A review of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
by Kathryn Mussenden, Potomac Review Intern spring 2024
What do we do when bad people make good art? Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma struggles with this. It is a semi-autobiographical collection of essays all concerned with the moral sacrifice needed to make or consume good art. Dederer starts with her love of Rosemary’s Baby, and inversely, her discomfort with Manhattan. She is insightful and vulnerable as she muddles through her feelings, and her essays have an engaging narrative arc. I like her writing, I like her voice, and I think it is important that theory stays in step with developing modern social environments. This conversation often gets heated, where people mask their id emotions with moral philosophy, so I think a clear-headed rumination like this is a valuable addition to the discourse. Despite subtitling it “A Fan’s Dilemma,” Dederer spends a lot of time on the artists themselves. The question goes from Do I have a right to watch this? to Were they justified in doing this? This is a slight issue I have with the book, but I understand why she does it. She’s a writer, and you can’t just sever that inherent kinship you have with other creatives, or the interest you have in the process. When she talks about “art monsters” (a term borrowed from author Jenny Offil, referring to artists—men specifically—who do not concern themselves with anything unrelated to art, not chores, not manners, not other people), she speaks from the perspective of someone lustfully afraid of becoming one.
All of this considered, I left Monsters feeling . . . complicated, which I suppose is apt. This book is about complicated feelings. I think it would’ve been a great failure if I had left without any internal wrestling. However, I kept waiting for something that would truly carve in deep to me, and that never came. As opposed to that swoop in your gut you get when you forget the last stair, I anticipated a last stair that never came, an aborted potential energy that leaves a buzz under your skin. I think it is a testament to the overall quality of this book that I couldn’t just shrug and dust my hands of it, but it bothered me. What I eventually settled on was this: good art is rare, and the moral argument is stacked in their favor. You can flinch from the weight of your complicity—whatever amount you may have—and hide behind their cultural worth. At this point, it is impossible to extricate the likes of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen from the foundation of their medium. Even if I haven’t watched any of their work, I’ve definitely watched movies inspired by them. Any debate you have over your participation is a thought experiment at best, and there is genuine comfort in that level of hopelessness. Additionally, people ascribe this almost hypnotic quality to their work, as if the sheer talent on display compels them against any will they may have. Dederer does this in a way that isn’t callous, but she does fall back to Rosemary’s Baby’s shot composition and the atmosphere of Annie Hall to defend these movies. Almost asking, begging, Can you blame me?
My purpose here isn’t to say whether or not that is right, but to me, these are moral cul-de-sacs that muddy the true question—or at least the question I’ve become most interested in: “What amount of suffering am I okay with as long as I’m having fun?” Not what level of artistic merit is worth it, or how popularity plays a role in the artist’s monstrousness, but rather What am I, the fan, willing to stomach?
It’s a horrible question, uncomfortable and blunt, but it’s necessary. The internet is rife with bad art that people love viciously. Fans have unprecedented access to creators, and we learn about their little, mounting misdeeds, or their great transgressions, and we have to make a call. We can’t shield ourselves with their good work, because what is the cultural worth of a YouTuber? Or an influencer? Or a fanartist? This is not a condemnation of the people who enjoy these things, but bluntly, people are not going to fight for the artistry of being funny on TikTok the way they may fight for Woody Allen. Dederer talks about a dinner she had with a colleague who snipped “Just focus on the aesthetics” when she brought up Manhattan. Would he say that about someone like Tana Mongeau?
When I was a kid, I watched a gaming YouTuber named Cryaotic. I loved videogames, but wasn’t particularly tech savvy or coordinated, and he had a kind, soothing voice that made me feel like I was watching a friend. The term “parasocial relationship” is common internet parlance now, but I wasn’t the kind of 8th grader who read social theory. Even as he stopped uploading and I drifted away from that genre, I still regarded him with fondness. Then, during COVID-19, he admitted to a whole host of allegations, including relationships with minors. I was left reeling with the . . . guilt? Anger? Sadness? Truthfully, I never figured out how to feel. I boxed him away and moved on, resolving to memory-hole this monster and his “art”.
