Dead Girls Read online

  The cinematography in the first season is moody, elegant, and gorgeous. Its A-list lead actors, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, give swaggering, juicy performances. Legendary alt-country producer T Bone Burnett provided the soundtrack, another of True Detective’s gestures toward being classy, southern Gothic, literary. This is a brilliant ruse: a generic specimen of cultural camp pretending to appeal to its audience intellectually. The characters have the monosyllabic bastard-Dickensian names found in every airport paperback: Rust Cohle? Episode four takes a weird turn into another region of thrillerville, as Cohle infiltrates a motorcycle gang he was associated with in his former undercover work and instigates a drug-related shootout in a housing project. Cohle is haunted by the memory of his dead daughter—have you heard that one before? Perhaps in every popular portrayal of a detective ever?

  I think True Detective mania mostly owes itself to the complicated power of the Dead Girl Show. The Dead Girl Show’s notable themes are its two odd, contradictory messages for women. The first is that girls are wild, vulnerable creatures who need to be protected from the power of their own sexualities. True Detective demonstrates a self-conscious, conflicted fixation on strippers and sex workers. Hart helps “free” a teenage prostitute from a brothel and, seven years later, cheats on his wife with her. “How does she even know about that stuff?” Hart asks in 1995 when he and his wife discover sexual drawings his elementary-school-age daughter made. “Girls always know first,” his wife replies. This terrible feminine knowledge has been a trope at least since Eve in the Garden. Marcus compares Twin Peaks’s victim Laura Palmer to the teenage “witches” in Puritan New England who were targeted to purge and purify their communities. In the Dead Girl Show, the girl body is both a wellspring of and a target for sexual wickedness.

  The other message the Dead Girl Show has for women is simpler: trust no dad. Father figures and male authorities hold a sinister interest in controlling girl bodies, and therefore in harming them. In True Detective, the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, involving politicians and clergymen. In Twin Peaks, Palmer’s father is her murderer—sort of. It turns out that he is possessed by a demon named Bob, who has driven him to rape Laura for years. Sheriff Truman expresses his disbelief in the demon story. “Harry,” says Agent Cooper, “is it easier to believe that a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” As if this is something that has never happened before—that doesn’t, in fact, happen all the time. As if a large majority of sexual assaults (73 percent) are not committed by someone the victim knows, and a significant percentage (7 percent) are not committed by family members.

  Externalizing the impulse to prey on young women cleverly depicts it as both inevitable and beyond the control of men. Marcus’s essay is a meditation on how the Dead Girl Show reflects and appeals to the American psyche, which is imprinted with the memory of two inherited atrocities, slavery and the genocide of American Indians. He discusses the resonance of old murder ballads that tell us that “America is a country where anyone can be killed at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.” Murder is something on the air, like a demon—and make no mistake, this is a kind of victim blaming.

  True Detective crucially involves history, too. In the first episode, Cohle tells Hart almost admiringly that the murder shows “vision.” “Vision has meaning,” he says, “and meaning is historical.” The show’s ritualistic murders invoke voodoo and southern Louisiana’s unique brand of Catholicism. Leading into the finale, Errol Childress, the horrifying inbred Faulknerian psychopath who is the villain of the show, the self-styled Yellow King, says menacingly into the camera, “My family’s been here a long, long time.” But the show is also rooted in a landscape of indeterminacy where history can be destroyed and effaced. They talk about the lawlessness after Hurricane Katrina, hospitals and churches and people that have been lost along the disappearing coastline.

  Broadening the effect and the meaning of an individual murder is what the Dead Girl Show is all about. Investigating these murders essentially ruins Cohle’s and Hart’s lives. When we see them in 2012, Cohle is gaunt and bedraggled, now a bartender who starts drinking at noon on his day off. Hart is off the force, too, and divorced, drinking again and working as a private eye. How sad that these murders had to happen to them. The show’s trademark is Cohle’s laughably serious dialogue about the nature of the self and existence. He describes life as “a dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person.” These ruminations recall Plato’s Cave, in which the self is a prison that prevents true insight. In Twin Peaks, Detective Cooper visits a mysterious red room in his dreams where he has grotesque visions and receives urgent spiritual messages. It is his labyrinthine consciousness made manifest, just as in the last episode of True Detective, Cohle and Hart enter Childress’s lair, Carcosa, a creepy series of buildings, ramparts, and underground passages, confronting the heart of their own darkness.

