This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  Several years earlier I had begun cultivating my completely unoriginal fixation on James Dean. As soon as I was old enough to make excursions to the used-book store in downtown London, Ontario, I culled every two-bit, secondhand Hollywood bio from the premises. I scoured the television listings for his films; I begged my dad to add East of Eden to that week’s rental pull. He was beautiful, of course, the thoroughbred combination of virile and vulnerable that drives the girls wild. Perhaps more important, Dean easily dominated a category I had been populating with candidates since I was a child: narratives of tragic greatness.

  It’s a taste I picked up honestly, being raised Catholic, but also in a family whose stories could be considered classics of the genre: my father’s mother, an English Ph.D., dead at thirty-four of tuberculosis; his older brother, a brilliant doctor, dead at thirty-six of a heart attack; his younger sister, an accomplished opera singer, dead at thirty-three of an autoimmune disorder; his luminous twin, a mother and social worker, would die in her mid-fifties of cancer.

  I was eventually confirmed under my deceased aunt’s name, but on the whole, enshrining the departed and transforming our sad stories into house scripture was not my family’s style. In fact the dead were rarely mentioned. Instead of saints I made them movie stars—a feat aided, no doubt, by the dazzling uniformity of their beauty. I would spend hours in front of the black-and-white portraits arranged in my grandfather’s den in Sudbury, Ontario, and never really shook the feeling that their fates formed a bloodlined tradition: we are amazing, and we die young.

  It was certainly ever thus with James Dean; he was practically family. As a pocket cineaste I transposed my sideline in Orange mythology and began to connect most privately and emotionally to the lives of big-livin’, big-dyin’ movie stars. I swapped old photos and my grandfather’s 16 mm home movies for Giant and Rebel Without a Cause, but the gist of the experience was the same. What I couldn’t get over, what slayed me continually, was the irreconcilable trick of looking at someone so vital, so immutably present and exquisitely responsive, and yet so indelibly, utterly gone.

  The transfixing survival of the images of stars like Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, and Natalie Wood made a pupil of me, and immersing myself in narrative study felt like a natural and necessary extension of that education. I consumed their life stories as though they were holy texts. I read the entire Shelley Winters oeuvre at fifteen, and it was worth it for the one or two Dean anecdotes alone. I picked her second volume for a book report in one of the post-Klapstein years.

  But back in 1990, in the coldest (and alternately hottest) classroom in the west portables, Mrs. Klapstein was trying to feather up the curriculum, get us kids engaged. One of her Holden-inspired assignments about voice and identity had us devising a sort of personal crest—a motto accompanied by a representative sketch of ourselves and our legacies.

  All right, cool stuff, I remember thinking. Engage this.

  I drew a gothic tableau of myself laid out in a coffin—candelabra, weeping cherubs, the works—and beneath it I inscribed the Dean mantra: Live fast, die young, have a beautiful corpse. When the assignment came due, I set mine on her desk with a smile.

  Cry for help is a phrase that makes my dad groan on a good day. Applied to his daughter—as it was during the phone call Mrs. Klapstein made to my home that evening to gently suggest I be put on a suicide watch—it was insupportable. Asked to explain myself, I made a shameless appeal to rank: I had had enough of her Montessori horseshit, I said, and was merely calling her bluff. And perhaps she was calling mine. Certainly the fastest living I’d done by grade ten was on the Himalaya at the Western Fair.

  “She was just playing with her,” I heard my dad tell my mother over the phone, with the barest glint of pride. And while it’s true that I had contempt for Klapstein—if only because she seemed to want my respect and insisted on a kind of proximal, kindred status—and I wouldn’t be within squinting distance of suicidal for another six years, what’s truer is that the Dean blueprint for both living and dying was the most powerfully suggestive of any I had come across up to and including that point.

  What I didn’t understand then, and for more of the following years than I care to admit, was that my response to Dean—and to the numerous doomed performers I was drawn to during that time—stemmed less from morbid anomie than its direct inversion. For a subaltern little squeaker still forming ideas about the adult world—and how to avoid, or fool, or conquer it—the movies and a certain caliber of their stars felt like the world’s most captivating private tutor. They could teach you how to dress and behave and seduce and show strength, but the best of them transcended the lessons of persona and posing to suggest something essential about how to live, while you’re living. In the same way that the myth of his life was swiftly conflated with the transporting quality of his performances, watching James Dean it was only too easy to confuse the notion of living and dying like him with a keener longing, that is, to die like him.

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  “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art,” David Foster Wallace once said, “lies … in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow … And the effort to actually do it—not just talk about it—requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.”

  Whether that effort is a product of courage or compulsion is a question those who revere and then grieve artists like Wallace struggle with. What is the fallout—personal, moral, cultural—of seeking and then gratefully accepting such a death? In a talk titled “Nurturing Creativity,” the writer Elizabeth Gilbert quoted Norman Mailer (“Every one of my books has killed me a little more”) before lobbying for a reformed definition of genius, one that rejects the self-directed language of death and suffering. About the burden on artists to maintain sole custody of their talent she says, “It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun.” Gilbert favors a more passive, classical notion of creativity, where artistry flows not from but through the artist.

