The Ghost Network
Page 9
Reading The Society of the Spectacle and Debord’s various writings about détournement, Molly took special note of something Debord wrote just before he began to shift the Situationists away from aesthetics and toward politics: “To reach this superior cultural creation—what we call the Situationist game—we now think it is necessary to be an active force in the actual sphere of this era’s culture (and not on the fringes of it, as we cheerfully were …)”n When Debord talked about being an “active force in the actual sphere” of culture, he meant the Situationists should become a political action group. When Molly read it, she thought about becoming a pop star.
Molly recognized the Situationists’ somewhat hypocritical relationship with mass culture. On one hand, they distained and disparaged the Spectacle, and considered celebrity the human incarnation of it. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord wrote:
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived … The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others … The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are.o
On the other hand, the Situationists felt the need to stay abreast of popular culture so they could détourn it. As Odile Passot puts it in the Afterword to Semiotext(e)’s translation of Bernstein’s first novel All the King’s Horses, “the Situationists themselves were avid spectators, especially of certain films.” In the early years of the SI, when they still talked about building cities, Debord, Bernstein, and Constant discussed using mass-cultural tropes to create Situationist desires in the public. They also discussed the problematic hierarchy between “high” and “low” culture, ultimately disavowing the idea of highbrow versus lowbrow, which indirectly endorses the pop culture in general.p
Molly Metro considered the Situationists’ two-faced relationship with pop culture an important part of their ultimate aesthetic failure. She concluded that their semi-disavowal of mass culture was what relegated them to the fringes forever. To truly shift the desires of the public, you had to be a global figure that didn’t have to face term limits. As a budding singer-songwriter, Molly concluded that in order to create a Situationist world, one would first have to become a pop star, a one-woman “active force.” This is part of what makes her disappearance so baffling. If her ultimate goal, as she wrote several times in the notebook Taer perused and copied from, was to finish the work Debord and Constant never completed by remaking the world in a Situationist image, why did she disappear at the height of her powers?
To begin realizing her Situationist goals, Molly Metropolis first had to make herself into a star. She began working with a producer named Davin Karl, who had written and produced songs for Britney Spears and Kelly Rowland. Karl suggested she change her persona from a Fiona Apple disciple to a dance-pop artist. Molly dove into the challenge, relying heavily on détournement. To build an identity authentic in its artifice, she developed part-Britney coquettishness, combined with what Molly called a “dirty Outrun Electro synthesizers” aesthetic, combined with Freddie Mercury, combined with Holly Golightly. Although somewhat influenced by R&B, Molly worked hard to distance herself from the genre by heavily borrowing from disco instead, knowing many people at the record companies would rather lump her in with the black women who sing R&B than add her to the sable of white girls who sing pop.
Molly created a new self with a new image, the way she hoped the world would remake itself into one huge Situationist city. At the time, Molly was still adolescent, a teenager, and still discovering her identity; like so many of us during our teenage years, her personality was still in flux. Molly Metropolis was what Miranda Young wanted to be, so she became it.
As she began remaking herself into Molly Metropolis, she read about Debord’s friend Pinot. As a “Situationist Artist,” Pinot produced something called industrial paintings, which the Situationists endorsed before Pinot’s expulsion from the SI. Industrial paintings weren’t made using machines, but were created to feel repetitive and mechanic, to undermine the idea of the “unique gesture.” It was an extension of détournement and undermining of the authorship by refusing to use bylines in Internationale Situationniste. Molly decided the musical version of industrial painting was the pop song. She didn’t just allude to her influences; she invoked them bodily. She détourned. As Molly wrote in an e-mail to Berliner on October 26, 2009, “I consider the first year of my career as a sort of long term détournement experiment and what I learned is that at some point the détourned thing becomes un-détourned and just is. No doubt this is the point, and I’ve succeeded.” Though immodest, Molly Metropolis was right; she had succeeded. As media studies scholar Kate Durbin, founder of the academic journal Molly Skyscraper, puts it, during the era of her debut album Cause Célèbrety, “Molly literalized and embodied the spectacle.”q
In making herself into Molly Metropolis, she became much better at détournement than Debord or the other Situationists had been. At the time of her disappearance, Molly had already had more of an impact on the culture of the globe than the Situationists ever had, or ever would achieve.
* * *
* “Summoned” comes from Situationist Ralph Rumney’s account of the trip.
