An Acceptable Level of Failure

Melody Heide in conversation with Claire Dederer's "Monsters"

I first met Melody Heide through a mutual friend. We were both applying to MFAs, and needed an extra set of eyes for our application materials. We forged a quick bond through art, and have been friends — and writers’ group pals—since. We’ve traded stories and book recs for well over a decade now. Melody’s writing is lyrical, concise, and cuts to the bone, confronting big questions of motherhood, loss and how it lingers in the body, the varieties of religious bafflements, and what it means to make a home. I’m usually reminded of Maggie Nelson or Sarah Manguso, and I’m often left with much to ponder. When I found out that Melody was considering writing about Monsters, I was elated. I’m about 100 pages into the book myself, and the book feels like one of those rare books that is urgent, and it cuts through a lot of the bullshit people talk about when they talk about cancel culture. I couldn’t think of a better person to consider this book at this moment. Without further ado, here’s Melody Heide. (Go follow her Substack!)

-Josh

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma A Conversational Review in 36 parts


1.
It’s mid-July and my best friend and I are in the nose-bleed section at our local stadium. We are screaming and dancing with 80,000 other people as the sun sets. Directly across from us is a triptych three-story screen that streams Beyoncé as she and her dancers perform on the stage below. It’s the Renaissance tour, and when she gets to the radio hit “Break My Soul”, it shifts into a remix and layers in Madonna’s “Vogue”. She changes the spoken word portion, listing Black female artists. Nina Simone, Badu, Lauryn Hill, Solange Knowles, Roberta Flack, Lizzo. Artist speaking to artists, acknowledging the ongoing creative conversation.

2.
In early August, Lizzo was accused of harassment, including body shaming and sexual misconduct. 

3.
“Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography pf the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.” 

4.
Lizzo fell, and we fluttered like moths with damaged wings. A friend with a significant number of followers on her social media posted the news and several people commented, "I just can’t with this one."

5.
“But hold up for a minute: who is this ‘we’…? 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. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think, We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you.”

6.
Frisson is French for shiver and it’s a physical reaction to art—the consumer gets chills. Generally, music. But other art forms can provoke these sensations. It happens most when there’s a disruption in the expectation.

7.
I often am late to cultural touchstones. Earlier this year I fell hard for the Hamilton soundtrack, particularly “Satisfied” (101 plays this year so far). Every time I listen to it, I notice something else—how the harp, piano, percussion, strings, Renée Elise Goldsberry’s voice mixing traditional Broadway and rap. The chorus adding dimension, complexity, deeper meaning. The previous song “Helpless” is layered in. The song builds on Goldsberry’s voice until there is a breakdown, a quick discordance, the top-tier strain of her voice--"To your union"-- the breaking of tension, and every single time when it resolved into high notes and then low, wistful notes, I get chills. Frisson. I don't want to tell anybody how obsessed I've become with “Satisfied”. It's a fucking brilliant song, and I don't want anybody to come in and tell me I'm wrong.

8.
So—how do we (me, you) continue to love the art we love when our heroes have fallen? Claire Dederer works through this question in her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In the beginning of the book, she looks for someone in authority who can answer. She cheekily says, “Looking back, I’m fascinated by my immediate instinct to find an expert—and a white male expert, at that." She finds no one, and so she sets out to answer it herself. Dederer, like so many of us, wishes for an easy answer, a calculation, a balance: “the greatness of the work and the terribleness of the crime” even while acknowledging that such “a calculator is laughable, unthinkable.” She looks through the lens of monstrous artists such as Polanski, Rowling, Hemingway. As a skilled memoirist, she holds the mirror up to herself: “Perhaps I come to you with my own kind of stain—the stain of being a certain kind of white middle-class feminist. Maybe you think my solutions will be typical of such a person. Maybe I thought the same thing. Maybe I assumed at first that my findings would assert the tenets of liberalism. Maybe we’ll both be surprised.”

