“So, with a synthetic,” the reporter said, summing it up, “the fantasy and the reality are identical.”
“Exactly,” Davecat said.
Of course, Pygmalion himself was an artificial creation. As a character in a story, he existed entirely as a symbol in a larger system of meaning. Davecat, by contrast, is a character in this chapter, and in an episode of a TLC show, and in several documentaries and magazine articles, but he’s a real guy who has invented a fictional universe around a doll that he expects the world to validate and normalize, and in doing so he raises a lot of interesting questions. For example, this one: Does appropriating the language of inclusivity to talk about a plastic fuck doll help promote tolerance, or does the existence of the dolls degrade the actual people they’ve been designed to replace? Because the more I read new interviews or caught his appearances in new videos, and the more ensconced he was in this worldview of the dolls as real women who just happened to be made of silicone, the weirder about it I felt. Was it OK to be creeped out? Or was I a horrible, judgmental organicist? To be honest, I was relieved when I came across the person in a website comments section who expressed the feelings I was scared to express, or even to feel. “He is trying to insist to the world that dolls are women. He doesn’t refer to them as dolls, and actually bristles at the fact that other people do,” the person wrote. “He comes up with dehumanizing language for women and bristles at imagined slights towards his toys.”
About two years later, Davecat reappeared in a Reason article called “Sex, Love, and Robots.” By then, he’d added a third doll to his collection. Asked about how he felt regarding a sex robot currently on the market, he replied, “All told, I’d rather have a Gynoid than a Doll,” he wrote to the author of the piece. “Dolls are fantastic, but realistically speaking, they can only do so much, and with a completely Synthetik lover, I’d have all the opportunities that are afforded in relationships with Organiks, but without all the drama.” The article entertains all the possible repercussions of a robot-surrogate sexual future, both optimistic and pessimistic. One technologist quoted wondered if it would lead to more unrealistic expectations of women. Regarding this, the author of the piece wrote that “some men are already predicting this day with glee, crowing on blogs and Reddit boards that human women will have to lower their expectations, step up their beauty rituals, or face the fact that many men will find sex robots a ‘better option.’”
By then, I didn’t feel so bad about being creeped out.
In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori conducted an experiment in which he graphed people’s emotional reactions to humanoid things that weren’t human. He plotted people’s feelings along the y-axis, as they reacted to things like toy robots, stuffed animals, androids, Bunraku puppets, prosthetic hands, and zombies, which were plotted along the x-axis. What he found was that people loved things that looked vaguely human, but only up to a point. Past a certain threshold, too much verisimilitude was freaky. Most people agree that toy robots are cute, for instance, but that highly realistic sex dolls are repulsive. There are differing theories on why this is. It may be because, when looking at something that looks almost but not quite human, we sense that some ineffable thing is missing. The cognitive dissonance that arises from meeting something that’s at once incredibly lifelike and clearly lifeless fills us with dread. Mori called the effect the “uncanny valley.” The “valley” was the steep dip on the graph where hyperrealism yielded revulsion. The “uncanny” (which doesn’t exactly correspond to the Japanese word Mori used) comes from Freud, who used the word to describe the nightmarish feeling you get from things that are familiar yet deeply strange: seemingly human bodies with dead eyes, corpses that walk, bodies reanimated by sorcery or science. For Freud, a monster was just that: an uncanny mirror of humanity.
The theory of the uncanny valley doesn’t technically apply to images of women in pop culture, but it’s still a useful metaphor. Girls in pop culture are also often represented in ways that feel almost, but not quite, human. They are lifelike rather than alive, and more than anything they resemble the “idea of woman” in late capitalist culture; the twenty-first-century “true woman.” There isn’t a girl in the world who has not, at some point, come across an image or portrayal that made her feel a sense of recognition and alienation at the same time, a me/not-me, real/not-real, true/not-true feeling that, once experienced, never quite goes away. Sure, these images and portrayals do not share the same qualities as the objects Mori first mapped—they are not, at least to start with, artificial beings. They aren’t cyborgs or replicants or reanimated corpses. But we don’t recognize them as human, either, at least not like any humans we know. Some ineffable thing is missing.
