Doyle - Trainwreck: the women we love to hate, mock, and fear-- and why

TRAINWRECK

Copyright 2016 by Sady Doyle

First Melville House Printing: September 2016

Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-564-3

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v3.1

And if I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.

PERICLES , Funeral Oration

Q: Whats the difference between Amy Winehouse and Amy Winehouse jokes?

A: The jokes will get old.

Jokes4Us.com

Shes everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck.

An actress known for light, bubbly romantic comedies and teen dramas throws a bong out of a thirty-sixth-floor window, to the dismay of assembled police officers. Her neighbors tell the press that shes been talking to herself, and that they suspect a psychotic break. A timeline of her meltdown appears on Jezebel. Late-night comedians have grist for months.

A reality-TV star appears on the cover of Vogue, causing massive backlash and speculation as to whether the magazine has killed its prestigious brand. The woman is rumored to have leaked her own sex tape. She once accepted thousands of dollars to accompany a wealthy man on a date. In the Vogue issue in question, shes posing with her fianc and newborn child. Readers threaten to boycott the publication.

An actresss fuck list, naming every man shes slept with, is circulated in advance of her upcoming reality series.

A musicians fuck list, naming every man shes thought to have dated, is printed up in Helvetica font and sold as a T-shirt online.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her apartment.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her hotel bathtub.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship remains under her fathers conservatorship due to mental incompetency. Ticket sales for her Las Vegas shows are through the roof.

Its easy to look at these women and see what they did wrong, tally up their sins and errors: insensitive, provocative, promiscuous, off-the-wagon, crazy. Its easy to tell yourself, this is not my story. But Id wager good, hard money that, if you got the chance to speak to any of these women, theyd tell you that these are not their stories, either.

The privilege of controlling your own narrative is easy to take for granted. Its easy to confuse for a right; to assume that, of all the people in this loud and crowded world, youre the person best suited to tell the world who you are, or what you are, or what your actions and emotions mean in context.

Yet we know that narratives can be stolen, and weaponized. Weve seen it happen again and again. Say the words celebrity trainwreck, and the image immediately appears: young, pretty, most likely blond, and in some degree of high-gloss disarray, pinned between the club and the door of her limousine by a wall of flashing cameras. Shes drunk, or shes high, or shes naked, or shes cryingor she will be, anyway, by the end of the night. The cameras are there to testify to her impending doom. Theyre there so we can watch it happen. Hence the etymology, actuallyjust as people are supposedly unable to avoid staring at a gruesome wreck on the highway, you know that this person is going to suffer, horribly, exceptionally, and you wont look away, because you enjoy it. The theft of narrative is where this begins, because, on some level, becoming a trainwreck simply means that the public assumes the right to control how you can define yourself: Kim Kardashian, for example, cannot be both the star of a sex tape and a blushing bride on the cover of Vogue. Well mock and scorn her for being the one, but flat-out punish her and Vogue both if she attempts to be the other. It also means losing authority over your own decisions. Some lose that authority literally, by being put in jail or in hospitals or under the conservatorship of their parents, but more often, its simply a matter of establishing them as troubled; as out of control; as people who dont know how to live their own lives.

But it escalates from there. All too often, losing your story also means that if you make decisions people dont likeafter a certain point, in this process, every decision you make will be one people dont likethey feel entitled to hurt you. It means being subject to a hostile, unasked-for, all-consuming intimacy: having other people claim ownership over your body, your sexual history, your medical history, your emotional life, your future. Having them feel entitled to scream slurs at you, or threaten your life, or call your employer until youre unemployed, if you dont follow instructions. Nothing is off-limits: After Whitney Houston died, ABC News published the information that the coroner had found scars on her chest consistent with breast implants. It had nothing to do with her deathshe had drowned, and breast implants have never, to my knowledge, risen up of their own accord and drowned their ownerbut the world was, apparently, entitled to that information.

This isnt the cost of fame, some necessary price one pays for being a public figureor, if it is, its only in the sense that everyone is a public figure, because it happens to civilians, toopeople who post unflattering pictures of themselves, or irritate one too many people with their personal blogs, or say stupid things on Twitter. And it isnt simply a matter of getting punished for wrongdoingor, if it is, we should all be worried, because this specific wrongdoing tends to sneak up on people from behind, when they havent intentionally or knowingly broken any rules. No one becomes a musician hoping to be placed on someones celebrity death watch list. No one takes her first drink hoping to become an alcoholic. And no oneI am almost entirely certainhas ever had sex assuming that the experience will later be summarized on a popular novelty T-shirt.

And yet, here we are. With the stories we have; with the experience of constantly witnessing somebody elses wreckage. Once we start to realize that it can happen to anyone, we can begin to ask why it happens at all.

Envy is a powerful force. Traditionally, the trainwreck starts out as the girl who has everything going for her: She is famous, after all, because shes attained some extremely rare level of professional success, and probably some of the wealth and adulation that goes along with it. Her implosion is a way of taking her back down a few notches, to where we live. The girl who has everything can have everything taken away.

This isnt entirely unfair. As long as we live in an unjust society, where the vast majority of us are struggling, and where ridiculously huge rewards are handed out for ridiculously stupid reasonswhere pretending to be a sexy doctor on TV comes with more money, more praise, and vastly more publicity than actually going to med school and saving livesit will always make some kind of sense to resent celebrities. The moralistic, concern-trolling quality of trainwreck coverage, the Whats Going to Come of Poor Dear Lindsay factor, might just come down to our wanting to believe they deserve their fame. (As if anyone could possibly deserve such a thing; Leonardo DiCaprio has a private island, for Gods sake. He wouldnt deserve that standard of living if he followed up each and every movie project by saving a busload of kindergarteners from going over a cliff.) We may just want to believe that the people we reward the most are the most deserving of being rewarded; that they got better lives by being better people. Which, in turn, makes our delight in celebrity suffering a form of vigilante justice: Were meting out what we believe to be just punishment of people enjoying a lifestyle that they havent earned, punishing flawed people to reaffirm our belief that celebrities must be better than human.