9. 
I wasn’t late to Lizzo. In the summer of 2014, my husband called me back to our office and said, You’ve got to see this music video. And there was Lizzo riding on the back of a motorcycle through the streets of Minneapolis, rapping “Batches of Cookies” on the steps of the State Capital during a pride demonstration. 

10.
Hold the image of a white tablecloth, the movement of a glass of wine being knocked over, the red seeping and crawling. Dederer works with this image throughout the book—the stain. We (I, you) can’t think of Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, Sylvia Plath without thinking of the stain. Some of us can still enjoy that art even with the history and some of us can’t; the biography, the stain, can’t be siphoned back into the purity of the first experience of that art.

11.
“And so, like many or most women, I have a dog in this particular fight: when I ask what to do about the art of monstrous men, I’m not just sympathizing with their victims—I’ve been in the same shoes, or similar. I have the memory of those monstrous things being done to me. I don’t come to these questions with a coldness or a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathizer to the accusers. I am the accusers. And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper? This tension—between what I’ve been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one.” 

12.
Much of Dederer’s focus is on the current easy access to biography and to capitalism. 30-plus years ago you could only know a limited amount about an artist, whatever was released by PR or paparazzi. It was easier to deny or hide or both. Pre-Google, to enjoy art, to consume it, to savor, we had to work for it. We had to travel to the museum or library or record store or music venue. We had to find people whose taste we aligned with and trusted. We didn’t have to think or analyze so much. We just had experience and community.

13. 
(I know it sounds like I’m glamorizing the good old days—I’m not. It’s important to acknowledge the harm that many artists have done AND to try and find ways to hold them accountable.)

14.
Dederer says, “I wanted to tell the story of the audience. The audience wants something to watch or read or hear…And yet, as I looked around, I saw that the audience had a new job…a group outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over."

15.
A couple of months into my repeat listening of Hamilton’s “Satisfied,” I discovered that, of course, there’s been controversy. I mean, how could there not be—it’s a musical that is basically glamorizing terrible parts of American history.

16.
“When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. Nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there."

17.
I grew up with a mother whose primary identity was not wife or mother but evangelical Christian and therefore cancel culture wasn’t new to me. When I was a child my mother cancelled our subscription to the Disney channel twice—once because Disney started hosting “Gay Days” at Disney World and once because a beloved show used the phrase “god damn”. At summer youth group camp, on the last emotionally high night, when we all decreed ourselves ready for the mission field and we had signed our purity pledges, we’d all gather our “secular” cassette tapes and CD and destroy them by hammer and by fire. 

19.
This summer, I reread Greek mythology, and wow, those gods and goddesses sure were jerks. Driven by lust, jealousy, and pride they committed monstrous acts. They created monsters. 

20.
“We now exist in a structure where we are defined, in the context of capital, by our status as consumers…Ourselves are constructed from the shitty stuff of consumption, but we remain feeling people nonetheless.”

21.
The artist makes the art, the audience consumes the art, the audience develops a parasocial relationship and feels that they know the artist, in “a relationship that exists outside the art”  which can monetarily benefit the artist, but can be destructive for the audience because “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.” 

22.
Dederer as a narrator is curious, charming, confessional, observant. It’s difficult for me not to form a parasocial relationship with her—the voice she establishes as the narrator makes me want to make her my real-life friend. She asks questions, she invites the reader to search for the answer with her. From the details she gives about herself, I characterize her a cool Gen-Xer. 


23.
“When we ask ‘what do we do with the art of monstrous men?’ we are putting ourselves into a static role—the role of consumer…Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works.”

24.
Capitalism and morality are terrible bedfellows. The only power most of us have is in the few spare dollars we have and in socially isolating those who have broken the moral code and so we exercise those as we are able. 

25.
My monstrosity is that I’m a hypocrite; most often, I don’t care—I’m still going to listen to the music, view the art, watch the movie, read the books. I grew up strung between an evangelical and Buddhist and in both these religions, well, everyone gets their just deserts whether by hell-fire or karma. I deny it but I care more about what my fellow liberals think. Am I signaling enough?

