by Alice Bolin
The horror in Ginger Snaps comes from codependence taken to its extreme of dysfunction, an extreme B and I maybe should have treated as a cautionary tale. But Brigitte and Ginger’s personal dysfunction points to broader societal dysfunctions, to narratives and expectations that push women and girls to exhaustion, to sickness. Their mother does everything she can to be a perfect suburban housewife—cooking, cleaning, and crafting, encouraging and caring for her daughters in spite of their weirdness—and by the end is cracking in her archetype. When she discovers that the girls have killed a popular girl who tormented them, she suggests they just start over. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll let the house fill up with gas and I’ll light a match. We’ll start fresh,” she says. “Just us girls.”
“Just us girls” is a succinct description of Brigitte and Ginger’s ethos. Their attitudes are at times misogynistic (“Wrists are for girls,” Ginger says when contemplating methods of suicide), but really what they long for is an all-female world. Since they know that puberty and the development of their sexuality may eventually lead them to need men, even want them, they see only one solution: to develop relationships only with each other and die before they reach adulthood.
We can look to a number of cultural forebears of the Fitzgerald sisters—the heroines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides are also familiar with the calamity that sexual maturity can pose. Hamlet’s Ophelia retreats intentionally into madness as her only recourse to express her grief, and turns to suicide when all the male figures in her life have failed her. There is also the uncanny matriarch of American poetry, about whom a VICE headline once said, “Emily Dickinson Was Horny and Ready to Die.” Ginger Snaps is, then, a very old story: the feminine descent into insanity, into wildness, into what is morbid, dark, odd, and scary. As Anne Carson delineates in her essential essay “The Gender of Sound,” Aristotle associates femaleness with all that is “curving, dark, secret, evil, ever-moving, not self-contained, and lacking its own boundaries.” Describing an ancient Greek poem in which a man who is far from home can hear the sounds of both wolves and women howling, she writes,
The wolf is a conventional symbol of marginality in Greek poetry . . . He lives beyond the boundary of usefully cultivated and inhabited space . . . Women, in the ancient view, share this territory spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a “natural” female affinity for all that is raw, formless, and in need of the civilizing hand of man.
In light of women’s problematic and long-standing affiliation with wolves, a werewolf movie involving pubescent girls feels less cheesy and more truly serious all the time.
It seems that one outcome of the feminine being’s “lacking its own boundaries” is that female pain is often collective. There have been incidents of a kind of “mass hysteria” in the very recent past: in 1962 a so-called laughter epidemic began with three high school girls in the Tanzanian village of Kashasha and eventually affected several villages and one thousand people. In an Upstate New York high school in early 2012, fifteen girls, many of them cheerleaders, started displaying Tourette’s syndrome–like symptoms. Girls charge one another with their suffering, and they take up the pathologies of their friends and sisters, in an interlocking web of cruelty and solidarity.
Carson writes how Sigmund Freud coined the term hysteria to describe “female patients whose tics and neuralgias and convulsions and paralyses and eating disorders and spells of blindness could be read, in his theory, as a direct translation into somatic terms of psychic events upon the woman’s body.” In Ginger Snaps, emotional pain is manifest on the Fitzgerald sisters’ bodies, even before their encounter with the werewolf. In Freud’s conception, their hysterical behavior was the only way for women to express what was going on in their minds. Hysteria was a rupture rooted deep in the subconscious, a terrible secret unearthed, “as if the entire female gender,” Carson writes, “were a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things.”
And yet all of these common female performances—as someone proper, chaste, and controllable; a wolflike other; or a hysterical invalid—are conceived of and defined by the patriarchy. Carson speaks of how Playboy magazine will print interviews with famous feminists alongside nude centerfold pictorials. “Each of them,” she writes, “the centerfold naked woman and the feminist, a social construct purchased and marketed by Playboy magazine to facilitate that fantasy of masculine virtue.” Brigitte and Ginger, in their transgressions and their transformations, are still participating in a narrative authored and perpetuated by a society that desires for girls to be wild, perverse, and “in need of the civilizing hand of man.”
I am attempting to avoid these traps sprung in the narratives of female experience, like I’m winding my way through some sort of feminist labyrinth—how do you think I’m doing? When I moved to Montana for graduate school, B and I talked on the phone constantly, but circumstances conspired to change our relationship. She came to visit me in the spring in Montana, not asking before she booked a trip for a full seven days. I was weirdly itchy about this collision of my old and new lives, and even though B would go off on her own for hours at a time, her presence still made me cranky. I felt like a kid who regrets asking her friend to sleep over. We were still best friends, but she wasn’t my one and only. Still, I consider our friendship a kind of twinning, embracing all the erotic potential of that phrase. Intimate best friendships are the first committed relationships many American girls have, and whether they are sexual or not, they are romantic. Girls give each other presents, cuddle and kiss each other, braid each other’s hair and do each other’s makeup, talk for hours on the phone, write each other notes covered in hearts, say “I love you” and mean it.
