Girls Like Violence
Girls like getting the stigmata, girls like being gay in a musical, girls like doing crimes, girls like Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis"
For the individual, however pious and dedicated to their faith, to receive the painful injuries of Christ’s suffering and execution on their own bodies is inevitably a shock. The trauma is then compounded by the reaction of others. Some stigmatists have been told to their face that they have been marked by the Devil. In more recent times individuals with the marks have been subjected to close and intimate examination by doctors and psychiatrists. It has been inferred that they have a mental illness and [they] have been labelled as suffering from schizophrenia or hysteria, whatever is the fashionable label at the time. Their faith and spiritual lives have been similarly dissected by parish priests and Vatican envoys. Often those who have conducted the investigations have done so in order to disprove any claims of divine intervention.
- Ted Harrison, Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age—You know, I’ve read and loved Los Bros Hernandez’s occasional series “Errata Stigmata,” which is about this very thing, and yet I’d never considered that real actual stigmatists would face such, how to say this, stigma.
Passing Fun/Strange Home
En route from LA to Santa Cruz a friend and I cross-pollinated our musical theater tastes. I played her my actual favorite musical of all time (and it isn’t close), 2006’s Passing Strange. She played me Fun Home. They mirror each other weirdly: both are heavily autobiographical stories of individual self-discovery, minority identity, and an ambivalent relationship with a parent, by artists born one year apart (1960 and 1961). And, as mirrors reverse the image, they feel like complete opposites.
Passing Strange is about a black kid growing up in LA, who journeys through many forms of rebellion and ecstasy (and rebellion-as-ecstasy) before discovering that the real, the true heart and core of life, was embodied in his mother’s love. It’s done in a wild mosaic of pastiches. You get gospel, early punk, German art-rock, all riding that edge of homage and parody. It’s frequently self-lacerating, but also self-aware about the ways in which self-laceration can become an especially aesthetic form of self-absorption.
Ah, look, I love this musical. The music itself is so distinctive and so smart (notice how when the “Stew” character is in Europe, and talking about how he’s been liberated from the USA, you get hints and licks of American music?). Passing Strange is full of double-edged comedy, like the Amsterdam erotic anthem “We Just Had Sex” or the furious cabaret tune about always being “The Black One,” and there are moments of low-key horror (“Berlin/was always creeping up/from behind”). But its insistent chord is awe. That moment when the eyes open wide, when something opens up inside you. When something you didn’t know you were longing for reaches out and touches you. Music is the freight train in which God travels!/Bang!—it does its thang and then my soul unravels!
You know, that kind of thing.
Fun Home felt more like one kind of music the whole way through—my friend says the music grew on her. It’s more hermetic: few signs of its specific time and place, much tighter focus on the entwined relationship with the parent rather than the social panorama. Or, maybe a more accurate way to say that, the parent is in some way consumed by the social panorama, rather than standing out against it in the purity of silhouette. The social context in Fun Home kind of is the father, and so social context doesn’t appear that much elsewhere; the mother in Passing Strange is an implicit critique of and alternative to the social whirl, its pressures and ideologies.
These are both stereotypically Baby Boomer narratives in that they resolve questions of injustice through individual self-discovery and/or the love between two people. Passing felt more open to all the other kinds of love that can pierce us, though there’s also a certain exhaustion at the end, in contrast to the openness and adventure of Fun Home’s final image.
FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS SORRY! FOXFIRE BURNS AND BURNS!
I reread Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, Joyce Carol Oates’s 1993 riot grrrl novel. I hadn’t read it since its publication, when I was a riot grrrl myself but also a child of privilege who got this book from her parents as a Christmas present. Wasn’t sure how it would hold up (Oates is real uneven for me) but Foxfire still can fly, no brakes over that hill, into the bright black sky.
Foxfire is a fable. We know from the beginning that something goes badly wrong, somebody dies; and that Legs Sadovsky, the leader of this 1950s group of desperate small-town teens, is not just a charismatic visionary and not just a hot delinquent but a mystery. Legs, partly through her friendship with a radical ex-priest, is the source of the gang’s intermittent ideology, its vision of class war and DIY anti-misogyny. The Foxfire girls aren’t feminists, I think, because feminists are adults. Feminists want to change the laws. FOXFIRE wants to break them.
Oates’s skidding grammar and adrenaline capitalization (“FOXFIRE JUSTICE FOXFIRE WRATH”) really makes this book feel like a zine and like a diary. Maddy, the bourgeois intellectual of the group, is the unreliable narrator. She imagines Legs’s inner world and maybe she sands down some of Legs’s anger, criminality, and expediency, emphasizing poignant longings instead of cash transactions in alleyways. But she loved Legs and Legs loved her (“Maddy, you’re my heart”). Maddy is Legs’s mirror and maybe that’s a statement too: maybe longing is one way to reflect the truth of ideology and criminality.
FOXFIRE ends because of a disastrous plot to solve their problems forever: “forever,” that bright red flag. The plot involves a rich man and he gets some imho not well-done villain speeches, but push past these. The plot makes sense for these characters. It deepens the book’s themes of isolation and desperation and hope-against-hope. It’s got some great lines (the rich man’s handshake “forced her to feel his strength, the unjust strength out of which his kindness flowed”). And it unveils the survivor’s guilt that shapes Maddy’s narration.
Foxfire is explicitly a book about looking back on the past, and I re-read it because I was personally looking back on my past. I re-read it at the same time that I was also re-reading Michelle Tea’s Against Memoir, which I love; her essay “Hags in Your Face,” about a real gang of dyke delinquents in 1990s San Francisco, feels almost like a documentary sister to art-film Foxfire. I don’t know that I have anything to say about the elegiac aspect of the novel but I’m interested to know if others do.
I’ll Fly Away
And last, I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and it rocked my face off. I’ll write more later but for now I’ll just say that it’s a portrait of the USA as a carnival midway advertising every kind of ecstasy, sex and God and drugs, violence and music and even the ecstasy of regret: Music is the freight train in which God travels—Get it while you can—This stuff’ll kill ya, it’s loaded with fun—Are you lonesome tonight?—I’ve got the Holy Ghost power—She’s a gangster, and she’s got a terminal case of “Ask too many questions and my Smith and Wesson will answer”—And the whirlwind is in the thorn trees—Coke is it!—Come on take a little walk with me baby and tell me, who do you love?
And if you’re white, this movie says, every choice you make on that midway is a choice to take a side: Black or white, home or hollow, lose your life to gain it or gain the whole world for the price of that sweet soul.
icymi
I reviewed Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping.
Now Playing
Koko Taylor, “Wang Dang Doodle”
Switchblade cigarette lighter via Wikimedia Commons.