44 pages • 1 hour read
Claire DedererMonsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue and Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “The Child Rapist”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, suicide and suicidal ideation, antisemitism and racism, anti-trans bias, genocide, domestic violence, and alcohol use disorder.
In spring 2014, Claire Dederer sets out to make sense of Roman Polanski, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and convicted child rapist. She is plagued by the question of how, as a viewer, to reconcile an artist’s monstrous actions with their beautiful art. Combing through Polanski’s films, she hopes to come up with a clear-cut answer to this question by watching all of his movies and reaching out to former professors who might be able to share relevant literature with her. Frustratedly, however, she realizes no such answer exists. She also realizes that the problem of consuming beautiful art made by a “monstrous” person might not be solvable by thinking, but rather by feeling.
Dederer sets out to write what she calls an “autobiography of the audience,” that will place emphasis on the reception of problematic artists, rather than on the problematic artists themselves. At the time begins writing, she’s unaware of the impending #MeToo Movement, which will place the questions she is trying to answer through her writing at the heart of the American zeitgeist in the late 2010s. Watching films like Rosemary’s Baby, she finds that she cannot refute Polanski’s merits as a filmmaker, even finds his work to be strikingly feminist, at the same time that she is repulsed by the predatory violence he has exhibited in her personal life.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Roll Call”
Dederer turns to an examination of Woody Allen, a filmmaker in whom she has greater personal investment than Polanski. She writes that Allen’s alleged sexual abuse of his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, and his subsequent marriage to stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn strike a personal chord with her because of her own relationship with her stepfather, which was the opposite of predatory: “To accept the idea that Woody was not Soon-Yi’s parent does violence to the very idea of my relationship with Larry,” she writes, “one of the most cherished of my life” (24). As with Polanski, Dederer decides to watch as many of Allen’s films as she can to reexamine her relationship to him and his work.
In this process, the film she finds herself struggling the most to watch is Manhattan (1979), in which Allen’s character, 42-year-old Isaac, dates Tracy, a 17-year-old played by Mariel Hemingway. Watching the movie during the early years of the Trump presidency, Dederer feels horrified by the nonchalance with which Isaac addresses his relationship with Tracy, and how that nonchalance mirrors Allen’s behavior regarding Soon-Yi. Beyond her difficulty with the film itself, Dederer encounters immense resistance from male colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers, when she expresses this discomfort regarding Manhattan. These men insist that she is interpreting the movie incorrectly, that it is wrong to consider the context of Allen’s life when watching it, and that she is ignoring its aesthetic brilliance. Dederer finds these responses to be equally emotional as her own discomfort, though the men themselves insist that they are being logical where she is not. As the #MeToo Movement takes hold over popular culture, she senses that these feelings are central to the audience’s role in her current moment.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Stain”
Dederer begins the chapter by trying to define what it means to be a “monster.” She refers to the novel Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, in which Offill refers to something called “art monsters.” Dederer writes that after the novel came out, she and other female artist friends embraced this term as an aspiration, complicating the purely negative associations Dederer had previously had with the word “monster.” She also observes that the use of the word can distract an angry public from the victims of monstrous behavior and become unproductive in its sweeping condemnation. Ultimately, she decides that in art, a monster is “someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms” (47).
This definition leads her to the issue of how an artist’s biography interacts with the retrospective reception of their work. While having a conversation over text about Michael Jackson, the global pop phenomenon who has been accused of numerous instances of sexual abuse of minors, one of Dederer’s friends tries to determine what eras of his music are acceptable to listen to. He wonders how far back the “stain” of his predation has seeped into Jackson’s discography. Dederer becomes immediately excited by this metaphor of a stain because it evokes the involuntary experience of the audience; it is something that happens to the work that cannot be miraculously removed, even if the audience might want it to be. This dynamic Dederer argues, is particularly heightened in the digital age, when consumers have easy access to the biographies of almost every prominent artist.
Prologue and Chapters 1-2 Analysis
In the first three chapters of Monsters, Dederer places herself in a highly specific cultural moment and space—the predominately white, left-leaning world of Seattle in the mid-2010s. These cultural coordinates inform the questions that she asks of herself and readers—questions central to her book. Describing the living room from which she views Polanski and Allen’s films, she writes:
It was a room that suggested—all those books—that human problems could be solved by the application of careful thought and considered ethics. It was a humanist room…you could call it a room descended from the Enlightenment (10).
The lofty lineage of political thought in which Dederer locates herself—tracing back to Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke—indicates her liberal leanings and her highly educated background.
In addition to Dederer’s personal context, these chapters also establish the national and global political context of her writing. The increasingly prominent #MeToo movement and the early days of the Trump presidency loom large in Dederer’s mind and on the page. She writes:
Trump had been in office for months. People were unsettled and unhappy, and by people I mean women, and by women I mean me. The women met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march (31).
Dederer’s reference to the allegations of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault made against President Donald Trump during and following his presidential campaign locates her work in the larger socio-political context of the #MeToo Movement. A tape of Donald Trump bragging about his sexually abusive behaviors had been leaked by The Washington Post the month before the 2016 election, sparking prolonged public outrage. In response to Trump’s election, 470,000 protesters gathered in Washington, DC, the day after his inauguration for a Women’s March. In evoking these events, Dederer immerses readers in her specific narrative perspective, heightening the memoirist tone of the book.
Dederer combines personal and national context in this early stage of Monsters to convey the relevance and urgency of the book’s subject matter: grappling with Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption. The author notes the importance of the questions she’s asking for society as a whole. Specifically, she senses a shift in the political significance of consuming art. “At the particular historical moment where I found myself, a moment awash in bitter revelation,” she writes, “the audience had become…a group outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over” (42). Dederer sees her own rage about filmmakers like Polanski and Allen reflected in others and hears the questions she’s asking herself repeated back to her. One friend tells her, “I don’t know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen” (28), pointing to the book’s thematic exploration of Biography as “Stain.” Through these anecdotes, Dederer implies that the women she describes looking at each other bewildered on the street in the wake of the Trump election are her own circle of friends, but she ambiguates her own community to project the broader, national feeling of unrest about men in power with a track record of sexual abuse.
Dederer views Misogynistic Structures in the Art World as emblematic of larger societal systems of misogyny. Her oscillation between focusing on small-scale and large-scale aspects of sexism—just as she shifts perspective between her cozy living room and the country as a whole—illustrates an experience of misogyny both universal and deeply personal. Dederer frames this immersion in socio-political experience as central to Monsters in which she asks questions about the ethics of art consumption in direct response to the political environment. When she asks what to do about “the art of monstrous men,” there is an implied question about what to do with monstrous men more generally, men whose presence has inundated her newsfeed.