  Cohle even hallucinates a swirling funnel cloud in the sky before coming face-to-face with Childress, hitting home that this is a journey into his own mind. “There’s just one story, the oldest,” Cohle tells Hart at the end of the finale, “light versus dark.” He has come to a breakthrough, a new understanding, some small peace. As Marcus wrote about Twin Peaks, “the story will be over before it begins.” There can be no redemption for the Dead Girl, but it is available to the person who is solving her murder. Just as for the murderers, for the detectives in True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.

  Pretty Little Liars was an ABC Family show with a giant fan base among teenage girls. It centers on four high schoolers—Spencer Hastings, Aria Montgomery, Emily Fields, and Hanna Marin—as they attempt to solve the murder of their friend and queen bitch, Alison DiLaurentis. A year after Alison’s disappearance, the girls start to receive threatening texts from a mysterious psychopath called only A. A is ubiquitous and all-powerful. Over the course of the series, A has filmed the girls, photographed them, listened to their conversations, read their emails, stolen from them, revealed their secrets, locked them in basements and closets, faked Spencer’s boyfriend’s death, and hit Hanna with a car, to give only a very short list. I watched the first two seasons breathlessly at my friend Emily’s house in Missoula, and for a while I would jump in fear whenever I got a text message.

  A’s outrageousness is indicative of Pretty Little Liars’s guiding ethic. The show manically collects characters, story lines, mysteries, and red herrings, so that its plot becomes a baffling web of unanswered questions. Since Alison’s disappearance, there have been many more murders, few of which have been satisfyingly solved. More than a hundred episodes later, we grow only incrementally closer to an answer to the initial mystery. One can assume that the show’s creators are, to some extent, fucking with their audience, but I admire the audacity with which they have dodged and complicated every moment of resolution.

  With its bizarrely powerful villain and its bizarrely complicated plot, Pretty Little Liars evokes nothing so much as a fairy tale. Marcus discusses the importance of Twin Peaks’s mysterious forest setting, and a forest figures importantly in Pretty Little Liars, too. The show’s lead characters meet in the forest, are chased in it, pursue a girl in a fairy tale’s red-hooded coat who looks so much like Alison through it—is she dead or isn’t she? The woods are shadowy, uncertain places, sympathetic to secrets, magic, transformations, and cruelty. Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition—it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.

  Dead Girl Shows often experiment with the incest taboo, like the girls on Pretty Little Liars, Veronica Mars, and Top of the Lake who share kisses with characters they later learn could be their half brothers. This goes back to Freud’s favorite myth, Oedipus, in which a prince is fated to kill his father
and marry his mother, and the psychological metaphors of Gothic literature, and the imposing persistence of patriarchal authority. My bad dad is your bad dad, as if to say, is everyone’s bad dad. And characters on Dead Girl Shows often experience frustrating lacunae in their memories. Laura Palmer’s father doesn’t remember anything he does while the demon Bob controls him. Duncan Kane, whose sister, Lilly, is the Dead Girl on Veronica Mars, suffers from a strange mental illness in which he has violent episodes that he doesn’t remember later. Both Alison’s brother and Spencer on Pretty Little Liars had substance-related blackouts on the night of Alison’s murder, making them question their own innocence. These memory gaps are related to Freudian repressions, evoking the fraught landscape of the unknowable self.

