Bylines at i-D, The Guardian, EROS Journal, The Quietus, MEL magazine, AnOther, Hyperallergic, The Fanzine &c &c. Features Editor at Modern Matter, and co-Editor at Hexus journal. All commissions via Philippahelensnow@gmail.com.
Hollywood
acts about Marilyn Monroe as though it had her poster pinned up on its
dorm-room wall: much like the “full pedigree of insanity” Norman Mailer
describes on her mother’s side, it’s a passion that verges on madness. So, too,
is Blonde’s. A fictionalised account of the life and death and difficult
menstrual cycles of Marilyn, written by Joyce Carol Oates — an author who,
tellingly, also fictionalised the life of Jeffrey Dahmer — it melds the rough
and the smooth as much as its subject. It seduces, then depresses. Parts of the
story are real (her marriages to Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, though here
they go unnamed) and parts of the story are wildly unreal (a scene in which a
bathroom attendant hands Marilyn her dead foetus), though as is so often the
case with celebrities, “real” hardly matters so long as the story is good.
Men
don’t gain any power from wrecking themselves. They don’t lose any, either.
This is hardly the greatest injustice in being a woman, but it goes some way to
explaining the reason why smashing oneself up has any allure for a girl: redressing
the balance, we start, like always, by acting as men do. Going viral as a
result of filming herself not only in a state of collapse, but also while getting
there, a Californian Vine user named Paige Ginn has somehow succeeded in
making, by accident or by design, some of this year’s best and most interesting
video work. That’s my opinion, at least — your mileage may vary, depending on 1)
what you think about video art in the first place, and 2) what you think about girls
being filmed falling over until they (occasionally) bleed.
In Secret Ceremony, Mia Farrow plays a wild-eyed, maybe-backwards
young woman who’s fucking (or else being fucked by) her stepfather; meaning
that Farrow was, in effect, playing her stepdaughter Soon Yi before she had
even met Woody. As Cenci, she has the very particular look of dishevelment so
often used to suggest someone fathers might fuck, and the very particular style
of the sixties — the peter-pan collars, the baby-doll dresses, the pale legs,
the long hair with “bangs” and the clavicles — that says much the same thing.
The film was made in 1968, but has the fin
de siecle gloom and the sexually paranoid spirit of summer 1969, and is
directed by Joseph Losey — while it’s possible to argue that between, say, 1961
and 1972, all women were daughters and all men were Daddies, conceptually
speaking, this film plays the balance as literal. Played by Elizabeth Taylor, the
interloping prostitute who resembles Farrow’s character’s mother (who is, in the
way all decent older women ought to be, deceased) is undone by her weight and
her middle-age: she no longer looks like a girl or a daughter, but only a
girl’s mother, cutting her out of this sick Daddy/daughter-girl binary.
When the going gets tough, the tough
occasionally have no better option than to shoot themselves in the head: this,
anyway, is the logical takeaway from Robert Greene’s docu-whatever Kate Plays
Christine, in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil prepares — or “prepares”— for the
role — or the “role,” since the film for which she’s preparing doesn’t exist —
of Christine Chubbuck, the newscaster best known for killing herself live on
air back in 1974. In Sarasota, Florida, where the real incident took place,
Shiel walks around with a camera crew and interviews the locals. Dressed up as
Christine, she goes to a gun range. She stands in the newscaster’s house, and
stares out of the window as music drones sinister, and she adopts a long wig. She
gets a California Tan. She talks about feminist motives as if this were the
natural subject of a telephone conversation, and not exposition. If expecting
an exercise like this to be in good taste is naïve, then believing the suicide
won’t be exploited for entertainment’s moronic; a meta closing scene attempts
to have its Chekhovian gun and then fire it, too, though it’s been pointed to
me that anybody who already saw Funny Games won’t feel chastened.
