When she was writing fiction, she would try to play with words and languages, often incorporating phrases of French and Spanish (though she couldn’t speak either language). Taer’s fiction would often peter out as the narrative fell apart. The beginning of a story would be written with dramatic energy, many pages filled with hurried and messy handwriting. Perhaps a few days later, another few paragraphs would appear, continuing the earlier narrative thread. Then the story would wane until it vanished. She had little control over the fictional worlds she created in bursts of fevered inspiration, so if a story messily disintegrated, it was a telltale sign Taer was writing fiction rather than fact. Maybe she transferred her stories from the journals to a computer, where she regained control of her narratives, but I never found them on her internal or external hard drives.§
Although Taer’s last diary entries were written with the same drama and timbre as some of her stories, she meticulously dated all of them. She didn’t date her fiction. In her final diary entries, Taer abbreviated people and place names, which she never did in her fiction, and she didn’t vary the sentence structure. In short, though these later entries sound fictional, Taer wrote them like she was writing facts. Woodyard has proposed that she was writing fiction in the style of nonfiction for some aesthetic purpose, but Taer never, to my knowledge, affected that style elsewhere, nor did she ever profess a preference for experimental fiction in that mode. To steal a saying from my helpful friends at the CPD, “the best indication of future action is past action.”
The events written hastily at the end of Taer’s journals and explored in this text unfold in dramatic, even fictive ways. I take full responsibly for any gaps in logic and legibility, stemming from a lack of knowledge or understanding.ǁ I hope those gaps will be few and far between.
This book is built on over one hundred interviews with everyone from key players in the unfolding drama to those whose roles were only incidental. I interviewed nearly every living person mentioned in this text, with the notable exceptions of Irene Davis, one of Molly Metropolis’s dancers and Berliner’s ex-girlfriend, as well as Alice Becker-Ho, widow of the French psychogeographer Guy Debord. For their willingness to explain their take on controversial events, I would like to thank two of Molly’s former dancers, in the text referred to as Peaches and Ali, at their request.
Equally as important is what Taer left behind for me: audio files (which I transcribed myself) of interviews with Nix and various discussions of Molly’s disappearance with Nix and Berliner—as well as the journals, which she wrote in every day during the early months of 2010.
Molly’s record label, SDFC Records, provided some limited, but helpful, information on sales figures and marketing strategy and approved brief but informative interviews with recording and publicity executives who worked with Molly. HBO Films allowed me to view uncut footage from their unfinished concert special Molly Metropolis Presents: The Apocalypse Ball, and for that I am grateful. I appreciate the willingness of Nix and Berliner’s families to speak with me, but I am especially indebted to the families of Molly Metropolis and Caitlin Taer, who agreed to be interviewed despite the difficulty of the subject matter. Molly’s team, who still call themselves the General Council, were instrumental in making Molly come alive for me. In the countless interviews, profiles, YouTube videos, Tweets, and music videos that Molly left behind, I found the pop star she wanted to be.
Once Molly and Taer’s story begins to take definitive shape, it quickly fizzles into absurdity, like a map of a world with slightly distorted proportions—almost normal looking at first, but on a second viewing, a terrible deviation, a ghost of a place that never was, a land that couldn’t be, a burning and terrible world beneath everything that we know to be real.
This book isn’t about the disappearance of Molly Metropolis or the death/disappearance of Caitlin Taer. It’s the story of Taer looking for Molly Metropolis, and whether or not she was found.
* * *
* The sentiment is semi-lifted from a piece by New Yorker journalist David Woodyard, who actually used the word addendum in his article concerning Taer. Woodyard has asked the author to clarify that point.
† My assumption is that Cyrus K. Archer meant to expand on this question, perhaps even try to answer it, but I think it works better if I let it stand. It’s the central question of the book, after all. A question even I am trying to answer. —Catie Disabato
‡ In fact, according to Cyrus’s notes, he was urged by David Woodyard to disregard everything he read in Taer’s notebook. Woodyard believed Taer’s story about Molly was fiction, and didn’t think Cyrus should write a book about it. Woodyard’s lack of support for Cyrus’s project was one of the main factors in the disintegration of their relationship. —CD
§ Graciously, Taer’s mother allowed me to access all of Taer’s computers and data storage devices.