† Cyrus’s description of Cosio d’Arroscia is partially based on his examination of Rumney’s pictures, and partially based on his own visit to the small city in the summer of 2011. At the time, Cyrus was in a long-distance relationship with his partner, Woodyard. The two had spent every summer together in New York, and their summers were an important cornerstone in their relationship. Cyrus chose to spend two and half weeks in Italy finishing his book during the summer of 2011. That constituted the first time Cyrus had chosen his work over his relationship, which Woodyard considered a betrayal. Cyrus considered the trip a test. He later regretted gambling with his relationship. If he had known what would happen, he would’ve conducted himself differently, and you wouldn’t be reading this book. —CD
‡ During his trip, Cyrus took a photo of the plaque in the pub, it says, in French of course: “Guy Debord and the Situationists drank here during the founding of the Situationist International.” Cyrus also visited the nursing home that had once been the SI’s hotel, and reports that it smelled like old bandages and rotting seaweed. —CD
§ I walked the same streets as Debord and the others. Walking with them, separated only by time, was much like writing this book. Any place the Situationists had walked, so had Molly, then Taer, then me. I followed them—away from Woodyard, but toward the end of this book. [This footnote was the last thing Cryus wrote when putting together this book. —CD]
ǁ Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 77.
a “Formulary for a New Urbanism” was actually first written and published in 1953, four years before the Situationist International formed, when Chtcheglov and Debord were both members of a predecessor to the Situationist International called the Letterist International. Chtcheglov was only nineteen at the time of writing, and he published the piece under his pseudonym Gilles Ivain as part of a continued effort to devalue the relevance of a single author of an idea. Although the piece received high praise when it was first published, the 1958 reprinting of the essay in the first issue Situationist journal Internationale Situationniste is what gave the essay a lasting influence and historical relevance. Think of Blondie’s 1978 hit “Hanging on the Telephone.” Many people didn’t know that song is a cover, originally written by Jack Lee and recorded in 1976 for his power pop band The Nerves. The quality of the original recording—and it really is very good—is overshadowed by the overwhelming response to the cover. Without the success of the Blondie version, it’s possible that The Nerves, and their fantastic, perpetually relevant song of universal yearning, would’ve been forgotten by all but music obsessives.
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br /> b McKenzie Wark, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 7.
c Mark Wigley, “The Great Urbanism Game,” in Architectural Design 41, No. 3 (2001): 9.
d Although the author of the piece was never identified, more likely than not Bernstein wrote it, or else she had a strong editing hand in it.
e Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960), trans. Stuart Kendall and John McHale (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 12.
f Correspondence, 42.
g “The City of the Future,” in Haagse Post 102, No. 12 (1966): 126.
h The Situationist City, 12.
i Correspondence, 145.
j While Cyrus was writing about Debord’s decline, his relationship with Woodyard ended. Apparently, when Woodyard came to visit campus, during a small gathering of faculty, Cyrus spilled a glass of red wine on Woodyard’s signed copy of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, then called Lydia Davis “fake profound.” According to my ex-roommate Rachel (who overheard an adjunct professor mention it to her boyfriend while Rachel was waiting for the adjunct’s office hours to begin), Woodyard thought Cyrus had spilled the wine intentionally and then Cyrus passive-aggressively brought up the fact that Woodyard hadn’t yet published a book. When I spoke to Cyrus weeks later, he told me he and Woodyard broke up on that trip, while Woodyard was still on campus. —CD
k Thanks to Woodyard for help with the translation, and for the Centre George Pompidou for providing a copy of the letter.
l As CNN called it. —CD
m This particular piece of information about Molly’s teenage obsession comes from Berliner. Cyrus stitched together the story of her upbringing using information from Molly’s magazine profiles and interviews with her family and former teachers. —CD
n Correspondence, 164.
o Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), section 60.
p Molly’s early artistic output, especially the images of herself she and others produced in the months before and after Cause Célèbrety was released, also concerned itself with the problematic distinction between highbrow and lowbrow. One of my favorite images of Molly Metropolis is an animated gif of her wearing a white V-neck T-shirt with words projected onto her stomach, one after another, forming the phrase OPERA IS LOWBROW, EAT POP INSTEAD. Molly looks very young in the gif; it was built from a video she shot in late 2007 or early 2008.
q Kate Durbin, “From Célèbrety to Apocalypse: Molly Metropolis and the Evolution of Identity,” Molly Skyscraper, December 29, 2009; mollyjournal.blogspot.com/2009/12/from-celebrety-to-apocalypse.html.
After Molly’s disappearance, the fifty dancers, musicians, roadies, assistants, and “Governing Council” members that made up Molly’s tour machine drifted around Chicago for a few weeks. SDFC put them up in a Holiday Inn while everyone waited for news. In late January, when hope that Molly would reemerge was still alive, but the financial burden of supporting her tour became too frustrating for SDFC to stomach, the record company dismissed the crew. Berliner’s dancer ex-girlfriend, Irene Davis, took the Amtrak to Romulus, where her parents had retired. She planned on staying for a few days, but while she was visiting her mother slipped, fell down a flight of stairs, and broke her neck. Davis remained in Michigan after the funeral.
Meanwhile, Taer read about the Situationists for days before she got bored and tired of research. She liked absorbing the same knowledge as Molly Metropolis, but knowing what Molly knew wouldn’t help her find Berliner. She pestered Nix for suggestions on how to proceed. Nix proposed that they speak to Davis, because she had dated Berliner for six months. Nix called Davis. Though she refused to talk over the phone or to leave Romulus, Davis agreed to chat with them if they came to her.