12
* * *
Celebrity Gothic
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
In the blustery wilds of Suffolk County, in a seaside hamlet that was once a prominent whaling village, a young girl is born to a prominent local family in the most decadent decade of the last century. Soon, her father—an impulsive, reckless, and moody figure given to fits of sudden rage—is beset by legal troubles and sent to prison for three years. During this time, the girl is pressed into service—in part, perhaps, to help with the cost of raising her younger siblings—and becomes famous around the world. When the patriarch emerges from prison, he is enraged to find that his wife’s parasitic family is controlling his daughter’s affairs and that the girl has fled to the far end of the continent and taken up residence in a gloomy (though recently remodeled) chateau perched high atop a hill above town. There, she experiences a series of mysterious afflictions and ailments, and she is repeatedly institutionalized by her family members and business associates struggling to gain control over her estate. The excesses of her ancestors—cocaine abuse, alcoholism, insider trading, DUIs—come back to haunt her, and, having escaped from the castle, the girl finds herself imprisoned once again, electronically shackled in her home, after a valuable necklace mysteriously appears in her possession. Tragically, her mother is declared mad in a Mother’s Day poll on Hollyscoop.com of the “ten craziest Hollywood moms,” which basically seals it: Lindsay Lohan is a textbook persecuted gothic heroine.
In the space of about two months just after Christmas 2006, Lindsay Lohan entered rehab; Anna Nicole Smith was found dead in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, surrounded by prescription-pill bottles, nicotine gum, and empty cans of SlimFast; and Britney Spears, trailed by paparazzi, walked into a Sherman Oaks tattoo parlor and shaved her head. Each time women like these made headlines, the headlines shot to the top of the most-read lists. The hunger for Britney’s pantyless crotch shots dominated even as troop surges, systematic layoffs, and a rise in global warming and global terrorism took place, and as global credit and asset bubbles headed for a pop. It was as though the tabloids were not just distracting us from the scary stuff but enacting our fears and honing our outrage to bite-size pieces. (What were suspect sites and credit-default swaps, anyway?) More virgins were sacrificed to the god of war. Because that’s who got it the worst by far: the former child stars and erstwhile Mouseketeers who had the temerity to grow up.
Tabloid stories about celebrity scandals are nothing new, but in that period there was something about their accelerated pace and their recurring themes of excess, addiction, transgression, decadence, madness, alienation, and confinement (jail! rehab! house arrest!) that seemed both new and familiar. Like the pursued heroines of eighteenth-century novels, the young celebrity heroines of the tabloid stories were doomed to wander the wilderness, being poked at by villagers wielding sticks and telephoto lenses, or to remain trapped, sealed off in the glass dungeon of their fame. Gothic tropes and motifs spilled over from fiction and permeated reality. In the tabloids, on the Internet, and on reality TV, familiar monsters and villains were created daily: menacing foreigners, corrupt
plutocrats, and, most of all, grotesque, abject celebrity train wrecks.
Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as “the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,” and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as “the terrorist school” of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about “the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality” and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It’s preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It’s interested in transgression, but it’s ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it’s designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it’s thoroughly ambivalent; it’s the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it’s terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin’s theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. “Doubles, alter egos, mirrors and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,” Botting writes, “signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.” In the transition from modernity to postmodernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, “Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,” and “narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.”1
Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation, Darwin’s theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of “primitivism,” moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, “going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,” as Jacques Derrida put it, “the end of history . . . the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.” A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regard with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the “author”—the media outlets that shape the train wreck’s life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.
Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, Anna Nicole Smith, and Michael Jackson (so fascinating for playing Frankenstein to his own monstrous self and so terrifying for his refusal to stay within clear race and gender binaries) also soon found themselves inescapably trapped in the same story of the vulnerable young girl brought down by hubris, ambition, or uncontrolled appetites (by the same libidinous freedom that attracted us in the first place) and transformed into a disorderly, histrionic grotesque.
In telling chilling tales of tabloid train wrecks, we resort again and again to all the gothic themes, motifs, and stock characters.
For instance: Themes of excess, decadence, madness, addiction, depravity, alienation, dispossession, transgression, and confinement. (Fat! Slut! Drunk! Psycho! Drug addict! Bad wife! Bad daughter! Bad mother! Jail! Rehab! House arrest!) Motifs of lost or dispossessed fortunes, haunted castles, fakes and counterfeits, long-buried secrets and hidden pasts, repressed alter egos, and, of course, the constant, looming threat of financial ruin. (Bad-vibe hotels, bad plastic surgery, stripper past, secret bigotry revealed!) Stock characters like controlling patriarchs, exploitative Svengalis, ineffectual or absent mothers, and callous or abusive boyfriends, husbands, and other cads. (Sued dad! Sued momager! Married business manager! Husband took money and kids!)
