Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  The impulse that draws us to these depressing visual images is pretty much the same one that allows essentially sane and well-adjusted sorts to enjoy the dark art of a band like Hole or Marilyn Manson or a poet like Plath or a novel like She’s Come Undone or a movie like Shine, which was considered a surprise success even though it had the obvious appeal of allowing any parent who saw it to congratulate himself because he wouldn’t beat his child and he wouldn’t drive him crazy with Rachmaninoff—without that same parent having to concede that David Helfgott is one of those needy, annoying people he couldn’t possibly abide if this were real life and not a movie. While the conventional wisdom would insist that a happy ending is required to make something a “feel-good” movie, in fact plenty of films that allow us to smugly applaud ourselves for never falling that low—but for still having the sensitivity to appreciate and care about those who have fallen that low just enough to spend two hours watching Frances or Betty Blue—seem the very definition of “feel-good,” from a certain liberal humanist perspective. Let’s face it: they don’t have movie theaters or bookstores or music emporia in mental wards. The audience for crazy art is mostly not crazy people. And no matter how many functioning dysthymics there are walking the streets on Prozac, they are not a large enough special-interest group to constitute the entire audience for Metallica albums or even for Kieslowski films: there is, apparently, a whole world of perfectly normal people who dig other people’s pain.

  And glum photography put to commercial use capitalizes on our need for sullen art, our culture’s attempt to invent a medicine man, the shaman who suffers so we don’t have to: he provides the 1 percent homeopathy to the public—the catharsis experience, the leading edge without the deep fatal wound—while he himself is infected with 100 percent of the disease. And just as inoculations are a bodily blockade against microscopic predators, the unhappy visual images that flood into popular culture screen out the ugliness of depression and insanity and make it all so beautiful—through an artist’s rendering, or through a camera’s lens, with the help of a light meter and proper play between a bright flash and frightened, frozen eyes, a scared and sad woman, a body caging vulnerability—can be converted by art into a breathtaking image. Charles Peterson’s unruly, uncontained black-and-white photographs of Soundgarden, Nirvana, Green River and other Seattle bands in motion—using a slow shutter speed and flaming-flash technique that’s become his trademark—create quite a commotion, lots of toppling over and falling into drum sets, lots of drunk and disorderly incoherence, so much disturbed energy that so captures the exuberance of grunge’s downward spiral it is easy to forget that many of the people in Peterson’s pictures have since died. But if Peterson’s lens tended to focus on men, music videos stalked distraught, unstrung women. While MTV was still in its infancy, Paulina Porizkova was already the windblown damsel in distress for the Cars’ “Drive”; Sofia Coppola plays the drugged-out roughed-up babe of the Chateau Marmont variety in the clip for the Black Crowes’ “She Talks to Angels”; in the video for “Silent All These Years,” Tori Amos is boxed into fetal position, in a striking concoction of photographs hued in blue and orange and purple, artfully Xeroxed onto stark white paper so that the singer looks as delicate as a watercolor painting, even as the song affirms her strength; in “If It Makes You Happy,” Sheryl Crow casts herself as a caged animal on display in an indoor zoo, paving the way for the black-and-white follow-up video for “Every Day Is a Winding Road,” a chronicle of coming to terms that’s full of Clearasil close-ups and introspective wanderings.