But then another content creator came onto the scene with the same gimmick. Cry had a very specific persona: a person wearing a green hoodie and white face mask. This new guy had copied it down to the brass tacks. It infuriated me. I hated this creator’s guts. But why? My YouTuber was a monster, and here I was complaining obsessively over his spoiled honor. What right do I have? Are my objections an insult to the people my YouTuber hurt? Is it somehow, by some lame praxis, a good thing that this new guy took his schtick? I genuinely don’t know, and I can’t fall back into the safety of some dispassionate assessment of Cry’s “art,” because he played video games. His “art” was stupid.
Am I willing to swallow these allegations to keep comfort in Cry’s work? Admittedly, in some ways, yes. Recently, I had gotten nostalgic for a certain game, and Cry was the only person I knew who had played it. Years after his downfall, I found myself gingerly clicking on old series of his. I felt like I had given into something horrible through the mere act of watching, and while I didn’t have the rush of affection I was afraid of, I also didn’t feel the disgust I was hoping for. I watched the whole series with a knot in my stomach, unable to give it up, unable to lean in. I read the comments beneath the video and took odd solace in their similar feelings. We commiserated in a form of homesickness, standing outside an old friend’s house years after that friend had moved away. There’s that parasocial relationship again. Cry wasn’t my friend, he was a stranger—a talking doll I played a form of pretend with—but like a friend, he was important to me.
I bring him up because Dederer sharply points out how people say “we” when really they mean “I”. I cop to that, and while I think other people—fellow fans—should be interrogating their behavior, I thought I would show my hand out of good will. I love trash, and this is a personal question. At the end of the day, I am here to defend myself.
I don’t think Dederer writes with active neglect. She writes about what she loves, and she has good taste. “What I like” and “what is good” often overlap, and I think many people see the question as one in the same. I don’t want to imply I am more insightful or clever than Claire Dederer. She wanted to tackle a lot more than this very narrow topic. While I think “A Fan’s Dilemma” is a misleading subtitle given the shifting focus of her essays, it is not an explicit fault. I just get frustrated. When writing this review, I—like many writers—talked incessantly about it, trying to refine it down to something intelligible. My mom’s response sticks out most to me. In trying to connect, to display her understanding of my half-formed thesis, she invoked Harvey Weinstein and said, “He made so many amazing movies.” I got annoyed at the time, which was not fair, but it was the perfectly wrong thing to say. Or maybe it was right, since it demonstrates this disconnect so beautifully. I ask what you can excuse, and the response shifts to be about the art. Do you see the deflection? We put the responsibility of “goodness” onto the art, as if it has to prove itself worthy enough to escape culpability. We are no longer the judged, but the judging, slipping out of the hot-seat, and the fight morphs into a philosophical conversation about the exonerative quality of good art. Besides, what even is good art anyway? My impulse, back then, was to say Harvey Weinstein was a producer, which complicates his roles in his movies, and that movies are such a team effort we have to consider other people when deciding to condemn. Then I got more frustrated, because I’d done the thing I’d spent multiple drafts complaining about. We had started arguing if the movies are still good, despite his hand in it. Who cares? We watch terrible stuff all the time. The question is whether you’re able to look at the harm and decide you are okay with it—not as a moral condemnation, but as an emotional self-assessment. We have to make this call all the time, in every facet of our lives. Playing coy does not take the decision away. If anything, it makes you turn to excuses or denial when something you love is questioned in this way, which is arguably worse than just accepting it.
Dederer’s essays are not an answer, nor are they pretending to be. Like this review, they are an exploration. She was exploring the facets of monstrousness in art. I’m exploring our responsibility in consuming it. I can’t end this spiral with any finality because there is no one metric for what we’re supposed to do. Our limits are deeply personal and extremely varied, and, unfortunately, there is no answer that doesn’t result in some form of harm. It’s unsustainable to think otherwise.