by Sady Doyle
TRAINWRECK
Copyright © 2016 by Sady Doyle
First Melville House Printing: September 2016
Melville House Publishing
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-564-3
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And if I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.
—PERICLES, Funeral Oration
Q: What’s the difference between Amy Winehouse and Amy Winehouse jokes?
A: The jokes will get old.
—Jokes4Us.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface: Our Trainwrecks, Ourselves
Part I
THE TRAINWRECK: HER CRIMES 1. Sex
2. Need
3. Madness
4. Death
Part II
THE TRAINWRECK: HER OPTIONS 5. Shut Up
6. Speak Up
Part III
THE TRAINWRECK: HER ROLE 7. Scapegoat
8. Revolutionary
Conclusion: The View from the Tracks
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
PREFACE
OUR TRAINWRECKS, OURSELVES
She’s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck.
An actress known for light, bubbly romantic comedies and teen dramas throws a bong out of a thirty-sixth-floor window, to the dismay of assembled police officers. Her neighbors tell the press that she’s been talking to herself, and that they suspect a psychotic break. A timeline of her “meltdown” appears on Jezebel. Late-night comedians have grist for months.
A reality-TV star appears on the cover of Vogue, causing massive backlash and speculation as to whether the magazine has “killed” its prestigious brand. The woman is rumored to have leaked her own sex tape. She once accepted thousands of dollars to accompany a wealthy man on a date. In the Vogue issue in question, she’s posing with her fiancé and newborn child. Readers threaten to boycott the publication.
An actress’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s slept with, is circulated in advance of her upcoming reality series.
A musician’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s thought to have dated, is printed up in Helvetica font and sold as a T-shirt online.
A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her apartment.
A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her hotel bathtub.
A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship remains under her father’s conservatorship due to mental incompetency. Ticket sales for her Las Vegas shows are through the roof.
It’s easy to look at these women and see what they did wrong, tally up their sins and errors: insensitive, provocative, promiscuous, off-the-wagon, crazy. It’s easy to tell yourself, this is not my story. But I’d wager good, hard money that, if you got the chance to speak to any of these women, they’d tell you that these are not their stories, either.
The privilege of controlling your own narrative is easy to take for granted. It’s easy to confuse for a right; to assume that, of all the people in this loud and crowded world, you’re the person best suited to tell the world who you are, or what you are, or what your actions and emotions mean in context.
Yet we know that narratives can be stolen, and weaponized. We’ve seen it happen again and again. Say the words “celebrity trainwreck,” and the image immediately appears: young, pretty, most likely blond, and in some degree of high-gloss disarray, pinned between the club and the door of her limousine by a wall of flashing cameras. She’s drunk, or she’s high, or she’s naked, or she’s crying—or she will be, anyway, by the end of the night. The cameras are there to testify to her impending doom. They’re there so we can watch it happen. Hence the etymology, actually—just as people are supposedly unable to avoid staring at a gruesome wreck on the highway, you know that this person is going to suffer, horribly, exceptionally, and you won’t look away, because you enjoy it. The theft of narrative is where this begins, because, on some level, becoming a trainwreck simply means that the public assumes the right to control how you can define yourself: Kim Kardashian, for example, cannot be both the star of a sex tape and a blushing bride on the cover of Vogue. We’ll mock and scorn her for being the one, but flat-out punish her and Vogue both if she attempts to be the other. It also means losing authority over your own decisions. Some lose that authority literally, by being put in jail or in hospitals or under the conservatorship of their parents, but more often, it’s simply a matter of establishing them as “troubled”; as “out of control”; as people who don’t know how to live their own lives.
But it escalates from there. All too often, losing your story also means that if you make decisions people don’t like—after a certain point, in this process, every decision you make will be one people don’t like—they feel entitled to hurt you. It means being subject to a hostile, unasked-for, all-consuming intimacy: having other people claim ownership over your body, your sexual history, your medical history, your emotional life, your future. Having them feel entitled to scream slurs at you, or threaten your life, or call your employer until you’re unemployed, if you don’t follow instructions. Nothing is off-limits: After Whitney Houston died, ABC News published the information that the coroner had found scars on her chest consistent with breast implants. It had nothing to do with her death—she had drowned, and breast implants have never, to my knowledge, risen up of their own accord and drowned their owner—but the world was, apparently, entitled to that information.