At times it felt like B and I kept each other girls too long, like Ginger trying to keep Brigitte forever sixteen. I am tempted to say that B and I had to change our relationship in order to grow up, but “grow up” contains so many heteronormative expectations, including the one that primary relationships must be the kind that could lead to marriage, kids, and a retirement plan. Sisterhood has been one of the foremost queering forces in Western culture, including in particular the professional sisterhood of the convent. There is also the venerable tradition of spinsterism, and pairs of spinster sisters have been immortalized over and over, from the murderous old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace to the saintly ones in Babette’s Feast.
True, female relationships are often fraught, untenable, and toxic, maybe because they’re expected to be that way. Think of Peter Jackson’s murderous teenage lovers in Heavenly Creatures or the secrets and betrayals between Nel and Sula in Sula. When girls are cruel and manipulative to their sisters and best friends, when they contract secrets and compulsions and disorders from them, they are acting out another script authored by a sexist society. And it is not only that sisters are expected to share dysfunction, but that our culture encourages female intimacy while also despising women without men and suspecting that they are wild and sinister. This contradiction produces shame and anger in girls, who take out their rage on the only people who are vulnerable to them, by punishing and policing their sisters but also themselves. I recognize this quick-burning, misplaced anger in my relationship with B, which was a kind of closeness where any boundary was a betrayal.
The world Ginger and Brigitte grow up in is truly out of a horror story, where the initiation into womanhood is either a quick, monstrous death sentence or a slow death of the soul. We must try to give female relationships the space they deserve, not treating them as aberrations or cautionary tales, but remembering how Sula becomes Nel’s only regret, and how, in the Book of Ruth, Ruth says to Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Rather than casting my story with B as another case of too-close female friendship, I should probably say that like many first loves, it did not survive the switch to long distance, but thankfully, we stayed friends. When I was twenty, B drew a portrait of the virgin martyr St. Agnes of Rome and I got it tattooed on my arm, so that some
part of B is mine forever. Agnes was a pious teenager who died rather than marry one of her rich suitors, saying of her executioner, “This butcher is the lover who pleases me.” It’s that same old story, about a spooky girl who died for love too young.
Part 4
A Sentimental Education
Accomplices
The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.
—Joan Didion, “Sentimental Journeys”
Well. Time passes and passes. It passes backward and it passes forward and it carries you along, and no one in the whole wide world knows more about time than this: it is carrying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember. Yet, something remembers—it can even be said that something avenges: the trap of our century, and the subject now before us.
—James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
1.
For years every essay I wrote started with “I moved to Los Angeles” because it was the only brave or interesting thing I had ever done. Much to my delight, my own biography had converged with one of the perennial themes of modern storytelling: the provincial naïf lost in the big city, learning hard lessons among the urban eccentrics. It’s a narrative that is almost universally understandable, and, probably because of that, at least partially a lie. Moving there was difficult. I couldn’t find a job, couldn’t figure out which directions the streets ran, couldn’t keep track of my wallet, and had to order new credit cards and a new driver’s license—twice. The lie in this narrative is not false naïveté. I really was that stupid, and I had no right to be.
I moved there a few weeks after I turned twenty-five, as I lost my last, most questionable claims on youth, still never having had a steady relationship or a real job. I had spent my entire life in Idaho, Nebraska, and Montana. I crammed for my new big city life in a Salt Lake City motel room, googling “How do you drive on a freeway?” The summer before I moved to L.A., I drove to my aunt and uncle’s house in Chico, California, north of Sacramento, in my battered pink Oldsmobile. I had never been to California, never seen a palm tree or the beach. I was pet-sitting for them as they took a cross-country road trip, despite the fact that I had always been more or less terrified of animals.
Having felt lonely all my life, I was for the first time alone. That is probably why I quickly became obsessed with my aunt and uncle’s dog, Sweet Pea, a pudgy two-year-old Chihuahua mix gnarled by an early life on the streets, who was, nevertheless, beautiful. I had never walked, fed, or bathed a dog, and rarely had I taken pleasure in petting one, but I would hold Sweet Pea from when I read mystery novels in the morning to when I watched Dateline at night. At times she would wriggle from my lap and lie on the floor to escape my constant hugging. We were together so much that I found myself, unsettlingly, thinking of her less as a pet and more as a roommate. At the Safeway, wondering if we were low on dog food, I thought, I’ll text Sweet Pea.