  The extra-individual theory does seem preferable to dying a thousand deaths a day in the name of better than so-so art. But Gilbert removes the causal connection between hard spiritual labor (call it suffering if you must) and what we instinctively recognize as its product: deeply committed, transcendent, necessary art. And yet her fundamental question persists: Why does there seem to be a high correlation between those willing to die and those, whether driven by some devouringly personal or insidiously public imperative, who actually perish?

  The idea of the artist as exemplary sufferer, as Susan Sontag pointed out, was a modern creation, one derived from an essentially Christian sensibility, where suffering puts the pilgrim in touch with his true self. If a suffering soul is considered more authentic, and we look to artists to seek out the truth, on some level the more an artist suffers the more truthful we believe her to be. That attitude permeated a newly psychologically and self-aware culture so quickly and so deeply that it became impossible to say what came first, the ideal or the artists who exemplify it. Aspiring artists began to seek out opportunities to suffer, sacrifice, live ascetically. Or they felt themselves unfit for the task if they embodied too many otherwise valued attributes: health and well-being, affluence and easy living. Those things the rest of a secular culture could enjoy knowing the artists were out there suffering for them, assuaging what religious guilt remained.

  Beyond all that, I want to say, good art is good art, and good art is timeless. I also believe that no work of art can or should be entirely separated from its time. But the degree to which a creative pursuit and its context are shackled together only intensifies; too often the story we attach to it seems in danger of subsuming even good art altogether.

  Often we have a sense of resignation when those who move us profoundly—who die for us—die in an unnatural or untimely way. They were too pure or just too fucked-up to live, we agree. “Oh, what’s the use?” critic David Edelstein wrote in his review of This Is It, the film compiled from Michael
Jackson’s final concert rehearsals. “He was a mess and destined to self-destruct.” Even a friend of Judy Garland’s admitted that his first thought upon hearing of her death was, “Yes, why not? It was inevitable, wasn’t it?” Arthur Miller used that same word—inevitable—about his former wife Marilyn Monroe.

  America is not a country otherwise known for its fatalism. Fatal optimism, maybe. And yet when it comes to our most celebrated artists, we speak easily of destiny and determinism, free will and inevitable fate. We slip into the language of myth and prophecy.

  A few things seem to be going on there. When rationality and the promotion of “realness” rule a culture, conditions become ripe for a sort of lizard-brain backlash. Nietzsche believed Greek tragedy to be a perfect art form because it balances Apollonian idealization and individualism with the darkness of Dionysian reality, where human beings are bound by a sense of “primordial unity.” A play like Oedipus Rex is a masterpiece in part because it is useful to the public; by catalyzing and imploding our most basic fears, suffering is set into its proper balance and tragedy becomes a source of affirmation.

  We discount our own participation in popular culture, as though great tragedies can only play out in repertory theaters or come clothed in togas. But in the same way that these artists show us ourselves the way we’d like to be, their dissolution gives us a way to enter a discussion about death that has otherwise been all but silenced. These modern tragedies don’t yield a similar balance in part because both sides of the Nietzschean equation—science versus art; the self-sacred one versus the animal all—are currently out of control, having metastasized to the point that they effectively snapped the thing balancing them. Now they roll around the cultural landscape freely, occasionally knocking into each other and thus conceiving the terms of our shared stories, which in the case of our fallen cult heroes has come to feel less like the rebirth of tragedy and more like tragedy stillborn. If the last century of American popular culture has taught us anything, it’s that that stuff’s gotta come out somewhere.

  Europe did it all first, of course. Their shift toward cult heroism began a century earlier, around the time in which John Keats lived and—perhaps more important—died. In one of the several portly bios of the young bard, author Andrew Motion describes the particular period in English history that allowed for Keats—a poet who felt himself unknown at the time of his tubercular death in Rome at age twenty-five—to become wildly, posthumously famous.

  Motion writes of England’s old feudal order being reorganized, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and in the wake of a trade and manufacturing boom, into a social structure vested in “money, property, talent, secular belief, parliament, the middle class, and an industrial class of laborers.” England was reborn as “a self-conscious nation. They encouraged a cult of heroes (ranging from Spenser and Shakespeare to Nelson and Wellington) and cultivated a sense of shared values.” The English, in short, “fell in love with themselves … smothering differences and difficulties in order to create the image of a united nation.”

  This was the world in which Keats wrote his best poems, and it subtracts nothing from his genius to note that this was the England eager to inscribe his work and his myth into the pantheon only after his early death in 1821.

  If World War I had a reanimating effect on America’s sociocultural infrastructure, with World War II the transformation was manifest. The New Deal, the rise of the middle and labor classes, and a focus on talent, fortune, and property created the conditions for Americans to truly—and then at their considerable leisure—fall in love with themselves. Our cult heroes, in the new era of the moving image, were more often movie stars and athletes than writers, although politicians with great hair and star quality could still contend. Initially the value placed on the celebrated had some correlation to their ability. Stars were expected to sing and dance as well as act and be beautiful. Politicians had to demonstrate their talent for perfecting the union, for getting shit done.