This isn’t “the cost of fame,” some necessary price one pays for being a public figure—or, if it is, it’s only in the sense that everyone is a public figure, because it happens to “civilians,” too—people who post unflattering pictures of themselves, or irritate one too many people with their personal blogs, or say stupid things on Twitter. And it isn’t simply a matter of getting punished for wrongdoing—or, if it is, we should all be worried, because this specific wrongdoing tends to sneak up on people from behind, when they haven’t intentionally or knowingly broken any rules. No one becomes a musician hoping to be placed on someone’s celebrity death watch list. No one takes her first drink hoping to become an alcoholic. And no one—I am almost entirely certain—has ever had sex assuming that the experience will later be summarized on a popular novelty T-shirt.
And yet, here we are. With the stories we have; with the experience of constantly witnessing somebody else’s wreckage. Once we start to realize that it can happen to anyone, we can begin to ask why it happens at all.
Envy is a powerful force. Traditionally, the trainwreck starts out as the girl who “has everything going for her”: She is famous, after all, because she’s attained some extremely rare level of professional success, and probably some of the wealth and adulation that goes along with it. Her implosion is a way of taking her back down a few notches, to where we live. The girl who “has everything” can have everything taken away.
This isn’t entirely unfair. As long as we live in an unjust society, where the vast majority of us are struggling, and where ridiculously huge rewards are handed out for ridiculously stupid reasons—where pretending to be a sexy doctor on TV comes with more money, more p
raise, and vastly more publicity than actually going to med school and saving lives—it will always make some kind of sense to resent celebrities. The moralistic, concern-trolling quality of trainwreck coverage, the “What’s Going to Come of Poor Dear Lindsay” factor, might just come down to our wanting to believe they “deserve” their fame. (As if anyone could possibly deserve such a thing; Leonardo DiCaprio has a private island, for God’s sake. He wouldn’t “deserve” that standard of living if he followed up each and every movie project by saving a busload of kindergarteners from going over a cliff.) We may just want to believe that the people we reward the most are the most deserving of being rewarded; that they got better lives by being better people. Which, in turn, makes our delight in celebrity suffering a form of vigilante justice: We’re meting out what we believe to be just punishment of people enjoying a lifestyle that they haven’t “earned,” punishing flawed people to reaffirm our belief that celebrities must be better than human.
Or perhaps it comes down to a simple need to feel good about ourselves—a need to believe that someone else in this world is doing worse, or just is worse, than we are. It’s an ugly little facet of human nature, but it’s unavoidable: We define ourselves by exclusion, by rejecting or shaming others as a means of proving that we don’t share their flaws. You might do it to drug users, or the mentally ill, or Republicans, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t do it. By zeroing in on the messiest and most badly behaved women, and rejecting them, we make a statement about what makes a woman good.
Or it could all come down to the “just world hypothesis”: The social-psychology theory that if we see something bad happen to another human being, we assume that the person deserved it and start coming up with reasons. On some level, human beings are incapable of accepting that bad things happen for no reason. We have to assume that misfortune proceeds from personal flaw. Any other explanation is just too frightening: Whether you’re getting threatened on Facebook, getting mugged on a street corner, or just getting a piano dropped on you from a great height, we assume you just shouldn’t have posted that picture, lived in that neighborhood, or walked down that street on piano-moving day. If we believed anything else, we’d have to acknowledge that the universe is indifferent; that no benevolent force protects us from being mugged, threatened, or squashed. We’d have to acknowledge that we don’t live in a just world.
So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.
It’s not that men can’t be wrecked. There are plenty of male celebrities who have become the targets of full-scale, cross-culture hatred. But they usually have to work a lot harder for it: Chris Brown had to beat his girlfriend within an inch of her life. Justin Bieber and Michael Richards had to get caught dropping n-bombs. Mel Gibson had to terrorize his girlfriend, and also utter every ethnic and sexist slur in the books, on more than one occasion, over a period of years, before we gave him up. Conversely, just try asking people why they “hate” Katherine Heigl, or Kristen Stewart, or Anne Hathaway: She just seems arrogant. She just seems unpleasant. She just seems like she’s trying too hard to be liked.
Men also have more options, in terms of redeeming themselves. It’s easy to say that acts of open violence are the line to draw, but if you can even remember that the rugged-yet-sensitive heartthrob Josh Brolin was arrested on a domestic battery charge in 2004, you’re a rare bird indeed. Bringing up the fact that Norman Mailer stabbed his wife will get you labeled a philistine, in some circles. Steven Tyler once adopted a sixteen-year-old girl in order to have sex with her, and for his crimes, we rewarded him with a judge slot on American Idol.
