Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  The problem was that the end of that story was a foregone conclusion. Anyone who had actually watched the series knew the identity of Laura’s killer, and could predict how the movie ended: Laura is beaten to death in an abandoned train car by her father, Leland Palmer, who is possessed by the demon BOB and has been raping Laura since the age of twelve. BOB’s ultimate goal is to break Laura’s will through repeated rapes, so that he can possess her, too; “he wants to be me, or he’ll kill me,” Laura explains. Viewers knew from the beginning how that fight would end. Laura was waging her soul on a battle she was bound to lose. In place of the original series’ mystery, there was just the awful, clammy feeling of watching a sexually traumatized teenager march toward death.

  Fire Walk with Me borrows liberally from the vocabulary of slashers, but it’s like a shred of a movie blown up to ten times its original size, until one insignificant detail fills the entire frame. We don’t get to know the slasher’s other victims (Leland has already killed his other known victim, Teresa Banks, when the movie begins) and we don’t get a Final Girl (Ronette Pulaski, the only girl to survive BOB’s rampage, does so accidentally—Leland assumes she’s dead after beating her into a coma). All we get is one disposable girl—the blonde who does coke and takes her top off in her first scene and does everything else that dooms a horror-movie character to certain and immediate death. But where most movies would kill that girl and move on, Fire Walk with Me doesn’t allow us to take our eyes off her. We stare at the slutty, dead blonde for hours: long enough to like her. Long enough to care. That’s when we finally see what we paid for, what we’ve watched without blinking in all those other movies: her death, as she sobs, alone and frightened, in a dark room.

  It hurts in a way all those other dead girls never have. Fire Walk with Me forces us to stare at Laura until the stereotypes have dissolved, and all we can see is a child in unbearable pain. Which is what the dead blondes have always been. It’s what we all are, or were, us disposable girls.

  Living Dead Girls

  In the twenty-first century, the energy of the slasher has found its way into yet another female-driven genre: true crime.

  True crime is a horror movie with the brake lines cut. Every horrible mutilation or death really did happen, and the victims are already gone. There’s no hope, and no telling yourself it’s just a story. Women love it. One 2010 survey found that 70 percent of all true-crime book reviews on Amazon were from female readers.8 My Favorite Murder, a podcast in which two women dissect historical crimes in gory detail, has become a sensation for its exhortations to trust one’s gut about male violence and “creepitude.” I listen to it nearly every morning; I don’t know why it feels reassuring to prepare my daughter’s breakfast while I listen to the story of a woman whose abductor tried to carve her third-trimester fetus out of her abdomen, but it works.

  Multiple women have described true-crime fandom as a compulsion, something that can take over one’s life or even override rational thought; Los Angeles writer Anna Dorn wrote, in an essay for The Hairpin, that she watched true-crime TV until “one night I left [the] house to get sushi and became convinced someone in the restaurant was hatching a plan to kill me. My brain concocted an intricate plot, compelling me to wait in the bathroom until I could see his car leave through a crack in the window.”9

  True crime, like the slashers, requires a dead girl. The female victims at the heart of certain unsolved mysteries—like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, or baby beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey—become superstars of death, providing new horror stories every time someone marshals the evidence into a convincing order. Amazon sells, by my count, eleven books dedicated to the Black Dahlia case alone; the titles range from Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story (in which the author famously argues that his dad killed Short; he could form a support group with Mutilator, Jr.) to Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, which examines the mutilation of Short’s body through the lens of twentieth-century art history.

  For JonBenét, the media circus became even more intense—and more troubling, as it proceeded to consume and define the lives of her surviving family members. JonBenét was six years old when she was found in her family’s basement with a fractured skull. She had been gagged with duct tape and bound at the wrists. The Denver Post reported that there were spots of blood on her underwear.10 Someone had left a bizarre three-page “ransom note” upstairs, which asked for $118,000—close to the exact amount paid to her father in his year-end bonus.11 No one thought the killer actually wanted the Ramseys to pay ransom. For one thing, their daughter was already dead.

  The crime was unspeakable, almost too ugly to think about. Yet JonBenét became a superstar thanks to our cultural fixation on dead blondes. The details of her bound wrists and potential sexual assault hinted at perversity. Photos of her on the child-pageant circuit—complete with fluffy blonde curls and a miniature tiara—made her look like an eerily shrunk-down, prepubescent Laura Palmer. The killer was never found, allowing public curiosity to stew and bubble for decades. In 2016, the twentieth anniversary of JonBenét’s death was greeted with a Netflix documentary, a true-crime miniseries on CBS, a widely promoted Dr. Phil interview with her brother, and countless articles and retrospectives. A child’s death was treated like a pop culture event, because, well, that’s what it was.