  Maggie Nelson writes in The Art of Cruelty how Freud’s centralizing of the Oedipus complex structures the human psyche around a question of personal guilt: “He . . . placed the questions ‘What have I done?,’ ‘Am I a criminal?,’ . . . at the heart of self-inquiry.” And the story of Oedipus Rex, like Dead Girl stories, is also about family secrets and the sins of the father. As Nelson writes in The Red Parts,

  Conventional wisdom has it that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves . . . to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime . . . Then we gouge our eyes out in shame.

  In the two great feminist Dead Girl Shows, Veronica Mars and Top of the Lake, the female protagonist is both trying to solve the mystery presented by a Dead (or missing) Girl and to solve her own rape, making the question not “What have I done?” but “What happened to me?” Nonetheless, memory and the self are presented as riddles to be solved.

  But there is an alternative to this mystery-solution model of the human wound. As Nelson points out—and as is borne out by the glut of Dead Girl Shows and their incredible popularity—our most basic myth would seem to be not Oedipus’s patricide, but matricide and violence against women. Where is Cinderella’s mother, and where is Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? The philosopher Julia Kristeva has explained the drive toward matricide as a kind of original, generative anger, expressing a need to destroy the mother, the origin place, to become an individual self. This is messier than an Oedipal reading of history, as the will to matricide is born in confusion and creates only chaos. As Nelson explains, the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.”

  The Red Parts is Nelson’s personal account of the trial of the man who murdered her aunt before Nelson was born. The strangest part of Nelson’s story is her family’s experience participating in an episode of the true crime show 48 Hours Mystery about the murder. Nelson becomes a character in 48 Hours’s version, the writer niece whose work is fascinated with her aunt’s death. A producer tells Nelson that their episode will help other people mourn, but, thinking of the list of titles for previous episodes—like “Where’s Baby Sabrina?” and “JonBenét: DNA Rules Out Parents”—she asks him “if there’s a reason why stories about the bizarre, violent deaths of young, good-looking, middle-to-upper-class white girls help people to mourn better than other stories.”

  Clearly Dead Girls help us work out our complicated feelings about the privileged status of white women in our culture. The paradox of the perfect victim, effacing the deaths of leagues of nonwhite or poor or ugly or disabled or immigrant or drug-addicted or gay or trans victims, encapsulates the combination of worshipful covetousness and violent rage that drives the Dead Girl Show. The white girl becomes the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr, particularly to that most unholy idol of narrative. As Nelson writes, all the jumbled details of her aunt’s murder that she had stewed over, “years of compulsion, confusion, and damage,” became a satisfying story under 48 Hours’s gaze, and “not just any story—a ‘story of struggle and hope.’” But to achieve that seductive conclusion, the story must be over before it begins. Nelson writes how in college she watched Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo in a class on existentialism, and she was disturbed “by the way Kim Novak’s character seems stranded between ghost and flesh, whereas Jimmy Stewart seems ‘real.’” She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

  Inasmuch as Pretty Little Liars is a Dead Girl Show taken to its logical extreme, the trespasses, sexual and otherwise, of its male authorities are too numerous to name: there are untrustworthy fathers, teachers, doctors, and police officers. It is also notable among other Dead Girl Shows in its absence of a strong protagonist or pair of protagonists, heroes on a quest. All Dead Girl Shows betray an Oedipal distrust of male authority figures, but in Twin Peaks and True Detective, the central characters are male authority figures. These shows glide to a single, comprehensive solution, reflecting the Freudian model of existence that, according to Nelson, “turns our lives into detective stories; our innermost selves, into culprits.” At every moment, Pretty Little Liars refuses the unified answer—with its four protagonists, with its many villains and many victims, with the way it multiplies with mysteries, with its Dead Girl who refuses to stay dead.

  Since the first text from the ambiguously named A, the main question of Pretty Little Liars has been not who killed Alison, but whether she is dead at all. In her friends’ memories of her, she is terrifying and manipulative; a major theme in the series is how she controls them even after death with the secrets she knew. In earlier seasons, the girls often have vivid, enigmatic visions of her. As all we have repressed returns, so this Dead Girl persistently becomes a presence in a story that was supposed to be about her absence. What would seem to be Pretty Little Liars’s worst faults—its unwieldy plot, its lack of consistency, the culpability of so many characters—are actually instructive. Its creators have made a Dead Girl Show that is not about a journey toward existential knowledge instigated by a Dead Girl body, but the mess, the calamity, and the obscurity that are the consequences of misogyny.

