Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

This is a book that I probably read for the wrong reasons, and a book that I was ultimately unsatisfied with. But in the book’s defense, it could never succeed at what I wanted from it.

This is a book that asks the question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men?

That question above was literally the title of an article the book’s author wrote back in 2017. She expanded that article into a book.

Public people do bad things and they get themselves “canceled.” It’s easy to walk away from a politician, but what about an artist who has contributed something that we personally hold dear. Can we still like their art?

For me, I wonder about Kevin Spacey. He did some bad things, clearly. But he’s a great actor, and I love his work. What do I do about this? Can I still enjoy? Should I feel shame about that?

In the article, the author says this:

They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or…we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.

She starts off by talking about Roman Polanski, how she loves his movies, but how he’s a monster for the sex crime he admitted to almost 50 years ago. Every chapter has a subtitle of problematic people: Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, J.K. Rowling, and a lot of others that I didn’t know.

The inclusion of Rowling is interesting, because the book is abashedly about bad men. And this is where it later drifts into some odd territory. There’s a shift about three-quarters of the way through where the author explains that men can be monsters through all sorts of different acts, but women are considered monsters thought just one: abuse or abandonment of their children. (Again, J.K Rowling is an outlier here, since she did none of that.)

In many places, the book is just a long train of thought with lots of questions. It’s very personal – you hear the author from every sentence – and it reads like a plaintive question that can never be answered. The author has no solutions. She just keeps asking the same questions over and over.

The book comes together a bit in the last few pages. The author says our love for artists – even monstrous ones – is a lot like human love. Sometimes he hate what our kids do, but we still love our children. Sometimes we hate what our lovers do, but we still find ourselves drawn to them. Human love is fallible and illogical sometimes.

What do we do about the terrible people we love? Do we excise them from our lives? Do we enact a justice, swift and sure? Do we cancel them? Sometimes. But to do is an excruciating process…

And she sums it up with this:

When we talk about the problem of the art of monstrous men, we are really talking about a larger question – the problem of human love. The question “what do we do with the art” is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful? …

What do we do with the terrible people in our lives? Mostly, we keep loving them.

Now, that sounds definitive and clear, but it’s less so throughout the entire book. About two-thirds of the way though, I wondered why I had started reading it in the first place – what could the author possibly say to me that would help me figure out Kevin Spacey or anyone else?

And she wasn’t helping. She got downright whiny in places. In some passages, she was bordering on incoherent.

But in the end, the “family” angle got me thinking. Love isn’t perfect (even parasocial love). We compartmentalize people all the time. Life is a series of case-by-case evaluations, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

…and so was the book. And maybe that’s the point?

If you’re looking an answer to the question, it’s not here. But it will make you think a bit.