ǁ I’ve tried to wrap up any pieces left hanging, and I apologize for the places forthcoming where I’ve been unable to do so. —CD
PART 1
“When I started writing songs, I didn’t have a plan,” Molly said. “I didn’t follow any songwriting rules, I made my own boundaries. I took whatever detours felt right to me. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to write this hit and be the world’s biggest pop star.’ I just wanted to feel the whole history of culture resonating through me.”
—“Living in Molly’s Metropolis,” The New York Times Magazine
January 2010. A new decade had recently been rung in, with less pomp and circumstance than the previous decade, which had the Y2K scare, not to mention the resurgence of Prince’s fantastic “1999,” selling over two million new copies over the course of the year. When the world celebrated the new millennium, Molly Metropolis was only thirteen. Born to an upper-middle-class interracial family, Molly’s African American mother differentiated her from her white high school classmates. She didn’t have any siblings or friends to share the experience of growing up biracial in a majority white space. Characteristically, Molly let her dissimilarities from her peers be her strength. “Sometimes I felt like an alien,” Molly told The New York Times in late 2009, “but even when I felt completely lonely, I thought, ‘it’s better to be unique than to be just like everyone else.’ ”*
A few weeks after giving that interview, as the overwhelming success of her single, “Apocalypse Dance,” and its accompanying thirteen-minute Alice in Wonderland–themed music video portended her stratospherically successful year, Molly Metropolis disappeared.
Molly was gone just as we were truly getting to know her. Five hit singles from her outrun electro–infused† and dance floor–centric debut Cause Célèbrety‡ gave Molly pop stardom and global name recognition. Her public presentation resembled Marilyn Monroe’s opaqueness disguised as translucence, before Marilyn died and was de-mystified. Like an Old Hollywood starlet with a name and backstory invented by a studio bigwig, Molly “seemed to invite you in, but then you realized you’ve had hours of conversation with her and you don’t really know anything about her.”§ The only difference was that Molly made up her name herself. During a time when pop singers like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears cultivated down-to-earth public personalities and signed away their last shreds of privacy to MTV’s reality television factory, Molly wanted her persona to be like parties at Holly Golightly’s apartment: crowded and so fun you forget you never really spoke to the hostess.ǁ
After the premiere of the “Apocalypse Dance” music video, and amidst conflicts with her record label about her delayed second album Cause Apocalyptic, Molly Metropolis updated her Twitter account more frequently with pictures of her dance rehearsals and workout sessions. She retweeted fans and, in true Stars!-They’re-Just-Like-Us fashion, she grumbled about hangovers: “11-11-09, 2:16pm @MollyMetro Stayed up late celebrating the ‘Apocalypse Dance’ video premiere. Too. Much. Red. Wine.” She also Tweeted quotations from her favorite philosopher, Guy Debord, often unattributed: “11-16-09, 5:33 a.m. @MollyMetro I’ve writte
n much less than most people who write; I’ve drunk much more than most people who drink.” Sometimes she altered Debord’s words to meet her own needs, for example, changing, “Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit,” to “11-14-09, 4:25 p.m. @MollyMetro People are told they have a choice between love and a garbage disposal unit. I say fuck love, fuck garbage, EAT POP INSTEAD.” After popular celebrity gossip website Oh No They Didn’t posted a story about record execs cutting some of her touring perks after she badmouthed them to Rolling Stone, she tweeted from the first page of De-bord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: “12-03-09, 10:22 a.m. @MollyMetro I obviously can speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care to not give too much information to just anybody.”
