Recently, a friend and I went to a screening of one of our favorite movies, Moonstruck, followed by a conversation with the screenwriter, now in his early seventies. Onstage he was quick-witted and charming, just the kind of person I’d expected to pen such a smart, savory love story. Afterward, as we headed home on the packed subway, I mentioned to my friend that I’d found the screenwriter to be very handsome. She agreed. We wondered aloud if he had grown into his good looks or if he’d always possessed them. Then we took to Google for the answer.
Holding my phone between us, I swiped through images of him on various red carpets, clutching an Oscar, clutching a Tony, clutching the waist of a blonde actress. My next swipe summoned the headline of a 2012 Daily Mail article, announcing that the screenwriter had been “hit with a $5m lawsuit by 26-year-old who claims he choked her with a belt during rough sex.” We groaned in unison and dutifully read on. In the article, the woman describes multiple “violent encounters” with the screenwriter, alleging that he had laughed when she said he was hurting her during sex, and then complained about her blood staining his sheets. She also claimed that after he sodomized her, she sought medical attention for a bowel obstruction. His lawyers argued that she “willingly returned to him for sex,” and the encounters were therefore consensual. The suit was dismissed in 2013. I put my phone away. My friend and I sat for a moment in deflated silence. “Dammit,” I sighed, stamping my foot on the subway floor. I hated that I’d learned something I didn’t want to know.
“There is no longer any escaping biography,” writes Claire Dederer in her brilliant new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, out today. “Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.” There was a time when learning about the private lives of public figures took effort. What little information you could get your hands on—magazine interviews and profiles, memoirs and biographies, liner notes and museum labels—was mediated by a third party. Today, you can access every detail of an artist’s biography—their schooling, career, awards, personal life (the only thing you care about anyway)—while watching their movies or listening to their music. The search for information is easy, instantaneous, and reliably yields results; every day you can learn something you didn’t know you didn’t know. What’s more, public figures are more willing and able than ever to volunteer information about their lives, unmediated by handlers or publicists or studios.
“The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life,” writes Dederer. “It’s something that happens to us.” I did not pursue information about the screenwriter’s sexual proclivities and ensuing legal woes—the information happened to me. And when it did, emotion preceded thought. Gradually, a coherent question formed: How did this guy make something so perfect? In retrospect, Moonstruck’s male protagonist had already answered this question just a few hours before: “The snowflakes are perfect; the stars are perfect,” he declares to his beloved one snowy evening, walking home from an opera written by a womanizing philanderer with fascist sympathies. “Not us. Not us!”
Monsters centers on a question that’s both timely and trite: Can you—should you—separate art from the artist? In answering, Dederer wisely abstains from the third-person plural. “Who is this ‘we’ that’s always showing up in critical writing?” she asks. “We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority.” We suggests that there is some universal truth that will put this whole thing to bed, for all of us. But this tension between art and artist can’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be resolved collectively. There is no single, correct conclusion to which Dederer can lead the reader. She sure wishes there was—she imagines an online calculator, in which “the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.” No such machine exists because this is a problem not of logic but of love.
It’s also—as evidenced by that operative word consume—a problem of economics. Art is a product—should we boycott artists like we do companies? Divest our resources from racists and rapists, as we would, say, corporate polluters and sweatshop enthusiasts? Dederer wonders: “Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house?” It’s a valid concern—that money spent on the work of a bad man will enrich him personally, thereby enabling (encouraging?) him to keep being bad. But Dederer, a fan of Polanski’s work, decides that if you want to watch Chinatown—if it moves you—then you should watch it. It’s not a moral failing to still enjoy the movie—it’s a feeling.
“The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one,” Dederer writes in the penultimate chapter. “You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” She’s skeptical of the invocation of art in public displays of goodness—what might more cynically be called virtue signaling—though she admits that the “transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and strangely exciting.” In a recent essay for the Yale Review, Garth Greenwell describes “an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art.” Greenwell observes a growing rejection of art that depicts immorality without condemning it—in this case, Philip Roth’s Sabbath Theater, which Greenwell calls “probably the filthiest major American novel I know.” Yet his insights also apply to the impulse to reject artwork for extratextual reasons, e.g. on the basis of its creator’s misdeeds. He concludes that “[a]rt can offer us a crucial moral training, placing us in the impossible position, which is also the only morally defensible position, of cherishing the existence of others we cannot bear.”
Still, it’s tempting to use taste and fandom as moral indicators. Each artist’s offense is a referendum on your principles, and a chance to put them into practice. To defend or disavow? The choice is yours, and it feels good to have a choice. Much of contemporary life is spent feeling powerless amid a circus of horror and injustice, but in the attention economy, viewers and listeners and readers, i.e. consumers, can be powerful agents. Is it possible to wield this power for good, to actually practice a form of ethical consumption under capitalism? Most products—cosmetics, cleaning supplies, running shoes, frozen dinners—can be easily substituted, swapped out for an offering from a more “ethical” company (if there is such a thing). But there are no substitutions for a work of art that moves you. Dederer and I agree: When it comes to cultural products—i.e. art—you have no obligations beyond your own affinities.
