Channeling the Alien-Plath Girl: Emotional Drag/Porn/Excess
I actually stumbled upon this picture after writing my post completely. How weirdly appropriate.
I heard Dodie Bellamy use the terms “emotional porn” and “operatic suffering” recently on her blog and I love that. I recently wrote on my blog about “emotional excess” in relation to the films of Andrzej Żuławski, and I’ve just been thinking–I love things that are flamboyantly and unapologetically emotional. It makes me think of teenagers. Since crossing over into my 20s, I look at teenagers and feel kind of embarrassed for them. They lack emotional filters. They’re so direct about their suffering. They’re making themselves look pathetic. But really–I kind of envy them, their lack of restraint. It must be really freeing to be that open without feeling the urge to censor yourself.
When I was in high school, I used to call a certain type of girl a “Plath Girl.” For me, the Plath Girl was white, upper-middle class, educated, a perfectionist, melodramatic, mean, and incapable of feeling joy. I guess I still used this term in college…isn’t that fucked up? This is my therapeutic admission of my fucked-upness. Yes, now I remember. There was a girl I thought was cute and I asked her on a date. She always wore black eyeliner and had a Virginia Woolf tattoo. I thought we could go to the airport and watch the planes take off but she was like, why don’t you just come to my room? When I went to her room, she did lines of coke off her desk while ranting about how much she hated everyone, how depressed she was at school, and before I knew it, she had left me so she could hang with other people. When my friends asked me about the date, I think I just said, “turns out she’s quite the Plath Girl.” (But was this an incorrect categorization? Did the tattoo mean she was actually a Woolf Girl?) Really, I think the Plath Girl is kind of sexy. She has direct access to her emotions and isn’t ashamed to show her bitterness or depression. (I am also involuntarily turned on by emotionally volatile people that can sometimes be cold to me. Perhaps it is a masochistic impulse.) There is certainly a performative element that pervades this kind of outward display of emotion, but that doesn’t mean it’s just some stupid act.
I think I was too awkward, ethnic looking, and weird growing up to be a Plath Girl even though I was teeming with emotional excess. I was more of an Alien Girl. A little Bjork or Yoko Ono. (Imagine what kind of babies the Plath Girl and the Alien Girl could make. Horrifyingly self-destructive and obsessive babies, I imagine.) Nobody is more emotionally excessive and operatic than Bjork. She epitomizes performative emotional excess. Her emotional affectedness is so over-the-top that most people can’t even stand to listen to it. Needless to say, I had an unhealthy obsession with Bjork that peaked when I was in 9th grade. When nobody was home at my house, I would blast her music on the stereo and scream her songs on the top of my lungs–the building symphonic ones with the violins and wailing vocal crescendos. It was my emotional porn.
What I love about Dodie’s terms “operatic suffering” and “emotional porn” is that they lack self-seriousness while still holding onto the idea that there is emotional truth within the performance of excessive emotion. There is an element of self-mockery and self-parody that come with these displays. I am utterly fascinated by literature and art that, like I wrote on my blog, straddles the “line between extreme seriousness and complete self-mockery,” the type of literature that puts on emotional drag, but doesn’t let you know what’s beneath the drag, whether or not you are supposed to laugh, take it as a joke, take it as sincere, feel embarrassed for the author, or some combination of all these things. I am reminded of Ariana Reines when she wrote, “I wanted to write poems that an educated person would feel embarrassed to read, poems that sound like Goth girls with feelings, except for sometimes they are ‘smarter’ than Goth girls with feelings are supposed to be.” The character Maggie in Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel also comes to mind.
The thing about performative emotional excess is, it’s not fake. As in, she’s not faking it to get your attention. She’s reveling in it, playing it up. She loves it and isn’t afraid even if she knows it might make her look pathetic. By exaggerating this type of direct articulation of emotion, we can explore the emotional worlds that are denied to us when we pass into our 20s and beyond. We exaggerate it to the point of absurdity, and we may do this to cover up the fact that we are still these over-feeling and fucked up human beings, and we have these little pimply and confused teenagers inside of us yelling and demanding a voice but we hush that voice–we have co-workers and editors and readers that are always eyeing us, looking for the places where the seams of the adult bodysuits are coming undone.
Tags: adolescence, Ariana Reines, bjork, dodie bellamy, drag, emotional excess, emotional porn, gurlesque, kate zambreno, operatic suffering, queer, the alien girl, the plath girl
this is why i read novels about teenage lesbians obsessively.
this is great. you might be interested in seeking out david larsen’s micro-essay “On Melodrama” / i think it’s in his book The Thorn?
I loved this post extravagantly. Mainly because it mentioned so many of my favourite things: Dodie Bellamy, Ariana Reines and Zulawski films. Really, really great stuff.
Great post. I was definitely a Plath girl in college (and was obsessed with Bjork, and drag, oddly or perhaps not)–and it’s funny, but since I was also studying theatre, everyone in my family refers to that period as “the melodramatic years.” Which is true, but you’re right, I wasn’t acting. Just performing my unhappiness. Which I suppose is why I don’t feel embarrassed about that period, even though I feel I should. O Fallen Angel actually reminded me of that time when I read it.
