Michael Jackson. With Woody Allen in particular, Derderer wrote about how much she related and resonated with his films and loved his work as a kid, Now, she reflects and sees him as a predator. She debates with a male colleague that Manhattan is quite upsetting and he dismisses her thoughts. But to a point that is made later in the book, this man, like many white men won’t or rather, can’t understand a different point of view. He insists that she should just ignore the plot of an underage girl dating a much older man and look at the aesthetic of the film. Well, sir, perhaps since you were never targeted, never were the prey, and I, as a reader and a person, find it disturbing that you do not find this plot disturbing. I do love Woody Allen’s films. I still watch them, his and Roman Polanski’s. But I am not excusing what they have been accused of. Then a question was written in the book that made me stop in my tracks: 

Do we believe genius gets a special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?

(Derderer, 2023, page 20)

She uses the painter Picasso, writer JK Rowling as well as other writers and filmmakers as examples. Their experiences, their pain, and their innate “geniuses” might constitute as hall passes. So when they do something we are against, Dederer writes, “We tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings,” (page 29). 

She also points out: 

“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 stain works. We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet,” (page 48).

I understand this as meaning that it is not diminishing how her friend who believes exploitative art should be destroyed is wrong and how her other friend is not. People have the right to their emotions and feelings, we can’t control that. 

There is a section in the book that moves on to women and their crimes. “If the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture. The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do” Page 176. Dederer shares the lives of women who had left their children and accomplished the peak in their field like Joni Mitchell, Doris Lessing and Sylvia Plath. After dissecting this portion, she shares, “‘A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.’ The artist becomes great in order to cover his ass for what a shitty person he really is—apparently this is just as true for women,” (page 205). Well, I thought, at least in this instance, there’s finally gender equality. 

At different times in the book, she talks about if we should stop consuming the work of the people who have done wrong things. “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—is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one,” (page 77).

I have had many conversations with friends about this. I tend to be able to listen to music or watch the film of someone who has been accused of wrongdoing because I also think of all the other people who were involved. Plus, we only know the story of one individual. No one is a saint. We know for a fact that Roman Polanski had drugged and had sex with an underage girl. Some cannot watch his films anymore but I for one, still watch Rosemary’s Baby, one of my favorite horror films. I still see not only the great work he did as a director but also the great work the editor, the camera operator, the make-up artist, the costume department, the set decorator, and the actors, all did. 

Many people do not know that an actual serial killer is in a brief scene in The Exorcist. The man who played the radiographer was also actually killing people while he was working on the film. Now some knowing this, might not be able to see this film. My point of sharing this information is that, just because you know the big name of someone like the director, actor, or writer, doesn’t mean that someone else in the artwork that you love has been a saint. When I speak with friends who cannot watch Polanski or listen to R. Kelly’s music, they can understand where I am coming from. But I also respect why they can’t. 

So at the end of reading this book and all of her reflection, what has she found? 

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. 

(Derderer, 2023, page 241). 

Well said, Claire, well said.