  Black Hole

  I was born in the late eighties in Moscow, Idaho, a small university town in a region of undulating loess hills called the Palouse. Just past the University of Idaho campus, fields jut up in steep dunes, a unique Ice Age geological feature appearing all the more alien when combine harvesters drag the fertile hillsides at a forty-five-degree angle to the highway. The house I grew up in in Moscow was a green-engineering experiment: an agricultural engineer at the University of Idaho built it in 1948 out of lightweight concrete made from sawdust and diatomaceous earth. This was apparently so pioneering that the house was on the cover of Mother Earth News thirty years later.

  As you might imagine, it did not look like a normal house. It was a giant rectangle set into a slope, so you entered on the second floor. This was by design: the bedrooms stayed cool in the summer and warm in the winter, partially insulated underground. My parents painted it peach with orange trim, and then, on an angry whim, my dad painted the house numbers three feet tall in orange on the chimney, so pizza drivers would stop passing it by mistake. Inside, the walls curved instead of forming angles, and the decor was stuck in its Mother Earth News glory days. In our living room, there was an ocean-colored shag carpet and a built-in couch upholstered in swirling, psychedelic greens and blues. The kitchen table was an amoeba-shaped slab attached to a glittery diner booth.

  The Technicolor quirk of the house was juxtaposed with our huge, overgrown yards. It was built on two lots, with descending terraces in the front yard and stands of pines in back. The yards had bushes, lilac trees, a raspberry bramble, and various little gardens my dad planted. This was the setting for my feral and morbid childhood pretends, where it was easy to imagine that I was a tragic runaway setting up house in the shelter of a giant fir. My little brother and I would prance around the yard in a pair of ruffly ballet tutus like a couple of forest sprites. I know it sounds like a fairy tale, and as is true in fairy tales, my sawdust palace was an idyll edged in peril. My
neighborhood climbed up in massive, steep hills on all sides of my house. I would gawk—infuriatingly, I’m sure—at my dad as he slowly pushed his bike up the hill. The wild neighbor kids rode their dirt bikes through our backyard and sped down the hills with their butts on their skateboards directly into heavy traffic.

  Growing up with such bizarre splendor and danger implanted in me a kind of comfort with the sublime that can’t have been healthy. Everyone knows the American West embodies the twin ideals of beauty and terror—the intersection of the awful and the awesome—but growing up in a homely little town set against a lush and extreme landscape is freakier than that. Moscow is an obscure eighty-mile drive from the interstate. The Palouse is the middle of nowhere: a nowhere with quilted hills of wheat and soybeans stacking and cresting like the waves of the ocean. No one is watching, the uncanny countryside seems to say. Anything is possible.

  The idea that northwestern landscapes hide some sinister, almost literary meaning was underscored by the news stories of my childhood, when serial killers and neo-Nazis brought my region to the pages of national newspapers. Ruby Ridge and the Unabomber’s cabin—one a few hours north of Moscow, the other half a day’s drive west in Lincoln, Montana—sent a clear message: the Inland Northwest makes people go nuts, or, less superstitiously, it is where white men with chips on their shoulders feel they belong. The siege at Ruby Ridge occurred in 1992, a time when I wasn’t exactly reading the newspaper, and confusion about it threaded through my childhood. But I knew even then that its narratives hung on the remoteness and majesty of where the disaster occurred: the story was named after the jagged hilltop in northern Idaho where Christian separatist and fugitive Randy Weaver and his family homesteaded. After the government’s attempt to apprehend Weaver ended with the deaths of a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s wife and fourteen-year-old son, FBI agent Gene Glenn asked the mountains, “How could there be so much evil in such a beautiful place?” As if beauty were ever incompatible with chaos.