26.
But no. That isn’t totally true. For me, “Smooth Criminal” is stained. Midnight in Paris is stained. Harry Potter, stained. And now Barbie, with the opening song by Lizzo.

27.
Something I heard once—the only way to enjoy the art of monsters is privately. But art creates community. When you go to a concert, a book reading, a musical, you exist in a space where almost everyone around you loves the work. You can strike up a conversation with the stranger next to you about your common love and leave the space with a new friend. There’s a particular energy you can’t experience alone.

28.
I saw Barbie twice in the theatre; the first time was before the allegations of Lizzo had been released. I saw it in on a Monday evening in an old theatre that was packed. Moms, daughters, grandmas, best friends and cousins. There was pink and joy and delight in the air. Unapologetically female. The first scene riffs on 2001: A Space Odyssey but then we are in Barbie’s world and Lizzo’s song “Pink” sets the trajectory from the state of stasis to the inciting incident. The second time I saw it was after the allegations. Stained and yet somehow appropriate. The real world not perfect yet. 

29.
“The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” 

30. 
We exist in a state of chaos and tension, and so we are always looking to make meaning. We make rules and we look for rules to give structure to ambiguous ways we exist in the world—everything is a construct. We are looking for a way to release that tension. Shouting online is one way to release that cognitive, dissonant energy. 

31.
We are all capable of monstrosity, and of being saints. 

32.
More than anything I want monsters to recognize their monstrosity. I want them, me, us to step back and reflect. To make it right somehow. To come back into their art.

33.
I still love Harry Potter, but I removed the prints and Funko Pop dolls that were in my campus office. I wondered if I was censoring myself, but it doesn’t harm me to remove these identifying objects. However, I know it could harm my students, it could distract them from conversations about their own art. This doesn’t make me a hero; it makes me human.

34.
Towards the end, Dederer quotes critic Dave Hickey and his definition on the difference between beautiful and beauty. Beautiful is a social construct while beauty is something that happens to us. We can’t help our physical and emotional reactions. Frisson.

35.
“We want the story to be one of redemption. But it’s always going to be more complicated than that. It’s going to be about fucking up and having been fucked up.”

36. 
The model for the original Barbie came from a German sex doll named Lilli. J.K. Rowling refuses to apologize and every day people threaten to kill her and her children. A Christian and a liberal burn her books. She continues to assert her views and by a turn of talent and luck, she is protected by her wealth and privilege; she is continually called a c*nt, a whore, a bitch. Lizzo denies the claims and is back in the studio. Somewhere a child reads about Perseus saving himself by reflecting a monster back to herself; he chops off her head. Medusa, a monster created by a goddess who was angry that Poseidon ravished Medusa in her temple. But no, that isn’t right. Say it--Poseidon raped. Medusa was punished. When Medusa’s head is severed, Pegasus flies out, beauty from ugliness. Powerful evangelicals, ones still fawning over Trump, who take away women’s bodily autonomy, who make politics about gender, send planes of practical supplies to the devastated island of Maui. Tonight, somewhere, Beyoncé will sing “Break My Soul (The Queen’s Remix)” a remix and when she lists the great black women musicians, replacing Madonna’s original lineup, maybe she won’t name Lizzo and maybe she will. 

She will sing, "Release, repressed, suppressed, regressed, redirect all that anger/Give it to me/You can do it."

What is a tolerable level of cognitive dissonance, of tension without reprieve? For you? For me? For us? At the end of Monsters, Dederer’s answer is simple and complex. It’s the easiest and the most difficult. It’s what makes great art and what makes us human and not just monsters.


Melody Heide's writing has recently appeared in Brevity Online, Whale Road Review, and the anthology Love & Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life. She teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College and writes occasional essays about creating a new American dream over at https://melodyheide.substack.com


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