Title: Monsters – A Fan’s Dilemma
Rating: 4 Stars
How we consume art has become more challenging in the interconnected age in which we live. The distance between the art and the artist is much narrower. A good example is a band like Led Zeppelin. In the 1960s or 1970s, what you’d know about the members of Led Zeppelin was limited to magazine articles (eg Rolling Stone) or perhaps the occasional rock journalist full length book. On the other hand, their music was everywhere.
That left you with an at best skewed perspective of the members of the band. For instance, Jimmy Page seemed to be an almost cherubic presence filled with the gift of musical genius. Does your opinion of Page and Led Zeppelin change when you find out, when Page was 28, that he began a sexual relationship with a 13 year old girl? That she was effectively kidnapped, kept locked in a room during Led Zeppelin’s entire tour to keep Page from getting charged with statutory rape?
It’s a tougher question than you might think. Either though you think it shouldn’t, it kind of depends upon your relationship to the artist. For instance, I used to respect Kevin Spacey as an actor. He seemed to be quite skilled and talented. However, given his abhorrent behavior, I find myself unable to watch him in anything anymore. Similarly, even though Louis CK was once probably my favorite comic, when I learned his predatory sexual behavior towards younger female comics, I haven’t any inclination to check out his work.
With me, it gets more complicated with someone like David Foster Wallace. He is unquestionably a genius. Infinite Jest is one of my favorite novels and, in my opinion, his essays are some of the greatest ever written. However, his behavior with Mary Karr is shocking. He threw her out of a moving car. He followed her five year old son. He climbed up the side of her house. He threatened to buy a gun to kill her husband.
What should I do with that information? How much does that diminish his greatness / genius? That’s the subject of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
With Dederer, her DFW is Roman Polanski. With films like Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, he made some of the all time great films. However (there’s that word again), he roofied a thirteen year old girl and then vaginally and anally raped her. You can try to excuse his behavior by saying that this was in the everything goes 70s or you can point to his personal history where he hid for years from Nazis even as his mother was being gassed at Auschwitz and then later, infamously, the Manson Family murders taking place at his house, resulting in the death of his pregnant wife. Does his horrific personal history explain his behaviors?
She discusses other monsters as well. There’s Woody Allen marrying one of his much younger adopted daughters and being accused of sexually molesting another of his adopted daughters when she was seven. Manhattan is considered one of Allen’s great films. At the center of it is a forty-two year old man dating a seventeen old woman. Given Allen’s history, does his history tarnish this film? In my opinion, it would certainly seem so.
Or how about Michael Jackson? In the documentary Leaving Neverland, he was accused of sodomizing young boys. Like Polanski, he certainly had an abusive childhood. Introducing Jackson, Dederer asks the question does knowing of these acts tarnish the artist’s entire legacy? Is the music of The Jackson 5, recorded when Michael was just a child, still OK to listen to? Trying to apply these gradations leads to rationalized, if not ridiculous, moral parsing.
This also leads to the question of at what point is the artist life so much in the past that it doesn’t seem to matter? Pablo Picasso treated women horribly, as did Ernest Hemingway. Richard Wagner was notoriously antisemitic, as was (if lesser known) Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather. Does the work of Wagner, because it was so closely associated with the Nazi regime, deserve censure while we let the lesser crimes of Woolf and Cather go?
Being a feminist, Dederer discusses at length women that may or may not be considered monsters. In our world, a woman that abandons her children to pursue her art seems to be a special sort of monster, even though men do the equivalent with very little impact. Doris Lessing fled from her husband and two of her children that were living in Rhodesia (weirdly enough, taking a third child with her) to start a very successful literary life in London. Joni Mitchell had a child and gave it up for adoption. How much should the fact that a mother sacrificed her children for her art color into our appreciation of the art?
By the end of the book, she doesn’t really have any answers. She eventually lands on the imperfections in all of us. We are all effectively monsters. Not only that, but we find ourselves loving things that we know are not good. We can’t really reason our way out of that. She discusses a prominent black woman talking about how important the jazz music of Miles Davis is to her. Even though she knows that Davis slapped women and apparently made money as a pimp, she can’t help but remember how his music carried her through several difficult periods in her life.
Maybe that’s how we have to deal with monsters. We have to look upon their sins with open eyes while also acknowledging the occasionally oversize impact their art has had upon our lives.
dorkenstein 