by Sady Doyle
Or you could go back to Kurt Cobain. Poor Kurt, dead Kurt, Kurt who suffered: He was a heroin addict, he was deeply and intentionally difficult, he called up at least one journalist and threatened to kill her, he had his daughter taken away when she was two weeks old, and (oh, yeah) he shot himself. And, in all of this, the take-away for his tween fanbase was that his wife was crazy.
Mental illness and addiction ruin women—make them sideshows, dirty jokes, bogeymen, objects of moral panic—but they seem to add to a man’s mystique. No one made fun of Kurt’s track marks; they built him a cult. Just as, throughout history, men have built cults around the sacred, illuminating madness of Antonin Artaud, or Vaslav Nijinsky, or David Foster Wallace, or Jack Kerouac, or Iggy Pop, or Jackson Pollock, or Vincent Van Gogh. That list, taken in a different light, reads Schizophrenic, Schizophrenic, Suicide, Drunk, Got So High He Can’t Remember the 1970s, Drunk, and Suicide. (Comma, Plus That Thing with the Ear.) Yet the diagnoses don’t end them, or even really define them. Instead, their struggles elevate them, make them special: We all understand that genius and madness are connected. At least, we do when the genius is male.
Lou Reed was a brilliant, queer kid who reportedly had a psychotic break, moved to New York City, befriended Warhol, and became a legend. Valerie Solanas was a brilliant, queer kid who had a psychotic break, moved to New York City, befriended Warhol, and had her play thrown away and got called a “disgusting dyke” at parties. Lou hated Valerie to the very end of his days (sample lyric: “There’s something wrong if she’s alive right now”) and I will always love Lou. But I hope that, from his throne in Curmudgeonly Rock Dude Heaven, even Lou can see that the difference between what happened to him and what happened to Valerie was pretty much Valerie’s entire point.
The world is the world. Masculinity is supposed to be brave, risk-taking, rebellious; femininity is supposed to be sweet, agreeable, people-pleasing. Madness makes the one gender riskier and braver; it makes the other less compliant and harder to deal with. And so it is that a male painter can get wasted and drive his car into a tree to impress his mistress (a mistress who is, I need to stress, in the car at the time) and only add to the legend that is Jackson Pollock, whereas if a former child actress gets drunk and passes out in her SUV, innocence itself has died.
But what does this do to the girl in the car? What does it do to any woman who is sick, or fragile, or dealing with actual, no-fooling mental illness or addiction?
The standard excuse for trainwreck-shaming is that people want “role models”—that celebrities have influence, that they shape young minds, that they must behave correctly lest people imitate them, and so on and so forth. But our standard way of treating “bad role models” is almost exactly calculated to harm those young minds that most need care. If your daughter starts binge drinking, or crying in public, or passing out at events, you don’t chase her around the yard with a garden rake, calling her a disgusting whore. And if you do, her sister is not going to come to you the next time she has a problem.
Shame is not a sufficient treatment for mental illnesses, or for addiction. In fact, there’s evidence that it makes certain illnesses worse: In one study, recovering alcoholics with greater tendencies toward shame (that is, an overwhelming sense that they were bad human beings; this is opposed to guilt, a reasonable belief that you’ve done something wrong) were actually more likely to relapse, and they drank more when relapsing than people with lower shame levels. Mental illness is not helped, or even effectively and accurately portrayed, by broadcasting theatrical, compromising, shocking images of mentally ill people. The only cause aided by that is the very old, Bedlam-circa-1700s cause of dehumanizing the ill: turning them into monsters, and Others, creatures to be feared and laughed at instead of people to be loved and helped.
So, no: We are not helping Lindsay Lohan or Amanda Bynes by treating them like circus freaks. Nor are we helping any of the many women with similar struggles—women who need therapy or medication, or women who need to get sober, or women who are simply at the ends of their ropes and don’t see an option other than imploding or lashing out.