And yet—a not small part of me believes that the art we love does reflect on us as people. That, to use the language of consumption, we are what we eat. I for one put outsized stock in personal taste. When I walked into the bedroom of my college crush and struggled to find a woman author among his many towering piles of books, I anticipated (not incorrectly!) irreconcilable differences between us. Years later, I felt an immediate kinship with a coworker (now a good friend!) who told me over happy-hour drinks that he shares my affinity for Joni Mitchell’s Blue and HBO’s The Leftovers.
As for the question of good art by bad people, my own approach to the work of troubling artists is inconsistent, case by case. There are, for one, the artists who have committed serious offenses, violence against women and children. I cringe when I hear Chris Brown’s music, which conjures in my mind’s eye Rihanna’s battered face; I’ve also recently become obsessed with the song “The Color Violet” by the repulsive Tory Lanez, who in 2020 shot Megan Thee Stallion (whose music I love). More inconsistencies: Midnight in Paris remains one of my go-to comfort movies, but I can no longer stand to see Woody Allen appear on screen; the revelations of the damning documentary Leaving Neverland permanently tainted Michael Jackson’s music for me, and I recoiled when a friend recently raved about the jukebox musical, but I still enjoy certain selections from Off the Wall; I love Hemingway and avoid Mailer. The singer-songwriter Don McLean—who pled guilty to domestic violence assault in 2016, was divorced by his wife on grounds of “cruel and abusive behavior,” and is now, at 77, dating a 28-year-old reality TV star—is one of my favorite artists. It sometimes feels arbitrary which art gets soiled in my mind by what Dederer calls “the stain,” but generally art that moves me on some primordial level is immune from staining. Whether that’s fair or right, it doesn’t matter—it’s what happens.
Then there are the borderline cases, irrational aversions that I can’t justify. Dederer gave me the language I needed to make sense of these stains too. A longtime fan of Woody Allen, she writes that she “took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally.” Oh, how many points in artists’ private lives have felt to me like personal betrayals! Engaging with a work of art is, as Dederer puts it, “two biographies meeting”—yours and the artist’s—and I often find myself blinkered by my own biography. I tend, in other words, to project. My compunctions usually align neatly with my personal history. I once declined to interview Salman Rushdie and have abstained from reading his work because of his comments about ex-wife Pamela Lakshmi being a “bad investment” on account of her endometriosis (as a teenager I suffered from debilitating periods). Despite the special place Moulin Rouge holds in my heart, I’ve generally soured on Ewan McGregor’s work since he traded in the mother of his children for the much younger Mary Elizabeth Winstead (when I was 12 my father left my mother for a younger woman). I can’t recall ever having a problem with a woman artist who left her husband, or even her children. “Good for her,” I think, with Lucille Bluth conviction.
And then there are the stains that spring from my own insecurities—again, pure projection. See: John Mulaney, whose first wife was Anna Marie Tendler, a smart, artistically-inclined, and enthusiastically childless woman with whom I very much over-identified. When he left Tendler for the unimpressive actor Olivia Munne, I (absurdly, psychotically) took the fucking, and subsequent impregnation, of Munne as a terrible betrayal of me personally. I’ve since lost all interest in Mulaney’s work, which I used to adore. Now, when I look at John Mulaney, I (absurdly, psychotically) feel rejected, unlovable. His work remains brilliant, no matter what I feel. Yet I still feel—I can’t not feel. “The stain is not a choice,” writes Dederer. “The stain is not a decision we make.”
Reflecting on her own response to the Allen–Yi union, Dederer posits that in such situations, “[w]e tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings.” Sorting out your feelings about an artist is a personal, and deeply intimate, undertaking. It means drawing your own emotional, nonsensical, moveable lines in the sand. It also means paying attention to the way a work art makes you feel, and accepting that these feelings can, and likely will, change. You can’t help what moves or repels you, what draws or disturbs you, be it certain aesthetic choices or certain pieces of extratextual information.
Following the release of Leaving Neverland, Margo Jefferson wrote a new preface to her nimble 2006 book, On Michael Jackson, in which she expresses her devastation at the revelations of Jackson’s abuse and squares them with her admiration for his work. “When the dark materials of life pervade, even taint, the work, does that mean that we must cast it off?” she asks. “It might mean that, but it might also mean that we fight for the parts of it that matter to us.” She urges us to “gather our resources in all their plentitude and variety: intellectual, emotional, moral; aesthetic, ethical, political” and “probe [the] clashes and contradictions, feel their power without being at their mercy.” This is, I think, the correct approach, which Dederer endorses as well. It’s also an approach that demands a lot of you, requiring reflection and inquiry, and one that lays bare certain unsettling but obvious truths: human beings are complicated; no one is wholly good or wholly evil; we can and do love people who do bad things.
I wondered, after learning about the sex life of the septuagenarian screenwriter, if I would ever be able to enjoy his perfect movie again, or if it would succumb to the stain. Next month, my friend (the one from the screening) is hosting a Moonstruck viewing party—it will be my first time watching it with this new knowledge. I don’t know how I’ll feel. Maybe it will color the experience, maybe it won’t. I expect my love for the movie will outweigh any hard feelings I have for its writer, which in itself makes me uneasy. Again, Moonstruck‘s male protagonist—which is to say, the screenwriter putting words in his mouth—says it best: “Love doesn’t make things nice, it ruins everything.”