  JonBenét’s death became a Rorschach test for the American nuclear family—one which used her actual family as props in the experiment. Nearly every theory about the case imposed a new idea of what had gone wrong in the Ramsey home, and placed the blame on a different relative—it was the narcissistic, overly ambitious mother! No, it was the sexually perverse, daughter-raping dad! No, it was the spoiled, undisciplined older brother!—until it was hard to even remember that we were talking about a real six-year-old girl and the family members who mourned her. In 2008, the Denver prosecutor’s office announced that DNA evidence cleared all members of the Ramsey family, and issued a formal apology to the Ramseys for “contribut[ing] in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime.”12 By that time, Patsy, her mother, had died of ovarian cancer. She spent the last days of her life knowing that people thought she’d murdered her little girl.

  So, yes: true-crime fandom can and does cross the line into exploitation. Yet even so, the women who consume these stories are engaged, in a deep way, with the fragility of life in female skin. Even if we think we’ve outgrown the slashers, women are still drawn to the black mirror of violence—trying to puzzle it out, to inscribe a narrative on its troublingly opaque surface. The dead girls of “true” crime are, in some ways, as fictional as any doomed babysitter in a horror movie; we superimpose our own stories over the facts of their lives and deaths, transforming them into projections of our own anxieties and vulnerabilities.

  And why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t women be obsessed with figuring out sexual violence, when that violence governs so much of our lives? Amanda Vicary, who coauthored the aforementioned study on true-crime Amazon reviews, found that “women were particularly drawn to true crime stories that included a trick to survival—a victim who escaped or a murderer who chose his targets based on certain criteria—suggesting women may look to true crime for safety tips.”13 In truth or in fiction, we are all looking to be the Final Girl.

  The Hunger

  Penetration is a male victory in these stories. It is something done to girls against their will and at their expense; the slasher gets a girl naked, gets her bloody, and gets rid of her so he can move on to his next kill.

  But the blood of a broken hymen, too, has power. Not all girls have hymens—or vaginas, for that matter—but that bit of skin has acquired a potent symbolic charge over the years. It signifies the beginning of womanhood, and the first steps into the adult world of procreation and childbirth; a girl losing her virginity is moving through liminal space, standing on the threshold between one phase of her life and the next.
Liminal spaces generate power. They create monsters. And just as men famously don’t trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die, there’s something uncanny about a girl who survives her first penetration.

  Which means that it is time, at last, to talk about the strange second coming of Mercy Brown.

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897, only a few years after newspapers became briefly captivated with an epidemic of rural New Englanders defiling their dead neighbors. Stoker was touring America during the time of the scandal; one such article, from New York World, was found pasted into his notes for his novel-in-progress.

  “Strange Superstition of Long Ago,” the article promised. “The Old Belief Was that Ghostly Monsters Sucked the Blood of Their Living Relatives.”14 It went on to explain that

  “recent ethnological research has disclosed something very extraordinary in Rhode Island. It appears that the ancient vampire superstition still survives in that State, and within the last few years many people have been digging up the dead bodies of relatives for the purpose of burning their hearts.”

  The writer detailed several such cases, one of which sounds like a garbled version of Mercy’s: “The most recent [exhumation] was made two years ago in a family where the mother and four children had already succumbed to consumption. The last of these children was exhumed and the heart was burned.”

  Stoker is a resolutely mysterious figure. Biographers have had trouble resolving basic questions like the cause of his death (“Locomotor Ataxy 6 Months,” which could mean either a stroke or syphilis).15 So, though we know Stoker’s interest was, uh, stoked by the happenings in New England, we don’t know whether his knowledge went any deeper than that one article. We specifically don’t know whether he ever read about Mercy, the nineteen-year-old girl who was exhumed and eaten, or if he learned her name.

  Yet, when Stoker’s novel of vampirism appeared a year later, much of its word count was devoted to the wasting illness and death of a nineteen-year-old girl with a near-rhyming name: Lucy. And one of the novel’s biggest, goriest sequences centers on the exhumation and destruction of Lucy Westenra’s corpse.

  Even in a novel as shamelessly tawdry and hypersexual as Dracula, Lucy stands out. At the start of the novel, she has three men in love with her—insane asylum doctor Jack Seward, American adventurer Quincey P. Morris, and generic-brand British dude Arthur Holmwood—and is delighted by the attention of all three. “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” she wonders at one point.16

  Lucy also flirts more than a little with Mina Harker, the respectable, tomboyish proto–Final Girl who’s staying with her: “I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit,” and so on, and so forth.17 Mina is the one who sees Lucy’s bedroom window mysteriously open every morning, no matter how they try to keep it shut; she’s the one who watches Lucy begin to rise in the night and walk, blind and unknowing, toward the darkness outside her door.