Not only is shame not helpful in treating mental illness or addiction, it also fails to justify its apparent raison d’être in the trainwreck narrative. It doesn’t help instill “good values”; instead, it creates a world in which women are afraid of themselves—where every girl lives like the lead in a werewolf movie, constantly monitoring herself for signs that she’s turning into a wild animal. Women with serious illnesses are being taught to hate themselves by the ongoing public display of madwomen, but so are women who are merely unhappy, or having a bad day. Female emotion itself is being portrayed as a destructive force that must be tamped down, contained, and (if at all possible) totally denied, because if it ever breaks through and becomes visible, that woman will become dirty, shameful, and disgusting.
I don’t know of a single person, male or female, who has ever solved their problems by refusing to admit that they had problems. But that kind of denial is what we teach women, every day of their lives, by telling them that their unhappiness is not only inconvenient, but flat-out pathological. Exhibiting madwomen creates a world where any woman can be called “crazy,” and dismissed, if she says something you don’t want to hear. It creates a climate where women are constantly inspected for signs of out-of-control emotionalism or sexual mania. But, worse than this, it creates a world where women who are suffering are afraid to ask for the help they need to save their own lives—a world where the only alternative to being made a spectacle or a trainwreck is to disappear.
4
DEATH
In February 2012, I had a party to attend. It was an ordinary affair, in one of the many hundreds of semi-respectable and totally forgettable bars down at the lower end of Manhattan—the kind of place that has both fanciful martini toppings and a jukebox in the corner. I mention this because the only thing I remember about the party is that jukebox. Every hour or half-hour, one patron’s playlist would end and another one would begin. And so it would start up once again, the same song everyone else had picked, its enormous climax blaring through the bar noise: And IIIIIIII will always love youuuuuuu.
Whitney Houston had died that afternoon. The song was their way of remembering her. But, after a few repetitions and a few drinks, it began to seem less like public mourning and more like a cruel joke.
There had been a time, certainly, when we loved Whitney. When I was a little girl, Whitney was a princess. We learned her songs in choir. (To this day, I can’t hear the line “You can’t take away my dig-ni-ty” without imagining it in the voice of two dozen fumbling second-graders who weren’t entirely sure what that last word meant.) She was a child’s perfect embodiment of glamour, a beautiful lady who appeared on late-night TV in sparkling gowns, a romantic heroine—this very song came from a movie my best friend and I had stolen from her mother and watched in secret, because (we had been led to believe) it was one of the most beautiful love stories ever told, and also too dirty for us to watch—and an idol. I had been in a car with an adult woman, my friend’s mother, who made us shut up for the entirety of “I Will Always Love You” when it came on the radio, and who had actual tears on her face when it was over. We loved Whitney. The little girls and the mothers, together. In the days when we loved her, it seemed impossible that we could stop.
We stopped. Suddenly, brutally, totally. By 2002, Whitney was a ghost: Frail, abused, addicted, her enormous voice hollowed out, whispering her way through an interview with Diane Sawyer where a discussion of whether Bobby Brown hit her was derailed by the fact that Bobby had stepped into the room to watch her talk. (Brown: “No, no, no. I would never.” Houston: “What does ‘hitting’ mean?”) Headlines flashed onto the screen: WHITNEY DYING. WHITNEY IS A WALKING SKELETON. MYSTERIOUS INJURY MAY LEAVE WHITNEY SCARRED. WHITNEY DENIES THAT SHE’S DEAD.
The interview became a joke (she said “Crack is whack!” She sassed Sawyer!) and the jokes became GIFs and memes
, and the GIFs and memes became who she was: As late as 2009, Buzzfeed was repackaging clips from it under the title “The 10 Best Moments From Whitney Houston’s Infamous Diane Sawyer Interview.” (“This interview … [from] when Whitney was still all drugged up is the best Whitney interview ever. Relive the magic with these 10 clips.”) We got more clips; got a reality show, Being Bobby Brown, filmed while Brown was on trial for domestic abuse; got, finally, footage of Whitney admitting to the drugs, fighting with Bobby, screaming “Kiss my ass” (it played on repeat on The Soup) and telling the camera that sometimes she got constipated enough that Brown had to pull feces out of her with his hand.