Being so newly alone, I ended up doing strange things. I went to karaoke at a random bar and, before I sang, announced that I was new in town and had no friends. I was quickly adopted by a set of sweet, hip townies a few years younger than I was. At the same bar on another night I met the man I started sleeping with. He was thirty-three, a former cop who had been wounded on the force, got fired, sued the city, and used his settlement to go back to college. In movie voice-over terms: I learned a lot that summer. I felt free to have experiences I had only heard of—“casual dating,” “dogsitting,” “meeting new people”—once I was living in a place where absolutely no one cared what I did. But it is dangerous to grow up so late. Desperately bored, I drove nearly two hours to Davis one night to watch The Bling Ring. Coming back home through Sacramento, I missed my freeway exit three times. Each time I got off on the next one, circled around, got back on the freeway, and drove right past it. It did not occur to me until I was surrounded by cars speeding through an unfamiliar city: Ah, I thought, with some wonder, I need glasses.
It was a summer of road trips. I drove my 1995 Oldsmobile thousands of miles up remote mountain roads in the Sierra Nevadas and down through the Grapevine to Hollywood. I loved and trusted my car completely, believing it to be low maintenance, resilient, and perfectly behaved in all weather. As I took one last trip, north through the Cascades on the way to Portland, in a scorching August on the hottest stretch of I-5, the car began to overheat. I was spacing out slightly when a light on my dashboard began to flash. Then more lights started flashing, and a loud dinging shook through my skull. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, as I was unable to read the familiar symbols on my dashboard. I rejected the only obvious response—pull the car over—and I kept going until the engine made a horrifying crack and my car was good and dead. A person who will keep driving on a busy mountain highway as her car boils over may be an adult, but she has not learned to act like one.
As I write my version of a Hello to All That, I am aware that this story is supposed to be told about New York, not L.A. There are of course books and movies about people moving to Los Angeles, but they are almost always seeking stardom or, more modestly, work in the entertainment industry. I can’t think of any documents of a new writer or artist moving to L.A. with no prospects, seeking only misadventurously to “find herself.” If you can, please let me know. We are all suckers for these stories of urban acclimatization because they allow for situations that are so adolescent: feeling left out, trying to analyze the clothes and haircuts of cool people, stupid mistakes, electric new experiences, false hope, sharp sadness, and embarrassing attempts at self-reinvention.
That vulnerable mood is the main appeal of Rachel Kushner’s art-and-anarchy novel The Flamethrowers, at least for me. I read it in my first year in Los Angeles as a newborn urban artist, raw to the world. Kushner’s novel, probably one of the most celebrated works of fiction of the early twenty-first century, is highly brainy, informed by ideas about time and chaos laid out by the intellectual movements of the 1970s, from land art to the Italian anarchist movement Autonomia Operaia. But the book’s tender heart is its vivid heroine and narrator, unnamed but sometimes called Reno, because that’s where she’s from.
The Flamethrowers documents the narrator’s journey to New York in the early seventies as she seeks the vibes of the downtown art scene. She has just finished art school at the University of Nevada at Reno, and she reminisces about her working-class childhood riding on her cousins’ motorcycles and ski racing in the Sierra Nevadas. I also grew up in a western backwater and went to a state university, so I immediately loved this book. I recognized so much of my own romance and confusion as she describes her early wonder at the city, the way Fourteenth Street glittered in a tropical light that would disappear once she knew it well. She is alienated from excitement she imagines all around her, her loneliness casting a spell of silence that is sporadically, jarringly broken by odd encounters. She tags along one night with some art-world libertines, an older southern gentleman and his girlfriend, a tragic nymphic beauty. They bullshit about everything, tell her lies and sob stories, make assumptions about her life, ask her questions and don’t listen to the answers. Their night climaxes in a hotel room as the narrator watches them slow-dance with a bottle of Cutty Sark and a loaded handgun.
I knew how thankful you could be for inexplicable episodes like this. Even the imperfect friendly gesture can be a mercy, and then you are mercifully free to walk away from whatever bizarre humanity you have witnessed. My first weeks in L.A. I hemorrhaged my birthday money driving insane distances from where I was crashing in Long Beach, eating breakfast alone in Echo Park and going to karaoke alone at midnight in Culver City. Once I was caught in traffic on the 710 for nearly an hour, one of those cliché traffic jams where people get out of their cars and walk around on the free
way. My hosts in Long Beach were my friends from college who had both gotten jobs as train conductors. They would be gone for days at a time and then come back in powerfully bad moods, which they remedied by drinking cases of Bud Light Lime and undertaking schemes like meeting girls from Cal State Fullerton at bars near Disneyland. When their lifestyle became too much for me, I got a cheap hotel room thirty miles north in Alhambra, where I watched MTV and tried to conceive of what the hell I was doing there. I chose the most difficult version of L.A., the one that meant endless arduous journeys by car, so the city was totally accessible to me except any parts of it that might have made sense. This lifestyle was unsustainable, and luckily I didn’t have to sustain it for long: when I finally settled in Koreatown, parking was at such a premium that I moved my car only when it was mandated for street cleaning. I walked to the many beloved landmarks near my neighborhood, including the Brass Monkey karaoke bar, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and the best Oaxacan food in L.A.