  Lucy’s story has the resonance and weirdness of a fairy tale, like a bloodier version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: First Jack proposes to Lucy, then Quincey proposes, then Arthur proposes. Jack is too serious, Quincey is too jolly, but Arthur is just right. (Yet that damn bedroom window keeps coming open.) Then Lucy falls sick with anemia; Jack gives his blood, and Quincey gives his blood, and Arthur gives his blood, but it’s not enough. (Lucy stays sick; she starts walking toward the dark in her sleep; the bedroom window just won’t stay shut.) One night, Mina awakes to find Lucy’s bed empty. After a panicked chase, Mina finds her friend outdoors: “The silver light of the moon struck a half-reclining figure, snowy white…. [I]t seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it. What it was, whether man or beast, I could not tell.”18

  What “reclining” and “bent over” mean in this context is not something Stoker could or would have specified; he wanted our imaginations to do the heavy lifting. Film adaptations have depicted this moment as everything from a classic mouth-on-the-neck vampire swoon to enthusiastic sex with a man-bat. What matters is that, soon afterward, Lucy is dead, and neighborhood children are being attacked. And Professor Van Helsing, who has been called in to solve the case, knows why. Lucy is a vampire, and it’s time for one last horrible round of Goldilocks-ing as the three men who love her open her grave.

  Like Mercy, Lucy’s body looks fresher than it ought to. “She was, if possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever,” Jack tells us, “and I could not believe that she was dead. The lips were red, nay redder than before, and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom.”19 Yet even this beautiful body proves disposable: “It made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not so strong as I had expected.”20

  Once he’s decided to do it, Lucy starts to look like she has it coming. She becomes a “nightmare” with a “voluptuous mouth [which] it made one shudder to see,” and a “carnal and unspiritual appearance”; her “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and [her] purity to voluptuous wantonness.”21 Now, given that the pre-dead Lucy was angling to institute an Ethical Slut situation in the middle of 1890s London, one doubts she was all that “pure” in the first place. But now there’s no pretense. We finally see her, in all her hunger: The girl who took three men’s love, drained three men’s bodies, and went out at night looking for more. The monster.

  So Jack agrees to put a stake through her heart, and Quincey agrees to put a stake through her heart, and Arthur can’t bear the thought of it. But Arthur, once again, is our just-right boy: “It will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free,” Van Helsing tells the men. “To this I am willing, but is there none amongst us who has a better right?”22

  He was, after all, going to be her husband. And here, at long last, is the consummation of their marriage:

  The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions. The sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it…. And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.

  The hammer fell from Arthur’s hand. He reeled and would have fallen had we not caught him.

  Great drops of sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps.23

  If nothing else, it seems clear that Bram Stoker had a really, really terrible time on his honeymoon.

  Queen of the Night

  Lucy Westenra raises a possibility that is apparently even more alarming than rape, torture, and fatal tanning-bed malfunction: consent. Desire, even. Dead sluts are forcibly penetrated and tossed aside; the Final Girl survives, but only by erasing her own sexuality. It’s when a girl leans into the violence of desire, goes out to let a stranger eat her in the pale moonlight, that she becomes a monster.

  There’s a certain ugliness even in Stoker’s depictions of Lucy’s true, “good” self. Letting herself be loved by our three heroes is framed as roughly equivalent to using their blood to treat her illness, a constant, sucking passivity in which nothing these men give will ever be enough. There’s even a mean joke embedded in the fact that the vampire Lucy eats children; as soon as a girl gets engaged, the joke goes, she starts wanting babies. Lucy becomes a monster by becoming a mother, or vice versa; like Regan in The Exorcist, when Lucy opens herself up to the possibilities of sex and pregnancy, she loses her humanity as a result.

  And yet, I’m hard-pressed to find Lucy—her voluptuous wantonness, her carnal spirit, her casual disrespect for love and marriage in a time when
love and marriage were the only things women of her station were allowed to care about—anything but wonderful. There really aren’t many nineteenth-century novels where a bisexual, polyamorous woman kidnaps a toddler, throws it across the room because she’s spotted a cute boy, then loudly begs said boy to do her in front of all his friends. (“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”)24 Yet there is Lucy, and perhaps she is enough. Mercy was so entirely stripped of agency that she was dead for the most important parts of her own story; it seems like a kind of justice to memorialize her with a character who, even in death, is so vibrantly and joyfully and inconveniently alive.

  Lucy has to be put in her place. She has to die. In fact, given the connotations of that stake in Arthur’s hand, she has to be raped to death; meeting her maker, like all the other dead blondes, at the end of something long and pointy. This is how sex looks in a world that views male desire as a form of dominance and violence. Virgins are untouched like a toy still in its original box, unspoiled like food in a sealed can—there to be used, played with, emptied, consumed.

  Lucy is no virgin; the thin membrane of her throat is pierced, the fang sinks through, her blood wells forth. She is forever changed by the experience. But she arises, not broken, but transformed; less than human, but more than herself, possessed of her own sharp fangs and ready to penetrate men in return. She ought to be dead. She is dead. Yet the act that killed the girl has brought forth the woman—and she is terrifying.