We took away your dig-ni-ty, Whitney. It turned out that we could, and that we wanted to. We did it for fun, because it was funny, because it made a good BuzzFeed list. We did it because she was a black addict, using a drug associated with poor black addicts. We did it because it was just what everyone else was doing.
Then she fell face-down in a bathtub. And she drowned there. Details about precisely which parts of her face had been hemorrhaging, and which chemicals were in her system, were already on their way to us thanks to whichever proud journalists were working the celebrity death beat that evening. The National Enquirer would find their way into the funeral and put a photo of her lying in the casket on its front page. (Whitney, this time, had not denied that she was dead. But, being notoriously responsible journalists, they still went looking for proof.) The Diane Sawyer interview was being repackaged, re-aired, re-posted; what had provided “The Best” moments before her death would provide Mediaite, two days after her death, with “The Most Disturbing Moment.” And tonight her song was playing, promising eternal devotion, the kind of love that never turns on its object, never mocks her, never views her pain coldly, never fades with time. Always love, always love, always love. She sang it over and over, a torn fragment of Whitney’s princess past echoing through the air and under every conversation we had.
Because now, now that our idol had fallen bleeding into the cold water and died there, we were ready to love Whitney Houston again. We were ready to tell ourselves that we always had. We weren’t forgiving Whitney Houston, that night. We were forgiving ourselves. And the more I heard her, the less certain I was that our forgiveness had been earned.
This is where it’s all headed. What the whole trainwreck industry is pushing for: the one form of permanent redemption that the culture freely allows to a woman who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. After all the flame-outs, the breakdowns, jokes, the failures, the surveillance, the invasions, the dehumanization—after all the years of hating these women, and punishing them—the one happy ending that we as a culture will accept is the moment where it all falls in on her. And we all get to gather around the coffin, and sigh, and say that it’s a shame.
We love our dead girls. We love them pretty, and we love them young: Aside from Houston, who was a practically ancient 48 years old at the time of her death, we have Amy Winehouse (27), Anna Nicole Smith (39), Princess Diana (36), Janis Joplin (27), Marilyn Monroe (36), Jayne Mansfield (34), Judy Garland (47), Zelda Fitzgerald (47) … and on and on, further and further back in time, probably back to the first woman who ever picked up a drink she couldn’t put down.
The outpouring of love and grief that these women receive, in the wake of their deaths, tends to wipe their records clean. Amy Winehouse’s death caused much of the press to turn a complete 180 on her: NME Magazine, which had nominated her as one of its “Villains of the Year” in 2008, promptly rounded up celebrity quotes on her greatness once she was dead and thus incapable of further villainy. We’ve covered the most infamous profile of Winehouse, in which a reporter went to her house at four in the morning to cover the “little scabs that raid her face” and a photo of “Winehouse’s blurry face, taken from above with a phone in one hand and a gigantic penis in her mouth.” But it’s also notable that Rolling Stone, the same publication that made this story the cover, published tribute upon tribute after her death, opening one rapturous article by lamenting the fact that her “remarkable musical achievements were often overshadowed by her tumultuous personal life.” Well, yeah: You’re the ones who told the world about the dick-sucking photo. Where did you think the attention was going to gravitate?
Similarly, during the massive international spectacle of Princess Diana’s death and funeral—the televised memorial service, with 3 million people in attendance and 2.5 billion watching at home; the streets full of flowers and weeping citizenry; the Elton John rewrite of “Candle in the Wind,” which became the best-selling single of all time—it was hard to even remember that the girl who was currently being eulogized as England’s Rose (You belong to heaven! Our nation lost without your soul!) had, in the last decade or so of her life, been portrayed as “crazy,” bulimic, and self-harming, addicted to media attention, and the subject of stories about how she’d thrown herself down flights of stairs and driven through Paris wearing only a fur coat and underpants.
