Daniel's Staff Pick: May 18, 2023

Claire Dederer: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023, Knopf)

One of my least favorite duties at Sorry State is managing our “banned list,” the list of albums and artists we refuse to carry. This is not a task I am well equipped for. While I think of myself as a morally upstanding person, I don’t have a strong sense of justice. I tend to look at the world more analytically, examining situations from multiple perspectives, and as someone who loves music and art, my curiosity and love for art is apt to outweigh my sense of right and wrong. So, I rely on my colleagues for guidance here, and when they’re offended by something we carry, I trust that it’s the right decision to remove it from the racks. It’s often a difficult decision, though. Some things, such as music that explicltly promotes hateful ideologies, are beyond the pale. However, what about work by artists with stains on their legacy? When I was younger, many people thought it was OK to listen to the first few Skrewdriver records, which they made before they became an explicitly racist and nationalist band. Nowadays, all the band’s releases are taboo, and they’re all banned from sale on mainstream sites like eBay and Discogs. But what about the country singer David Allan Coe, who made at least one album full of slurs and other reprehensible ideas, which he seems to have intended as a joke. Do we remove all his records from the shelves? What about people who have done bad things which don’t show up in in their work? We didn’t have to decide to stop carrying Bill Cosby’s records because people just stopped buying them. But what about Michael Jackson? Morrissey? Miles Davis? Our customers are still eager to buy those artists’ records. Where is the line, and how do you determine what side of it things are on? That is the question Claire Dederer addresses in this book.

Once I started reading reviews of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma this spring I was eager to read it, because I realized this is an issue I think about all the time, and I desperately wanted to read an analysis that’s smart, or even (fingers crossed) wise. The problem is that most sane writers don’t want to touch this topic with a ten-foot pole (in fact, I find myself nervous to write this staff pick), because the stakes are high and the dangers of missteps are real. Sympathizing with a monster can get you branded an apologist, putting your own politics and ethics in question. Thus, the discourse around this topic is dominated by people with the most extreme views. Shouts of “burn the witch” play well on social media—I click on them despite my better judgment—and the only people who stand up against the zealots tend to be reactionary dummies. If someone uses the terms “cancel culture” or “woke,” that’s an immediate red flag for me, a signal that they’re an asshole, someone who thinks it’s acceptable to trample on other people’s feelings to protect the “freedoms” enjoyed by the privileged. As someone who cares about art and culture, it often seems impossible to find the middle path that respects the feelings of victims, marginalized groups, and other stakeholders while reserving space for artists to do what artists do… what we love them for doing.

Dederer’s book starts by examining the reputations of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. These filmmakers make excellent test cases. Both made art that, at least at some point, was acknowledged as great, and both men have done bad things (though, as becomes apparent, there’s much more to be said than that). Dederer analyzes both cases at length, examining the work for evidence of the darkness we see in the bad things the artists did and tracking the discourse around these artists and their work, from the people who think they should be resigned to the dustbin of history to the people who think we should “separate the art from the artist,” and everyone in between. Consistency and easy answers are in short supply. The metaphor Dederer lands on to describe the situation is that of a stain. I find this metaphor apt because it’s so flexible. Stains can be larger or smaller, darker or lighter. Some people can live with stains and keep wearing clothes even after their stained, while others find themselves unable to unsee the stain, or rather to see past it. Whatever your attitude toward the stain, it’s still there.

Along the way, Dederer pulls a bunch of threads related to this central line of inquiry. There’s a fascinating chapter about women monsters, who are rare, but they exist. Unsurprisingly, what constitutes an unforgivable transgression is very different for a woman than it is for a man, as are our attitudes about the women who cross those boundaries. There’s also a great chapter about alcoholics and addicts, who present a more complicated case because the monsters aren’t just monsters; they’re also victims. And what of the addict in recovery? What happens to the stain when the artist commits to mending their ways? Is there any hope of redemption? Dederer also a fascinating reading of Lolita, a book I’ve never read because I am frightened of it. But I am always interested in what people have to say about it, and Dederer’s chapter on Nabokov and Lolita is gripping, a masterpiece of literary criticism. For Dederer, Nabokov is the anti-monster… unlike the bad men who made great art, Nabokov is (by all accounts) a decent person who made a monstrous piece of art, which both illustrates and complicates our feelings about the relationship between art and monstrosity.

If you’re looking for Dederer to provide a list of which artists are and are not beyond the pale, or even a stable rubric you can apply on your own, then you’re going to be disappointed. However, the book still has some substantial takeaways. A big one for me is that capitalism is a big part of the problem. Under capitalism, art is a commodity and the consumption of art-as-commodity is inherently politicized. Viewing art as a commodity complicates the picture in all kinds of ways, in no small part because of the system of celebrity that has built up around the culture industry. Appreciating a Woody Allen film—even if you don’t pay money for it—feels like an endorsement of Woody Allen, one that Allen and the people and businesses who associate with him profit from, if only indirectly. Try as we might, though, we can’t opt out of capitalism, and these problems are likely to remain with us for the foreseeable future. And even if Dederer doesn’t offer a solution to the fan’s dilemma, her book brings the issue into much clearer focus and does a great deal of work to carve out critical space for those of who value art’s ability to question, antagonize, and even offend.