  Slowly, perhaps inevitably, self-consciousness slid into self-obsession. By midcentury, the bones of Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy (published in 1925, a psychic twin to Fitzgerald’s boom-as-bust Gatsby) were being reassembled to tell the stories of our cult heroes. We thrilled most when they could commit to its full trajectory: humble beginnings, uncommon gifts, bridling ambition, discovery, stardom, hubris, excess, downfall, death. Monroe, Dean, and Elvis Presley are the holy trinity of this particular denomination. In the postglamour 1960s and early ’70s, rock musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones—were more often martyrs to the faith.

  Even as the cornerstones of the cult of tragic greatness were being set and our lives grew more sheltered and domesticated, the public’s appetite for realism was sharpening. The “Method” hit Hollywood in the early 1950s, and its explosion of what was false or mimetic in performance reflected and fueled this hunger. Actors following Russian pioneer Constantin Stanislavski’s sense-memory method were encouraged to infuse their characters with past experiences and personal psychology, and audiences internalized the idea of acting as a form of self-dramatization. The strengthening pop machine brought us that much further into actors’ lives. We began following an artist’s life at least as closely as her career; eventually the two were married in a public narrative bound by the need for a strong dramatic arc. Andy Warhol made the earliest and most indelible comment on the permeability of this popular mythology with his coterie of invented “superstars”—damaged socialites and hard-luck drifters whom he packaged in the look and story that sold. You no longer had to die for your audience, although often and one way or another, you wound up dead.

  In the pre- and postmillennial decades the growing preoccupation with the private lives of public figures converged with and was quickly overtaken by a parallel obsession with fame itself. As tabloids and tabloid TV evolved, inventing an audience and its appetite for the “real” story behind the star, we sought to reveal our heroes to be more like us than unlike us. By closing the gap between stars and their audience, it was permissible—even logical—to declare open season on the fame they enjoyed.

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  Socialism is … above all an atheistic phenomenon, the modern manifestation of atheism, one more tower of Babel built without God, not in order to reach out toward heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  When I was growing up, the centripetal fascination with old-fashioned stardom was about to give way to the entitlements of the famous age. We became more concerned with the things we deserved to know about public figures and what we were meant to be ourselves. Talent was no longer the main thing you needed to get over; if you could master a couple of the star narrative’s bullet points and look good in your underwear, the public would take you on as a boarder and barely hold a grudge. We moved toward an age of celebrity simulacra like Paris “This Is Just a Character I Play” Hilton, and the word icon became so widely and ill-used that The New York Times banned it from its pages. The new celebrity economy seemed unstoppably bound for a kind of nirvana: an inelasticity of demand for this kind of synthetic entertainment meant we could eventually all wind up “entertaining” each other, generating our own subnarratives of stardom and feeding the parts of ourselves instantly gratified by recognition, “followers,” our own names in little pixelated lights.

  A mean patch of briar lies between our parallel cravings for stories that are “real” and those with mythic dimensions, and some of our best artists have found themselves tangled up in it. Anyone who has posted a picture of herself toasting champagne with the VIPs from a pit of self-loathing or tweeted the day’s workout stats while weeping into a quart of raspberry sorbet has felt a tiny measure of this particular sting for themselves. The Internet is the ultimate realist medium—real people, real time, real messy—yet everything about the way we use it to perform our lives (and to a certain extent our culture) for one another confirms th
e manufactured terms of our beloved reality entertainment. It’s all about the edit.

  That we seem intent on forgetting this suggests the extent to which we are drifting from a shared sense of reality. The line between performer and performance is long gone. The line between performer and audience continues its slow fade. In a time when all of the information we consume in a day—whether it’s a news report out of Libya or a YouTube search for a Billie Holiday song or a long-forgotten friend’s post on your Facebook wall—falls under the rubric of “content,” the line between performers is blurring as well. After national self-consciousness comes a nation of self-conscious individuals, and after that a homogenization of the nation’s central precepts: money, property, and public recognition shift from shared values to rights. Which is how they are fed back to us, until suddenly the health of an entire country depends on the constant retail of fiction: stories about homes we might own, stocks that might soar, how we might look, the lives we might lead and more crucially advertise in a kind of panicked, perpetual present haze of—and I would urge you to consider the term—status updates.

  The new American dream is to build a really bitching personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour’s large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium—to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what’s real and what’s not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers’ virtual scrims. From the vantage of the individual platform, even the narrative of tragic greatness seems less a product of secular anxiety—a sort of surrogate Christian allegory—than one more of the stories we devour out of self-interest. We take heart instead of horror in the idea that anyone can be famous, but we are performers with no interest in dying for each other. It seems related that actual death is by far the most awkward thing for the Internet to handle. Because it’s so real.