  In fashion photography, heroin chic has become an idiom of choice, beginning in 1990 with pictures Corinne Day took of a newly discovered Kate Moss, making her the face of the British magazine The Face—in a layout whose cranky, incandescent lights and bathroom-tile setting posed Moss’ waifishness as dope-sickness, hunger. People dug it. Suddenly fragile, delicate, troubled looks were a trend, and waif models like Emma Balfour, Beri Smithers and Amber Valletta became the antidote to the bigness that was Cindy, Claudia, Naomi and Linda. British photographer Andrew Macpherson described these somber babies as “elegantly wasted,” two words that were also the name of an INXS album whose title track was accompanied by a fashionably brooding video. (For what it’s worth, the band’s lead singer, Michael Hutchence, committed suicide by hanging himself in his room at the Ritz-Carlton in Sydney in late 1997.) Since the early nineties, Kate Moss has herself filled out a bit, she has joined the ranks of the first-name-only supermodels and her looks have proved unexpectedly versatile. But the bored slouch of the world-weary continues to style ads for Calvin Klein’s cKOne and cKbe, the sex-neutral fragrances that are sold with campaigns picturing both men and women, standing around looking unwashed and unhappy, for a total effect that makes them appear to be playing a game of charades and doing their damnedest to pantomime “existential angst.” These commercials have been around so long that they actually parody themselves, but in case anyone is not in on the joke, Boston Market now has a television spot that shows models blabbing inanities at no one in particular and talking about hunger as if it were an intellectual concept, until some nice, ordinary-looking guy steps onto the set and tells these skinny people dressed in black that the pain they’re feeling inside is just what most people call an appetite and they just really need to eat.

  Pasty, starved, disheveled, dirty: the heroin chic look begs the question of whether it is dictated by fashion or if fashion is dictated by the drug itself. After the war in Afghanistan ended, the country’s 800,000 poppy growers who had fled to Pakistan for refuge returned to their homeland and resumed their tradition-bound agrarian trade; at the same time, with bumper crops of opium in Myanmar, Southeast Asian heroin traffickers were able to flood New York and its environs with a cheap street brand called China White, a strain of smack so potent that snorting it is a realistic, nonprohibitive alternative to shooting up. Becoming a junkie in New York City has never been so easy. As teenage girls all alone in Manhattan, models are natural candidates for substance abuse, making it a lucky coincidence that, as Stephen Fried writes in Thing of Beauty, “some girls [are] even more attractive to photographers when they [are] high than when they [are] straight: certain drugs produce certain faraway looks or stoke certain inner fires that work for certain pictures.” Fried’s 1994 book, a biography of Gia Carangi—the dark, brooding lesbian junkie who made it to the cover of Cosmopolitan and Vogue before succumbing to an AIDS-related death in 1987, at age twenty-six—may actually be contributing to junk contagion by creating a cult around Gia. A group of young models, calling themselves “Gia’s Girls,” have apparently taken up heroin in homage, heartened by the knowledge that the large, bloody abscess on Gia’s hand that eventually rendered the cover girl unemployable will never be a problem for them, since they don’t use needles. “There aren’t a lot of signs, aside from the way it makes you itch and keep scratching,” Zoe Fleischauer, a twenty-one-year-old model and recovering heroin addict told Allure, in a profile the magazine did of her habit. “People aren’t likely to notice. Models don’t have tracks on their arms; it’s more common to snort it rather than shoot up.” If enough young models are using, perhaps heroin chic is fashion’s elastic attempt to accommodate what it can’t contain, to give dull eyes and empty stares and limp limbs a forum for expression, to make languor and helplessness seem glamorous. “The nineties,” Amy Spindler wrote in The New York Times in May 1996, following fashion shows full of red-eyed models with stringy, slimy hair, “may well be remembered as the decade when fashion served as a pusher—a pusher of what appear to be the best-dressed heroin addicts in history.”

  It would be easy enough to just say that’s fashion, hemlines up, hemlines down, ho-hum, who cares? But drug addiction and mental illness are serious things, they claim lives. And while many suffering souls have beautified and embellished themselves in various ways to gain sympathy for their cause, the effect is often like a charity ball with too much glitter and champagne and conspicuous
consumption—all that luxury makes us wonder why the cause needs our help. For some strange reason, a woman crying out in pain is less sympathetic than one suffering in silence—and pictures of fashion models are always silent. In Carnal Knowledge, Ann-Margret delivers the best performance of her career as Jack Nicholson’s frustrated, depressed girlfriend, buxom in black lace nighties that she never takes off because all she does is sleep—a firecracker when she first met him, she has been reduced by his neglect and her boredom into a nagging shrew, a pill-popper of the classic sixties demented homemaker variety, without the benefit of even being married. But when she takes an overdose, calculated to catch Nicholson’s attention, the movie maneuvers us into siding with him, all calm and charm, stuck with this manipulative nightmare. In this surprisingly realistic portrait of a typically annoyed response to a suicide attempt, even a hot tomato like Ann-Margret seems shrill and vile: while there is no way to draw attention to her desperation other than to make a lot of noise, it is that very shriek that drives people away. In real life, the beauty is dwarfed by the overwhelming nature of the mental disease, which is something that still lifes captured through a camera’s lens cannot show.