Although most of her fans didn’t identify the real writer of some of her Tweets, savvy readers could’ve picked up some revealing hints about Molly’s inner life from her choice of quotation sources. Gawker.com wrote a short piece titled “Is Molly Metropolis a Secret Guy Debord Fan?” The answer, of course, was yes.
Elle put Molly on their December 2009 cover. She returned the favor by giving interviewer Eliza L. Pinkett her most revealing interview to that point. She told Pinkett stories from her childhood, teetering on the edge of talking about racism without fully committing to a serious dialogue: “Growing up, I was very theatrical and dramatic and strange, and I had this gigantic mane of wild, really thick hair. Most of my friends were white girls with thin hair, they didn’t know how to help me look good. It was the nineties so everyone was trying to have that really straight Jennifer [Aniston] look.” She also talked about the difficulties of dating as a superstar, “What I don’t understand are the guys who don’t want to be with a successful woman. It’s so sexist! It’s like, don’t they want to be with the best version of me? The one that sells hundreds of thousands of records and gets to spend every night with thousands of my Pop Eaters? If a guy can’t deal with that, then he’s the one that has a problem, not me.”
Molly couldn’t keep Debord out of the Elle interview, explaining fame to Pinkett in Debordian terms: “In the past, being a pop star meant specializing in the ‘seemingly lived,’ superficially representing one personality type or another. Like, one pop star is the pretty virginal one, and one is the wild child, and one is the unlucky-in-love one. But I’m not superficial, I’m not a type, I’m a woman! I don’t want my fans to get some simulation of life from watching me, I want them to listen to my music and feel that it describes, and improves, their own life. I want them to identify with me, but also know that I’m my own person.”a
By the time the Elle profile was published, on the eve of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis’s following had become increasingly passionate and fervent. The creativity and ferocity she devoted to what would’ve otherwise been standard pop songs caught the attention of “highbrow” critics and thinkers, as well as teenage pop devotees. She insisted on her and her fans’ non-conformity with society, even as she sold millions of records, as music critic Tesfaye Likke wrote in his controversial article “Eulogy for Molly Metropolis—2 Years Later”: “Molly made her ‘Pop Eaters’ out to be more punk than the mall-punks they grew up with, more rebellious than the pseudo–Che Guevara disciples they sat next to in Econ 101, and more revolutionary than all the kids living in filth at Occupy Wall Street. She created a scene where people could claim non-conformity by listening to music made by the most popular artist in the country. And she made that paradox feel logical. Her inexplicably powerful charisma trumped better judgment. That quality is rare in a musician, and hasn’t been seen since Kurt Cobain took his own life.”b
When Molly Metropolis vanished during her massive Apocalypse Ball tour, she left 152 dates unperformed, costing her record company upwards of twenty-five million dollars and disappointing thousands of fans who had given her their hearts, souls, and money. At the time of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis had more than forty million Twitter followers, and fan sites by the hundreds. The abrupt end of millions of parasocial relationships became the greatest and most frequently broadcast loss. “She was a part of my actual life!!!” a typical (though with a marginally greater grasp of grammar and spelling) YouTube commenter exclaimed. “I’m going to miss her because I really really felt like she was talking to me—she answered a question from my twitter in an interview once and it was so amazing.”c Molly often Tweeted her exact location, providing a link to a map with a drop-pin, making her physical person even more present in her fans’ realities than all other pop culture phenoms before her.
After Molly disappeared, a few kooks came out of the woodwork to offer elaborate explanations. A popular Illuminati conspiracy theory website called The Vigilant Citizen weighed in with their particular brand of insanity. On August 12, 2009, the website had published a long article called “Molly Metropolis: An Illuminati Puppet,” which claimed Molly was a mind-controlled puppet and that every time she posed for a picture with her hair over her eye (which, admittedly, happened a lot in her early press photos and the music videos for her Cause Célèbrety singles) she was making herself into the All-Seeing Eye. The Vigilant Citizen wrote: “Those who have passed Illuminati Symbolism 101 know that the All-Seeing Eye is probably its most recognizable symbol.”