It did linger, a bit: It was too entrenched in her persona to do otherwise. In 1999, The New York Times endorsed author Sally Bedel Smith’s posthumous diagnosis of “borderline personality disorder,” and called Diana “unpredictable, egocentric, aggressive, insecure, manipulative, paranoid, possessive, easily bored, uneducated and a habitual liar.” (Sub-headline: “The author’s diagnosis explains why Diana was so rotten, but not why others seemed to like her.”) And yet, in the sea of flowers and tears and piano ballads, all seemed forgotten. Alive, she was a madwoman and a blight on the British crown. Dead, she was Ophelia, lost and lovely, garlanded and mourned as she passed downstream.
In addition to all the public and private hypocrisies and the revisions of history, there is an even seamier side of the Cult of the Dead Wreck to address. There is (sorry about this, folks) the necrophilia.
Marilyn Monroe was also hated when she died. Her Some Like It Hot costar Tony Curtis said that filming a love scene with her was like “kissing Hitler”; Billy Wilder, who’d been her director on The Seven-Year Itch and Hot, refused to invite her to the premiere of the second picture because of her chronic lateness and erratic behavior, and once publicly claimed, “I’m the only director who ever made two pictures with Monroe. It behooves the Screen Directors Guild to award me a Purple Heart.” Arthur Miller, her husband at the time, told Wilder that Monroe had been pregnant while shooting, had needed half-days, and had miscarried. Wilder replied that the story was too big for him not to talk trash: “I have been besieged by newspapermen from as far as London, Paris and Berlin for a statement,” he said. “The conclusions reached by the columnist from his own research would have been twice as vicious had I not submitted to the interview.” A Ladies’ Home Journal profile of her was killed for being too sympathetic. Monroe was aware of all this, and she was angry about it: “An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument,” she said in her last interview. “Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”
And then, before the interview was even printed, she died. The hate, predictably, went away. What came in its place was infinitely creepier: Her death became a fetish.
MARILYN MONROE KILLS SELF, ran a full-page headline in the New York Mirror. The first detail included in the sub-headline was “Found nude in bed.” The woman who’d spent the last years of her life railing at the idea that she was just a dumb, pretty blonde, just a joke, had the spectacle of her naked, helpless body trotted out in just about every outlet that covered her passing.
The circumstances of her death, too, have attracted a fetishist’s possessive attention. Aside from the conspiracy theories (Murdered by Kennedys! Driven mad by the CIA!) showbiz-memorabilia collector Todd Mueller raved to Vanity Fair in 2008 about a cache of “amazing stuff” that was about to enter the Monroe market, “including the half-drunk bottle of champagne she used to wash the pills down that night.” The Wikipedia article for “Death of Marilyn Monroe” (she and Princess Diana are among the few celebrities to
have a whole article specifically dedicated to the circumstances of their demise) shows an alarming specificity in reporting that Monroe was buried in “the ‘Cadillac of caskets’—a hermetically sealed antique-silver-finished 48-ounce (heavy gauge) solid bronze ‘masterpiece’ casket lined with champagne-colored satin-silk.” Photos of Monroe in that casket circulate online, and show up in any Google search related to her death. So do photos of her on the autopsy table.
Finally, Hugh Hefner, the man who’d leaked Monroe’s nudes in the first issue of Playboy decades before the phrase “leaking nudes” was even in the lexicon—he became an instant celebrity; she had to apologize for the photos, and feared for her career—bought the crypt next to Monroe’s for $75,000. It was a gruesome joke, “sleeping with” the woman he’d almost ruined, and doing so without her consent—claiming her in death, as he’d claimed the right to exploit her in life. “I’m a sucker for blondes and she is the ultimate blonde,” Hefner told CBS Los Angeles. “It has a completion notion to it. I will be spending the rest of my eternity with Marilyn.”
Meanwhile, the vault above Monroe’s went to Richard Poncher, a man who reportedly told his wife, “If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life.” She made sure he was flipped over in the coffin to accommodate his wishes. Or, at least, to accommodate them until 2009, when the good widow Poncher put his spot up for auction on eBay. Bidding started at $500,000.
With the difficult woman inside removed, Monroe’s body—that much-remarked-upon, much-commodified object—was once again the property of the public. She belonged to us. We had the right to know. To see. To lie next to; to lie on top of. Who was to stop us?
