Who didn’t mind watching Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’, a technically important documentary shot in 1935 to serve the cause of the Third Reich? Or ‘The Birth of a Nation’, which is the mainstay of cinema language but glorifies the Ku Klux Klan? Or Fritz Lang’s lyrical work ‘Nibelungs’, full of classical elements of the Aryan claim? Aren’t many rock songs (for example, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under my thumb’), rap and boleros misogynistic?
Can Richard Wagner’s operas and symphonies be listened to without considering his anti-Semitism? Another thing is that Hitler liked the composer’s music, but Wagner was not responsible for this. How do we respond to a Picasso painting that we know is abusive? How do we read a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline without thinking that he was equally anti-Semitic and collaborator during the Nazi occupation? Do we reject overt misogyny? From Buñuel, Berlanga or Hitchcock?
When we listen to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ or ‘Billie Jean’, can we move away from the case of a child molester, even if he is declared innocent, like what happened to Woody Allen? Or hasn’t anyone felt a strange feeling when they rewatched ‘Manhattan’ and learned everything that was revealed about the director? Are we going to throw away the books of TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf after learning that they are anti-Semitic? What will happen today in Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’? Extreme or pedophilia? Will we laugh again while watching an episode of ‘Louie’ after learning that its author and protagonist, Louis CK, masturbated in front of two women without their consent? Can we enjoy the old James Bond movies and its successor ‘F for Flint’? ‘ and ‘Matt Helm’, aside from their appalling sexism? Should we forget that the former Beatle and jazz trumpeter beat his wives while listening to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ or Miles Davis’ ‘So What’?
Can the author leave his work?
To be fair, there is Harvey Weinstein, towards whom the world has been the harshest. However, he was not an artist in the strict sense, but a producer of artists. And of course there’s Roman Polanski, and it all starts with the director of ‘Disgust’ in this excellent book ‘Monsters’ by Claire Dederer, published in Spanish by Peninsula. Although nothing is that clear, the subtitle makes it very clear: ‘Can an author leave his work?’
Dederer wanted to write a book about Polanski. “I decided to watch his movies. Actually to solve the problem Roman Polanski, the problem of liking someone who has done such a terrible thing. I wanted to be a consumer with moral standards, obviously a good feminist, but I also wanted to be a citizen of the art world. the opposite of a philistine”, he writes in the preface.
“The terrible spoils the wonderful”
After watching the Polish filmmaker’s “The Chimerical Tenant,” “The Devil’s Seed,” “Chinatown” and other films, Dederer expected to feel transformed when he learned what the director of these films had done with an underage boy, penetrating him anally, but there he was. There was no transformation. And he adds something important: “Polanski wouldn’t cause problems for the audience if his movies were really bad. But they are not”. Problem, rejection, contradiction arise when the artist is good, because you recognized yourself in his work or thoroughly enjoyed it. When ‘Manhattan’ was released in 1979, no one said it was a pedophile movie. Allen’s antipathy towards adult women and his rhetoric in favor of young girls were built on later.
It’s a sensitive issue that Dederer approaches with utmost composure, almost nonchalance. “The terrible spoils the wonderful”He writes about the person and the job. “We cannot see, hear or read that magnificent work without remembering that terrible thing. We turn away, succumbing to disgust…or we don’t.” The crux of the matter can be found in this thought: monstrous geniuses“We tell ourselves that we make ethical evaluations, when in reality what we experience are moral emotions.”
They rape, they abandon
Focusing on Woody Allen, he analyzes passages from ‘Manhattan’ and recalls how the director’s character, Isaac, believed that: “If a woman can think, she cannot ejaculate; If she can cum, she can’t think.” Is the character speaking or the creator speaking? Allen said of his relationship with Soon-yi, the adopted daughter of his current partner and ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow: “There’s no logic to this stuff. You meet someone and you fall in love, that’s it.” It’s that simple? Dederer couldn’t be stronger than that, and he relates some of Allen’s attitudes to those of Donald Trump.
The author details many cases and the different ethical and moral aspects these cases imply. Not just men either abusive writers (Sylvia Plath) or what she calls abandoning mothers (singer Joni Mitchell, novelist Doris Lessing): “If the man’s crime is rape, the woman’s crime is giving up care. “The worst thing a woman can do is abandon her children.”
Dederer knows that nothing is completely black and white, even in some aspects of monstrosity. The section dedicated to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ is clearand wrote it after re-reading the novel in the wake of #MeToo. ‘Monsters’ describes certainties and brings up the unknowns. He doesn’t answer. It puts all readers in front of their own mirror.