According to The Vigilant Citizen, Molly Metropolis disappeared because her “Delta” or “killer” programming had been activated and she completed her “final Illuminati operation,” then vanished to hide the evidence of her actions.d With the story, The Vigilant Citizen ran an early publicity photo with Molly dressed in a black T-shirt with a deep V-neck; she holds the back of her hand up to her left eye to reveal the tattoo of an eye inside a triangle that Molly has on her palm. Needless to say, the police never investigated “Delta programming/evil Illuminati mission” as a possible explanation for her disappearance.
Leaving behind the wildest conspiracy theorists, most people argued over whether Molly Metropolis had been kidnapped, killed, or had left of her own volition. Various broadcast news reporters and Internet commentators fought out these three opposing viewpoints until they had nothing new to say.
On January 8, Molly Metropolis was scheduled to play the first of two shows at the United Center, the heart of Chicago’s ice-covered Near West Side. Despite a windchill of ten degrees below freezing and system-wide delays on the L, ticket holders arrived early and in droves. Girls and boys—the most conservative dressed in leather and leotards, the most ostentatious in full costume as Molly Metropolis herself—lined up outside of Will Call, giggling and jostling each other with excitement. The dance floor was crowded by 5 p.m., with sweaty teenagers jockeying for the spots closest to the stage.
Molly performed songs from Cause Apocalyptic, at the time still unreleased, as well as all the singles from Cause Célèbrety, to a gyrating crowd of three thousand Pop Eaters, as her dedicated fans had christened themselves, riffing off an interview Molly gave to MTV. com: “I want to live in a world where the only thing you need to drink is music and the only thing you need to eat is pop culture.”
The show began with the projected image of a glowing black-and-white skyline, not specific to any city. A “chopped and screwed” version of the opening melody of “Apocalypse Dance” then played, as the projected city started to degrade and crumble. The sound of a pre-recorded intro filled the room: “My Pop Eaters. The ones who eat pop for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You are the city kids. The ones who ran away to the city, the ones who are born there, the ones who dream of it. I’m not talking about L.A. or Chicago or even New York City. My name is Molly Metropolis”—here, the recording pauses for a burst of applause—“and I’m the city where you live. And in my city, we live every night like it’s our last.”
The recorded voice faded and the fallen city turned translucent to reveal Molly Metropolis in a dress of bronze metallic lace sparkling against her light brown skin, her arms reaching toward the sky in a V. The music cut out, and she belted the opening
lyrics of “Apocalypse Dance” a cappella: “Tonight / might be your last chance / t-t-tonight / to get one last dance.”
As the Chicago Tribune’s music critic Bran Hollis Brooks pointed out in his review of the show, when a concertgoer is used to the pop shows of artists like Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Christina Aguilera, seeing Molly Metropolis perform is an aurally surreal experience. At the time, most other pop stars lip-synced to album cuts of their hit songs while devoting their stage energy to dancing—but Molly actually sang while she performed. The airbrushed, autotuned album might be more conventionally beautiful, but nothing makes a concert feel more like a concert than hearing someone sing live. In the years since Molly Metropolis debuted, most new pop stars have followed her model.
As with all of his Molly Metropolis coverage, Brooks spent a good portion of his review (published before her disappearance became public knowledge) re-examining the “phenomenon of Molly Metropolis” and attempting to draw some satisfying conclusion about the nature of her appeal, though obviously flummoxed by his own appreciation of her. Like a dog staring confusedly at his own reflection, Burns wrote, “Perhaps, in a long year of job loss and economic decline, America needs an oddity to gawk at like Depression-era Americans visiting freak shows. Molly Metropolis is no Bearded Lady, but she scratches the same cultural itch.”e
After the concert, Molly Metropolis held an after-party at the Peninsula Hotel on the Miracle Mile with a small group of dancers and friends, including Nicolas Berliner. They kept the hotel bar open until 3 a.m., two hours past the usual closing time, after which Molly retired alone to her private suite.
The Ghost Network Page 2