My writing sure sucked then, though. I think some people take all that performative angst and create great art with it–and others, like me, take it and squeeze out the darkness for ink and use it to write really bad imitations of Plath poetry.
Anyway, good stuff to think about. I don’t know Reines–I’ll have to check her stuff out.
THIS STATE OF EMERGEEEEEEEENNNNNNNCCCYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Have you read Kate Durbin’s blog post, “The Teenage Girl Speaks as a Melodramatic, Hysterical Demon?”
http://katedurbin.blogspot.com/2010/01/teenage-girl-speaks-as-melodramatic.html
Great post!
I love this post and particularly what you say about there being emotional truth in the excessive performance of emotion and how teenagers act without filters. Oh when I think about my emotional escapades in my late teens and early 20s…
Is Annie on your mind?
This was a really great post, Jackie. I’m reading Frank O’hara right now, and you’ve given me a way of thinking about his work that I had not come to on my own.
In many ways, I think O’hara is enacting a kind of melodrama, what with all his exclamation points, all his overblown language “my heart was aflutter”… “the catastrophe of my personality” (both of those examples are from his poem “Mayakovsky”).
Makes me wonder if camp (I’m thinking of the way John Waters enacts melodrama) intersects with what you & Dodie Bellamy are talking about — and if so, how or in what ways?
I also feel like there’s something Queerish about teenage texts regardless of whether the characters themselves have queer identities, insomuch as melodrama and teenage emotion aren’t really seen as “legitimate” content for SERIOUS literature, because the dominant culture takes a real paternalistic, agist, pat-em-on-the-head-and-say-aw-aint-they-cute kind-of attitude toward these concerns, and/or the dominant culture violently objectifies youth, and because to a certain extent queer folks who don’t participate in heteronormative reproduction are cast as perma-teenagers, like Peter Pans.
I liked the post too, though by now it seems boring to say so, and I’m barely awake. When the Plath girl abandoned you in her room did you search it for more drugs or at least some unopened pleading mail from her parents with money inside….? Or were you too indifferent and cool? James Ellroy would’ve stolen her underwear.
I think this is where it’s great that Jackie brings Zulawski into this; his characters certainly queer the idea of both “acting” and “adulthood” because they are so emotionally over-the-top within specifically “adult” contexts
[…] Jackie Wang’s excellent post today over at HTMLGiant on, among other things, how certain kinds of young women exaggerate and perform their emotional craziness and general melancholy, reminded me of something that’s bothered me for a long time. Why are men (and other women) so attracted to emotionally or mentally unstable women? And why the double standard? Because I certainly don’t know many people attracted to emotionally fucked-up men. […]
Love it. I am going to respond to both the Zulawski post from your blog & this post right here because I think I want to address things in both of them in a related way.
A) My obsession with Zulawski is so deep that basically any other mode of ‘acting’ for me is totally boring and just doesn’t cut it (except, ironically, the exact opposite, the “not really there” character/actor)
B) Dennis Cooper’s dialogue, throughout most of the George Miles cycle & then even further (and more artificial in a beautiful way in later works), is, I think, very over-the-top emotionally but once again more in a withdrawn, absent sort of way. In both instances of performativity there are, for instance, run on sentences that refuse to let grammar get in the way of their urgency.
C) I think these sort of melodramatic approaches to the delivery of dialogue (both textually and vocally) are a really amazing way of delivering meaning in a totally physical way that is expressed almost exclusively through the voice or (in the text) the representation of the voice (though I think that I could argue that they can also be presented purely as a zero-degree text-as-experience etc stopping now because it’s not relevant to the post)
D) I’m a little confused, from your actual blog post, about how “we all want to be little Batailles, right?”. It follows your idea of being not in the world, and while I think that’s, perhaps, part of Bataille’s praxis, his fiction certainly blatantly demonstrates his interest in the excessive character/event, related of course to baseness, and how this is pushing closer to the impossible (which is also what Zulawski is doing I think)
E) You must see Szamanka. It finally has a real release, and it’s probably the pinnacle of Zulawski’s interest in approaching some of the things you talk about in your other post.
aren’t they making another sex and the city?
she’s not faking it to get your attention – she’s realing it to get your attention
billie holiday girl
(less talented) octomom girl
(shit-together) katharine hepburn girl
I like this kind of thing, especially in film (Zulawski-ish cinematic emotional explosions, “Antichrist”, etc.). In life I’m almost the opposite (driven by all kinds of things that are not my emotions) and it helps me to understand people who are driven by their emotions.
“For me, the Plath Girl was white, upper-middle class, educated, a perfectionist, melodramatic, mean, and incapable of feeling joy.”
i would completely agree with this statement if you added something about abusive or nonexistent father figures.
