Notes on Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

“What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” "What do we do about the monstrous people we love?”

I started reading Claire Dederer’s introspective exploration of whether we can separate art from artist—in her words “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” (and later, “what do we do about the monstrous people we love?”)—the day before the election. I only made it a few dozen pages, distracted by Dead Horse Point State Park’s beauty, before the night of counting votes.

By that point Dederer’s discussion had lit in me an impulse to watch Rosemary’s Baby. I’d never seen it. Like many popular works, I’d heard enough from others to sort of feel like I had—the way I kind of know Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad, or The Office—but now I wanted to experience it firsthand. (This, despite Polanski’s monstrousness, a core theme in the book. Should I not have streamed the film? Was my desire to do so some warped, inappropriate response to a work specifically about terrible people, specifically about terrible men?)

So, convinced it might be days before we knew who’d be president, Sean and I…