And, while I could try to find examples of famous men who have redeemed their reputations from wild behavior, promiscuous sex, and irresponsible drug use, research reveals that the answer is, roughly, all of them. In fact “redemption” seems like the wrong word for what happens to some of these guys: Keith Richards’s drug career has included accidentally snorting strychnine, setting himself on fire on multiple occasions because he was so wasted he passed out while smoking a cigarette, and taking to the media in 2013 to defend heroin as essentially useful to the creative process. Hunter S. Thompson was best known for getting wasted on the job and living in a “fortified compound” stocked with dynamite and heavy firearms. Henry Miller wrote a modernist epic about how much fun it was to have sex with prostitutes. Members of Led Zeppelin once encouraged a woman to put a dead fish up her vagina. For all this, these guys became heroes: hard-living, boundary-pushing rock-and-roll badasses. Courtney Love and Lindsay Lohan, though? Those bitches are crazy.
So, as the trainwrecks keep floating up through our social-media timelines and gossip-blog feeds, as the social media pile-ons and hate-reads keep on coming, as this year’s girl continually arises, scandalizes, flames out, and is replaced, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have a vast and insatiable appetite for specifically female ruin and suffering. And if you, like me, have a tendency toward more-than-mild paranoia involving The Patriarchy, it’s hard to avoid the fact that this appetite has reached unprecedented levels right at the moment when women are making unprecedented gains in terms of access, visibility, and general empowerment to enter public life. All those MILEY CYRUS HOSPITALIZED: DID DEATH OF DOG TRIGGER TAILSPIN? headlines were running right next to predictions of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 2016.
As long as there has been a public sphere, there have been women attempting to enter the public sphere, and usually being punished for it. The one thing that all trainwrecks have in common is the temerity to be heard. Where we now exhibit “celebrity meltdowns” on TMZ, we used to exhibit “hysterics” on public viewing days at mental institutions. Where we now have sex bloggers living in fear that their real identities will be revealed behind their pseudonyms, we used to have women posing as men or assuming anonymity to publish groundbreaking novels. Where we now have conservative blogs ranting about Clinton’s lesbian affairs and/or murder sprees, we used to have poems run in conservative newspapers about how Mary Wollstonecraft—yes, her, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman lady—was a suicidal hooker with a shame-baby.
Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles. And this, I would argue, is a none-too-veiled attempt to push women back into the places we’ve designated as “theirs.” If you stay at home, get married right away, never get a job, never display any unwelcome emotions, and stay away from the public eye to such an extent that you actually never make any sort of impression whatsoever, you can’t become a trainwreck. You become a miserable, sheltered woman living in a prison of her own making, but hey: At least no one’s going to disapprove.
But, if you don’t plan on doing that, the trainwreck—in all her varied and historical iterations—is actually a useful figure, in more than one way. She’s not just the worst-case scenario. She’s not just the cost of showing the world the wrong things, or of being Visible While Female. She’s a signpost pointing to what “wrong” is, which boundaries we’re currently placing on femininity, which stories we’ll allow women to have. She’s the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she’s actually the best indication of which game we’re playing, and what the rules are. And, in her consistent violation of the accepted social codes—her ability to shock, to horrify, to upset, to draw down loud and powerful condemnation—she is a tremendously powerful force of cultural subversion. At the end of the day, despite all our praise of strong women and selfless activists and lean-inners, the trainwreck might turn out to be the most potent and perennial feminist icon of them all.
Consider this book, then, a feminist anatomy of the trainwreck. It’s an effort to
figure out who she is: what her crimes are, why she’s making us so angry; what, in general, she hath done to offend us. These are questions of more immediate and personal relevance than you might think: When women look hard enough at the trainwreck, we almost invariably end up looking at ourselves.
So this is an attempt to figure out what we’re looking at, and why we keep staring into this particular warped mirror. It is also an attempt to reclaim the trainwreck, not only as the voice for every part of womanhood we’d prefer to keep quiet, but also as a girl who routinely colors outside the lines of her sexist society. It is, above all, an attempt to use the figure of the trainwreck, and our fascination with her, for good: to take all that earth-shattering and civilization-angering power of hers and channel it toward something that might make the world a more just place for the women who live in it.
Part I
THE TRAINWRECK: HER CRIMES
1
SEX
There’s no neat and simple taxonomy of the trainwreck. She doesn’t come in different flavors, like a bag of assorted lollipops; we don’t get a Trainwreck (var. Whore), Trainwreck (var. Drunk) or Trainwreck (var. General Offensiveness). Instead, her sins tend to be messy and boundaryless, to bleed together and become indistinguishable from one another. Once she’s found guilty, she’s always guilty of more than one thing. But if you want to figure out how and why these women piss off the American public, well, there is one big, obvious starting point.
So let’s start here: Who’s the first person you imagine when you hear the phrase “celebrity trainwreck”? Summon her in your mind, whoever she is for you: “Wild,” out of control, doomed. The girl gone off the rails. Put a name to her, and a face, and hold her in your mind’s eye for a minute.