What about the Horse Girl.
aren’t they making another sex and the city?
she’s not faking it to get your attention – she’s realing it to get your attention
billie holiday girl
(less talented) octomom girl
(shit-together) katharine hepburn girl
cool connection. i think o’hara definitely enacts melodrama, or enacts a performance of trying to be honest when you know the person you’re trying to be honest with (even if it’s just yourself) isn’t the only person watching (even if the only other watcher is the world or the language itself)
i actually just downloaded szamanka a week or so ago! can’t wait to watch it. it certainly sounds like one of his most hysterical films.
yes… the absent character… the silent hysteric or quiet melodrama–i find it compelling as well. i’ve written jeanne dielman-like stories of people that seem really disconnected from their suffering, but can sometimes erupt in frightening ways. but also, macabea from clarice lispector’s hour of the star is a totally weird and fascinating version of the teen girl because she’s so not-there that she doesn’t even suffer until the end…i wont ruin it for those that haven’t read it. i think dennis cooper’s characters in my loose thread are totally absent melodramatics as well… it’s kind of frightening how confused and un-integrated they are but there is still something very excessive about their behavior in an unspoken kind of way.
the bataille comment was just a snarky stab at people who only pick up on his obsession with death… because i am critical of that mentality. but of course, there’s a lot more to his theories. and i actually thought of visions of excess after i posted it, and it certainly seems related to zulawski. when i was writing that i was specifically thinking about his conversations with laure… how he thought it would be really romantic if they both killed themselves but she wanted to stay alive for her writings. something along those lines.
i love the physicality of emotional excess as well. the voice, bodily movements, overflowing words….
ted berrigan as the straight white male plath girl, especially in poems like bean spasm. the pills, the general emotional rhapsody through popular culture. his obsession with women and new york. in train ride, his embarrassingly candid reflections on his friends, all negative. the self loathing. great stuff.
i should send you a copy of my novel when it’s done!
EMOOOTIIOOONNALLLL LANNNDSCAPESSSS
ahhh kate’s post is good. i’ve read some of her stuff abt teen girls floating on the internet but i might have missed this… it’s kind of hilarious in relation to my upbringing because my mom thought i was a satan worshiper and possessed by evvviilllnesss even though i was just a lil weird that’s all haha
i actually just downloaded szamanka a week or so ago! can’t wait to watch it. it certainly sounds like one of his most hysterical films.
yes… the absent character… the silent hysteric or quiet melodrama–i find it compelling as well. i’ve written jeanne dielman-like stories of people that seem really disconnected from their suffering, but can sometimes erupt in frightening ways. but also, macabea from clarice lispector’s hour of the star is a totally weird and fascinating version of the teen girl because she’s so not-there that she doesn’t even suffer until the end…i wont ruin it for those that haven’t read it. i think dennis cooper’s characters in my loose thread are totally absent melodramatics as well… it’s kind of frightening how confused and un-integrated they are but there is still something very excessive about their behavior in an unspoken kind of way.
the bataille comment was just a snarky stab at people who only pick up on his obsession with death… because i am critical of that mentality. but of course, there’s a lot more to his theories. and i actually thought of visions of excess after i posted it, and it certainly seems related to zulawski. when i was writing that i was specifically thinking about his conversations with laure… how he thought it would be really romantic if they both killed themselves but she wanted to stay alive for her writings. something along those lines.
i love the physicality of emotional excess as well. the voice, bodily movements, overflowing words….
oh god i LOVE kate’s essay:
“Say teenage girls are attention whores—fashion fanatics, shopaholics, sex crazed, shit-talkers, bulimics, classless gum crackers, & Plath addicts. Loitering between the dress-play innocence of childhood and the plain-clothed penance of womanhood, they parade in shopping malls, movie houses, & back bedrooms, as seething, sequinned receptacles of excessive emotions, hormones, desire.”
I do think my Maggie is wearing emotional drag, definitely a tortured Plath/Goth girl, all excess of emotions, I really like that, Jackie – I didn’t know you had read OFA! I was going to bring you a copy when we met in the Pittsburgh!
i just took my ambien so i cant write my ideas…but…
have you read the debates about the gurlesque in relation to queer subjectivity? they’re fascinating… some people think the gurlesque is heteronormative and appropriative in its borrowings from queer theory/performance theory…others say it’s queering heterosexuality…and others say that by saying yr queering the hetero, you limit it to the hetero (as in queer subjectivity is excluded, while queer theory is use). i kind had this feeling without knowing that all these debates/discussions were happening. but i am still interested in the gurlesque even though i cant identified with all of it as it’s define now… but it’s open-ended. i wanna rethink the gurlesque from a queer, non-white perspective. the alien girl is kinda what’s i’ve used lately to get at that. an eccentric “foreigner” weirdo…rather than blond, bubble chewin, vogue style…. wow my thoguhts are mush right now… maybe more later
I spent years chasing Plath girls, thinking they would ‘get’ me. Then I fell nutzoid in love with a loud, kind, unafraid girl who loves everyone. She ‘got’ me, alright.
hope you stole the rest of that girl’s coke