Between 9/11 and the financial panic of 2008, these lugubrious tales of lost innocence piled up, one after another, not only distracting us from the real horrors of the modern world but also somehow enacting them. Celebrity train wrecks captured the American imagination, giving us a reason to be outraged that we could wrap our heads around (as opposed of, say, “suspect sites” and credit-default swaps), and a clear, easily identified object for our rage.
The celebrity train wreck was disgusting. She was fat. She was a bad mother. She was a whore. One by one, the increasingly erratic heroines transgressed the boundaries of taste and decorum, tarnished their vaunted innocence (or their highly-publicized virginity), and were cast out of the protected sphere of acceptable femininity and into lurid tales of abjection. They stumbled around in the streets of Hollywood, drunk, drugged, terrified, distraught, catapulted into madness, and/or temporarily blinded by the exploding flash bulbs of the jeering predators that pursued them everywhere they went (“Britney! Britney! What’s wrong? Are you sad?”), then mocked and reviled by the “‘baying mob’ intimidating its subjects” online. The train wrecks became the stars in a grand Foucauldian “theater of punishment.”
If 2007 seemed like the year celebrity gossip turned gothic, it’s probably because that’s the year celebrity worship was eclipsed by the more lucrative business of celebrity denigration. Even at work, there seemed to be a TV tuned to TMZ all day. Everybody seemed to be up on the comings and goings of the fallen starlets. A New York Times article about the invention of the twenty-four-hour celebrity-news cycle described a business model that set out to create “online addicts” by providing a continuous flow of fresh gossip, sometimes provided by family members. Michael Lohan, Lindsay’s dad, a former commodities trader who had gone to jail for contempt of court while being investigated for insider trading, had a sideline in trading insider information on his daughter.2 The article alluded to the scandal sheets of the 1950s, of which Confidential magazine was the best known and most notorious. Confidential was known for paying for information on stars, and for demanding ever more celebrity sacrifices. The deal Dexter made with Spy magazine’s publisher in The Philadelphia Story, then, was not unheard of. In exchange for getting Confidential not to out Rock Hudson, his manager threw his other clients Ror
y Calhoun and Tab Hunter to the wolves.3 Finally, the movie studios asked the California state attorney general to intervene. An investigation was launched, and the magazine was taken to court in 1957 and eventually shut down. Another Times story, on the Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, noted that the media conglomerate Time Warner, which during peak train-wreck time still owned both the Warner Bros. movie studio and People magazine, also owned TMZ. When Confidential was put on trial in 1957, it was largely because the celebrity scandals it trafficked in cost the studios a lot of money. In these days of vertical integration, however, when the studio and the tabloid likely have the same parent company, it’s less crucial to protect a celebrity’s untarnished image. Now, whether a celebrity is making a movie or making a scene at a nightclub, the money ends up in the same place. In 2011, advertising analysts estimated that the twenty-four-hour gossip sites, magazines, and TV shows generated more than $3 billion in revenue per year. That’s Frankensynergy at work.4
Like the genre itself, twenty-first-century gothic heroines had not only transgressed their original limits but possibly also vacated them. People were interested in the saga of their lives writ large. They were corrupted innocence and squandered potential, with all the bad behavior, screwups, meltdowns, and crack-ups that implies. This was much more emotionally compelling and cathartic than any role they’d be likely to play in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Which story was more lucrative for Time Warner, in the end—some Herbie remake, or the ongoing saga of Lindsay Lohan’s tragic flameout? Whether Britney is making a movie, making an album, making a drunken scene outside a nightclub, or making hundreds and hundreds of clickbait headlines, she is making a lot of money. The former child stars did not make it on the perilous journey to marriage. They transgressed all the boundaries and became grotesques. Some of them found their way back, some didn’t, some died. But the year 2007 was the year they become our id monsters, our cautionary tales of terror and abjection. We didn’t just consume their suffering as entertainment, we also produced their suffering as entertainment. And we were entitled to it, too, because they were rich and wore short skirts and drank too much and asked for it. We turned them into the ghostly embodiment of our collective anxieties about privacy, identity, consumption, social decay, financial collapse, and the increasingly blurred line between reality and fantasy. And for a while there, they came back to haunt us relentlessly, sometimes more than thirty times a day.
You Play the Girl Page 17