  But even worse, sometimes it is the pain itself that is so beautiful—instead of masking the beauty, the madness only enhances it. One of the most striking photographs of Edie Sedgwick was taken in 1967 after the second time her Chelsea Hotel room had gone up in flames as a result of her drugged indifference. She sits on a couch, dangling earrings contrasting her pixie-girl haircut, her burns wrapped in bandages, her hand close to her face, her eyes gently closed, heavy with mascara and glitter and fake lashes—she is all eyes even when her lids are so weighed down. It’s as if she wouldn’t leave her room without putting her face on, fire be damned—a vanity that is sick in its stupidity and touching in its tenacity. The picture I am describing is of someone who has just had her wounds dressed after surviving a fire, it is a horrible thing, but the beauty is in the plainness of the pain, the glamour of fire, the bohemia of it all. We look at this photo and get sucked into its brute loveliness, rubbernecking through a lens across several years, knowing that its subject is a woman who could have been killed, a woman who did indeed die by her own means shortly thereafter. It is a picture of somebody who should be dead, and is dead. It is madness in repose, and the allure is so blatant that it’s hard to remember what a miserable person Edie Sedgwick was.

  And the photography and artwork that portray and celebrate depression not only fail to enlighten us about the emotional illness of the ravishing subject—if anything, they make us appreciate it too much, enjoying the aesthetics rather than aiding with an antidote—but also fail to increase our generosity toward the majority of mentally ill people whose pain is not so pretty. Anyone who has ever taken a tour of a loony bin can tell you that there aren’t terribly many Zeldas or Edies in the schizophrenic ward, and even the ones who are there look terrible—slack-jawed, slouchy, spacy, sallow from institutional lighting, puffy from institutional cooking or just plain ugly from indifference to appearance or exhaustion or any of the many other side effects that the lockup can result in.

  But forget mental institutions—already the rarefied hospital air could have a salubrious effect on the inmates. Instead take a look at the sick among us. Anyone who walks around the streets of a major metropolitan area will notice that the gutters and sidewalks are littered with the insane and infirm bodies of homeless people, most of whom fell into their destitute, deracinated poverty because of mental illness. These street people, the ones talking to angels or just plain talking to themselves, the ones panhandling on the subway or standing with placards on the median of the highway—these people are smelly, filthy, lousy, shameless, plainly unappealing. And yet, their schizophrenia or manic-depression or alcoholism is no less worthy of sympathy than that of a gorgeous heiress. Mental illness is incredibly ugly, and it is these devastated casualties of deinstitutionalization that walk our urban streets who give the truest illustration of just how ugly the experience of emotional breakdown is. They look the way Anne Sexton feels. They don’t allow us to deny how bad things are.

  While Mary Ellen Mark and other Arbus acolytes would seem to provide a countervailing force to heroin chic by photographing the real homeless and the truly dispossessed, this work only comes across as some politically correct gesture at—at what? It’s a tired theme, these pictures of what is ugly and sad, so overdone that it doesn’t make us feel anything except occasionally grossed out, and the photographer-as-do-gooder starts to seem just plain exploitative—I mean, at least Kate Moss is getting paid. Worst of all, these portraits of poverty do nothing to connect the emotional life of, say, Frances Farmer with that of a greasy, grimy homeless woman—they do nothing to show that the mental state may be the same, but one was born beautiful and talented and the other was not. (It is worth noting, for instance, that supermodel Niki Taylor, who is twenty-two and the single mother of twin boys, with no skills or education, would probably be regarded as just another burdensome welfare recipient living off our tax dollars if she weren’t so beautiful.) In all these pictures of society’s marginalia, the subjects remain wholly Other, their humanity restored not at all. The Edie cult, the Gia cult, the Zelda cult: everybody gets trivialized as a result of these icons of insanity—the pretty babies because they are too beautiful to be seriously suffering, and the ugly deranged because no one wants to pay attention to them because they aren’t attractive enough.