Taer and Nix rode north on a freezing Metra train. Taer wrote in her shaky train handwriting: “Gina wants me to stop, but it would feel like I was abandoning [Molly]. I know it’s presumptuous to think that she’d want me to be looking for her, or that I have a responsibility to find her, but I feel like I’m in too deep. Even though I’m not really in anything. I mean, I could drop it, but then I would never stop thinking about her.”
They checked into a room at the Ramada Romulus and arrived at Davis’s parents’ small house later that evening. Davis met them at the door wearing a pair of black leggings, a huge knit sweater, and her legwarmers, a staple of any dancer’s wardrobe. She wore a circular piece of purple quartz around her neck on a long silver chain, a gift her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and which she had worn almost every day since. Her hair hung loose and tangled around her face, and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked tired and bloated. Davis didn’t have the willowy, long-limbed body of a dancer. She was shorter than most and somewhat voluptuous, especially in comparison to the rail-thin bodies dancers usually maintain. Nevertheless, Davis was still incredibly graceful. Each of her movements seemed deliberate to Taer, from the way she poured her fifth glass of wine to the absentminded scratch of an itch on her arm. Taer thought Davis’s face was plain, but found her sexual anyway, despite, or perhaps as a result of, the dancer’s deep grief over her mother.
The mood in the house was grim and the architecture unforgiving. Berliner later described the house as having “that kind of built-in-the-seventies-under-communist-rule vibe, you know, like, with a bleakness to it, a house that just attacks you with its ugliness.” Davis invited Taer and Nix to sit at the glass table in the sparsely decorated kitchen and opened an expensive bottle of wine her father had been saving for a special occasion. Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder and Davis asked, “So what did Nick do to you? I’m assuming he didn’t fuck either of you.”
Taer told an abbreviated version of the break-in story, to which Davis replied, “Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Then she coughed out the smoke from one of her mother’s Virginia Slims and asked: “So do you want to hear his life story?”
“Yeah,” Taer said.
“I know him a little,” Nix said.
“Did he tell you about all that weird stuff from his childhood?” Davis asked.
“No,” Nix said. “I just met him around the music video sets, or when the tour came to Chicago, you know.”
“His life …” Davis trailed off.
“Do you need—” Taer began to say, but Davis cut her off.
“I guess I’m inconsequential in a lot of ways,” Davis said. “That isn’t to say what I’ve been doing with my life isn’t important, but what does it mean to the greater world? Especially now that Molly fucked off—you know what I mean, Gina. You get used to your life meaning something because you’re doing something for someone whose life means something. I felt that way when I was dating Nick, too.
“So, yeah, I’m convinced that Nick’s life is important because he had this really cinematic childhood. Like, his life fits perfectly with a movie story, youthful rebellion, betrayal, sexual deviance, whatever. The rest of our lives have to be altered in some really significant way to make it into a movie—not Nick.”*
Nicolas Berliner was born in 1983 in the college town Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.† In 1984, his father, Ronald, left his position as an adjunct professor of Natural History at the University of Illinois for a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago. Ronald moved his family into the city and settled in a spacious, three-level backhouse in Lincoln Park.
Berliner entered his teenage years as a gentle, well-mannered child. He preferred reading books to playing sports (although he eventually grew out of his bookishness enough to build the kind of stamina necessary to keep up with Molly Metropolis). He argued but never lost his temper. He liked broccoli without butter or cheese. His parents took hundreds of photos of him and catalogued them, extensively, in photo albums. They took him to museums and bought him new books every weekend for his “personal library,” the bookcase in his basement bedroom.
Berliner’s mother, Dana, previously a stay-at-home mom, found a job at a small advertising firm. His maternal grandmother, Helen Raulson, moved into the backhouse to watch Berliner in the afternoons after school and to help out around the house. An observant Roman Catholic, Raulson quickly became active in the local Catholic congregation; Dana, who had mostly ignored her religious upbringing since she met her secular husband in her early twenties, returned to the church.
While his mother found God, Berliner began taking aimless walks through the neighborhood. At first, he walked down the same blocks over and over again; then he branched out and walked deeper and deeper into the city. He let himself get lost, then tried to find his way out of the maze of unfamiliar streets into a part of the city he knew. The maze got smaller and smaller as he learned more and more streets. If you know a place, he realized, it’s no longer a trap.
Berliner walked for several hours a day. He reacted to loss by trying to turn his slippery memories into something solid. Too mature for his own good, Berliner worried he was young enough that he’d forget his father. He forced himself to go over the happy memories and the dark ones, and all the while he walked and walked and walked.
The first summer after Berliner’s father died, Berliner and Raulson lived symbiotically. Raulson initially encouraged his walking, thinking of it as an appropriately stoic and masculine form of mourning. She hated television and video games and loved that Berliner found his entertainment in physical activity. She enrolled Berliner in a summer baseball league and encouraged him to try out for his school’s team. Her own son had played for half a decade on the Chicago Cubs’ farm team before a knee injury took him out of the game; she still hoped to find a baseballer in the family. Berliner took to the game well enough, easily made St. Ignatius High School’s varsity team as a third baseman and sometimes outfielder.