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.
Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Fan”
Dederer uses the example of how the Harry Potter mania of the early 2000s and 2010s was undercut when J. K. Rowling began making anti-trans statements online, illustrating how an artist’s biography can stain the reception of their art. Recalling her own children’s love of Harry Potter, Dederer explores the downfall of Rowling through a personal lens. She observes that the Harry Potter universe “offer[s] a navigable system for belonging” to its fanbase, especially LGBTQ+ children who face social exclusion and persecution in the outside world. In light of the safe space that the books and movies had provided for this community, Dederer identifies Rowling’s use of anti-trans rhetoric as particularly hurtful.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Critic”
The author shifts her focus to the early days of her career as a film critic in Seattle. As a young woman surrounded by older male colleagues, she recalls feeling incapable of critiquing films objectively. In retrospect, she realizes that the men surrounding her only assumed a position of objective authority because they were ignorant of their own biases. This allusion of objectivity, she argues, was a byproduct of their hegemony, and of the luxury they enjoyed by primarily watching and critiquing films made from a male perspective. With the benefit of hindsight, Dederer asserts that she “didn’t know it when [she] was a young critic, [but her] subjectivity is the crucial component of [her] experience as a critic” (73). Acknowledging that all experiences of art are subjective, she concludes the chapter by asserting that the process of art consumption is in fact the collision of a consumer’s biography with the artist’s biography.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Genius”
Having addressed the word “monster” in a previous chapter, Dederer now turns to the word “genius,” which is frequently used to describe the same set of artists. In short, she finds “genius” to be a copout, a word that lovers of a particular artist can use to excuse that person’s bad behavior. “Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it,” she writes. “When we don’t want to hold our heroes accountable” (84-85). The idea of bad behavior, she argues, is baked into the very notion of genius. She uses two prominent artists of the 20th century to illustrate this dynamic: Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway.
Both Picasso and Hemingway were artists fixated on masculinity, and both were domestic abusers in their personal lives. Dederer posits that unrestrained masculinity (particularly white masculinity) is an essential component of the modern genius archetype, and that Picasso and Hemingway were key agents in the construction of that idea. Their notorious violence against women and children boosted their genius status, rather than detracting from it. Their stories suggest to Dederer that consumers of art are actually drawn to monsters, even if they are also repulsed by them.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Anti-Semite, the Racist, and the Problem of Time”
Another way in which Dederer believes consumers soothe their discomfort around artistic monsters is through the fallacy of “The Past.” She argues that modern people believe themselves to be inherently more moral than the people who came before them as a function of time passing. This belief softens the blame for historical artists who have done bad things because consumers can tell themselves that the artists were ignorant of their own badness. Dederer argues that this is a fundamentally wrong notion that has its origins in liberal thought.
She uses the example of Richard Wagner to demonstrate these principles. She watches a documentary about the German composer hosted by British actor Stephen Fry, in which Fry seems convinced that he could persuade Wagner not to make antisemitic comments if only he had the power to time travel. Dederer disputes this premise, insisting that Wagner was perfectly aware of his antisemitism, and even gleeful in his hatred.
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
Dederer continues her thematic engagement with Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption by exploring different aspects of how consumers relate to artists: how they idolize their favorite artists, and how that idolization can deteriorate. All of the artists she discusses in this section have made highly influential, beloved works, but the actions they take in their personal lives, and sometimes even their artistic choices, complicate contemporary audiences’ ability to love them. In this sense, they are each a clear-cut example of Dederer’s titular “monsters,” figures whose personal lives “disrupt our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms” (47).
To expand on the metaphor of Biography as “Stain,” Dederer analyzes J. K. Rowling, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso, interrogating the circumstances that allowed these artists to ascend to such venerated status. J. K. Rowling is the most modern monster explored in the book, which reflects her particular form of fame:
Harry Potter fan-ship twined with the growth of the Tumblr platform, which in turn twined with the growth of a new kind of LGBTQ+ movement…kids who found solace in un-embodied community, whether it was Hogwarts or online” (61).
The author indicates that the passion of this unembodied community derives both from the accessibility of the art and from the high stakes of consumer preference in the 21st century. Dederer writes that the contemporary fan “steals part of her identity from the art, even as it steals its importance from her” (55). She contrasts this intimate relationship between modern artists and fans with earlier generations, who enjoyed a different degree of distance and anonymity from the artists they admired. Contemporaries of Picasso, Hemingway, and Wagner could enjoy their work, often blissfully unaware of the transgressions of their personal lives. The personal lives of artists could remain mysterious and alluring—“screen[s] upon which the audience could project its ideas about what an artist ought to look like. And it was a capacious, expansive image too, like all the best images, the ones that are really indelible” (93). Dederer argues that this sweet spot, between the biographical oversaturation of the digital age, and the biographical wasteland of the pre-industrial world, allowed artists at the beginning of the 20th century to cultivate their celebrity images and flourish commercially.
Dederer’s analysis posits that all of these stories of love for art are tainted by the stain of the artists’ biographies, and this stain works to destroy their previous status as idols. She argues that the contemporary popular disillusionment with J. K. Rowling is heightened by the emphasis on fandom inherent to digital capitalism:
This dynamic makes the stain more destructive—the more closely we are tied to the artist, the more we draw our identity from them and their art, the more collapsed the distance between us and them, the more likely we are to lose some piece of ourselves when the stain starts to spread (59).
Dederer positions Rowling as representative of the immediate impact and inescapability of the stain in the digital age. Her decision to make her anti-trans views public on the internet catalyzed a swift, wide-reaching, and immediate stain on her reputation and art, as fans around the world (and celebrities associated with the franchise itself) expressed a sense of personal betrayal over the remarks. In the cases of Picasso, Hemingway, and Wagner, the stain worked its destruction more gradually, reaching viewers decades after the art was made. In the case of all three men, testimony by women in their lives—Mary Welsh, Marina Picasso, and Winifred Wagner, respectively—eventually made the intentionality of their transgressions undeniable to the public. Watching a documentary in which Winifred Wagner delightedly reports her father-in-law’s antisemitism to the camera, Dederer remarks, “The footage was shot in 1975—when anyone would know better. And yet she doesn’t. You can see it in her naughty grin, her conspiratorial asides about what can and cannot be shared with the public” (123). The distance enjoyed for decades by fans of Wagner from the more uncomfortable truths of his personal beliefs is collapsed in an instant by the modern media of film.
In certain moments, the stain works its way into the works of art themselves, making discomfort inevitable for contemporary viewers. Dederer uses Picasso’s Femme au collier jaune (1946) as her chief example, which depicts one of Picasso’s mistresses with a cigarette burn on her cheek, inflicted by the artist. Dederer’s children’s despondent response to the painting—“‘Ugh, this is so depressing,’ said one. ‘What a disgusting creep,’ said the other. ‘Can’t we leave?’”—highlights the knee-jerk distaste with which 21st-century viewers respond to the artistic evidence of Picasso’s brutality. Artworks such as this one collapse the space between the consumer and the artist’s biography entirely, operating in the same way as Winifred Wagner’s unnerving interviews, recorded on screen.