  We blame the repressive times for the madness of Marilyn, we blame the excessive times for the schizophrenia of Zelda, and the cries of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—along with novels like The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood—played some part in the spark of the women’s movement in the early seventies. But finally, now, with Prozac and all these new drugs and more humane treatments of mental illness of all sorts—and better understanding of depression and its biological nature—it is easy to pin the troubles of all of these women in the past on bad chemistry. It’s easy to say—and not wrong at all—that their ailments would have been greatly ameliorated by serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So whether we turn the madwoman into great art or portray her as a victim of bad science, we still end up with the same result: we still end up failing to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, she had a point, maybe her anger and sorrow and sadness were as justified and valid as Cassandra’s prophecies. Maybe their craziness spoke the truth. There are lessons in these lives, but we are no longer obligated to learn them.

  Since the publication of The Bell Jar in the United States in 1971, nothing has succeeded its significance as a cultural document, no work of fiction has assumed its literary role as the narrative of an adolescent girl’s rebellion against the forces that will straitjacket her into a frightful, flightless femininity—and the way this willful fight is so thwarted that it just turns around, the loaded gun that should be pointing Out There is instead a weapon of self-destruction. It’s the story of the moment when girlishness and womanhood meet at a desperate crossroads, and confront the pushes and pulls and demands and choices that are as daunting as the fright that bluesman Robert Johnson felt at the fork in the road of “Crossroads Blues” when he “got down on my knees and prayed.” Plath’s novel is still the template, the book to read for a girl going through a depression or breakdown.

  It’s not that many novels chronicling a girl falling apart have not appeared since 1971—this plot probably constitutes the subject matter of at least half the bildungsromans published each year—but most of them have revolved around, to pilfer a term from legal circles, the abuse excuse. Most are about incest, molestation, rape or battery victims who go crazy as a result of the cruelty and torment that was visited upon them; many employ an up from slavery / I saw God in myself and I loved her type of conversion narrative that delivers recovery and redemption by the end, as is the case in popular novels like Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone or Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.

  T
he Bell Jar—while absolutely implicating a prefeminist society in which a brilliant young woman writing a thesis on the motif of twins in Finnegans Wake is encouraged by her mother to learn shorthand to increase her secretarial prospects—is about a world that is fine, fine enough for most people to function in at any rate: no beatings, no bruises, no blood on the kitchen floor to be hid under the rug. But Esther Greenwood is just too sensitive. She can’t handle it. She gets depressed, she breaks down, she takes a large overdose of pills, she lies comatose in a crawl space in the cellar of her house, she is resuscitated, she gets shock, she gets therapy, months in a mental hospital: in summary, Esther has a taxing and extensive bout with emotional illness, for no particular reason, for causes that shuffle around, appearing and disappearing as if they were part of a shell game, a street con—as soon as one thing starts to make sense, another is revealed. The death of her father? Her rather dim mother? What can it be?

  At no point in The Bell Jar is a model of cause and effect, an Exhibit A, an item that can be committed to evidence, offered for Esther’s self-destruction. There are a zillion good reasons, but ultimately no real smoking gun, no father who raped or maimed her, no mother, like the one in Sybil, who systematically sexually tortured her. There is just stenography and scholarship worries and a simultaneous translator and sexual curiosity and an annoying consumptive Yale medical student for a boyfriend and a hot summer in New York City with a lucky magazine job—there is just a lot of lucky everything, more than enough reward to compensate for a father who died while she was still young and a mother who taught shorthand to make ends meet. The Bell Jar rather daringly exposed suicidal depression as the rage of the privileged class, as a killer without cause and a disease without the precise DNA tests or brain-scan results that would hold up in a court case against its existence: its symptoms are purely circumstantial, in an evidentiary sense, and rely on the account the sufferer, who is unstable enough to be thought an unreliable narrator even though it is that very instability that she is testifying about.