Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (9 page)

I wanted to be Courtney Love.

Courtney was the bête noire of our suburban middle school clique. We all loved her husband—Kurt, poor Kurt, dead Kurt, Kurt who had struggled. We all understood that Nirvana was the greatest band that had ever existed. I have a distinct memory of sitting in a boy’s bedroom, staring at Kurt’s three-foot-tall head on a poster (
MTV Unplugged
, the one where he looked really upset to be there) and hearing the boy murmur, “It’s so weird that we got to be alive for him, you know?” Kurt was to be our Christ: We had trod the earth with him, and dipped our hands in his wounds,
and would forever more witness his true gospel, untainted by the blasphemies of posers.

But, before you could truly accept Kurt into your heart, you had to get that Courtney Love was Satan. She’d married him to get famous. She’d stolen his songs. She made fun of his suicide note; in fact, some people said, she probably killed him. She was rude, she was mean, she was loud, she said “feminist.” She punched people, and at concerts, you could always see her underpants. Sometimes even (we whispered, darkly and with fear) her boobs.

So I got a pink dress and snipped at it with scissors until it was miniskirt length. I put on a pair of boots—I didn’t have Doc Martens, but old, scuffed-up winter boots worked—and a blond wig, and I fucked up its hair. I put on makeup: too much of it, and smeared to look wrong. My mother evaluated me to see if the overall look was too provocative (“you don’t actually want to be like this woman, do you?” “Mom, nobody wants that, that’s the point”) and I was out the door.

And then, when I was safely out of my mother’s sight, I whipped out my
pièce de résistance
. I took a safety pin, and scraped it down my arms, to give myself track marks. I had no idea what “track marks” were, really: how they got there, what they said about your health, why they were shameful. But I knew Courtney Love had them. And I knew that, because Courtney Love had them, they were funny.

“When Kurt died, I just fell into this endless spiral,”
Courtney Love told addiction and recovery website
The Fix
in 2012. “I was doing drugs from the moment I woke up till the time I went to bed.” Her album came out four days after he died. Her bassist overdosed a few months later. She hid in her house—
“there were people outside her house every day. People in the trees, people throwing microphones in the yard,” a friend said later—and in her first concert, she went through the set sobbing, changing lyrics so that they alluded to her own impending death, and collapsed on stage.

So that was my monster costume. Dressed as a grieving mother whose husband had blown his head off, giving myself track marks to sell the gag. It was cool. It was funny. I was twelve years old.

It’s easy to say that you shouldn’t despise women for having sex, or getting naked. Nearly everyone has sex, or at least human genitalia that might show up in a photograph. It’s also easy to say that you shouldn’t punish women for being sad or angry about a failed or abusive relationship, since loss is one of those things that tends to make most humans feel sad. These are crimes that even “nice girls” can commit, albeit inadvertently. It’s not hard to rally sympathy to their cause.

But the full trainwreck treatment doesn’t begin until you’ve passed beyond the preliminaries. Check off one or two boxes on the list, and you might come off fine, if slightly
worse for wear. The women we truly despise don’t just make common mistakes. They aren’t flawed in everyday ways; they aren’t just whiny, or clingy, or slutty, or loud. These are the true spectacles, the ones we remember, not in incidents, but in images: Amy Winehouse, walking down a London street without her shirt or her shoes. Lindsay Lohan, posing with a butcher knife between her teeth. Amanda Bynes and her tattered Halloween wig, Sinead O’Connor ripping a photo of the Pope in half, Britney hammering at a car with an umbrella. They’re where sexual overabundance and emotional overabundance collide and merge into something that is both, and neither, and worse than either. They are addicted, delusional, suicidal, violent; they are mad.

This is a story about images. So flip the pages backward, for the moment—to before gossip blogs, before tabloids, before photography, even—to one painting, done in 1876. It depicts the legendary Paris hospital of La Salpêtrière.

La Salpêtrière was an institution in the heart of Paris that housed women who had gone wrong. It held thousands. Though it was originally intended to be a warehouse for the homeless, in time, more and more women found their way in: They drank too much, or had sexually transmitted diseases. They were developmentally disabled, or epileptic. They were old. They were prostitutes. They saw things, or heard voices, or refused to eat. The crimes were many, in La
Salpêtrière, but the punishment was always the same: Here, in what Georges-Didi Huberman called
“the city of incurable women,” you were chained to the walls and left to die.

Getting from La Salpêtrière to
TMZ
is a quick trip: We can do it in three doctors and two paintings. Here is Pinel, our first doctor, and the hero of Painting Number One: Tony Robert-Fleury’s
Pinel Liberating the Madwomen of La Salpêtrière
. Pinel has bold new ideas about how to run La Salpêtrière. He thinks the chains are a bad idea, for one thing. He thinks these women may be basically rational creatures afflicted by deformations in their thought processes—illnesses of the mind, if you will—that a doctor could resolve by speaking with them.

So Pinel comes to take the chains off the madwomen. Yet the funny thing about Pinel, in Fleury’s painting, is that he’s hardly visible. You have to look to spot him: a sober, respectable, middle-aged man in a nice suit, so dark he nearly fades into the background. What this image concerns, chiefly, is what he’s “liberating”: a landscape of writhing, white, exposed female flesh.

One girl, her flimsy white gown slipping down her shoulder to show her cleavage, smiles hazily as men grip her by the arms. An angry-looking woman in a low-cut shirt lunges at the viewer from her knees, mouth agape. Another woman lies on the ground, back arched, gasping. She’s torn her gown away to expose one naked breast.

Oh, sure, there are a few old hags around the edges.
Sure, we’re meant to focus on what the doctor did. But we all know what we’re here to see. These girls—these pretty girls, these crazy girls, unable to control themselves, unable to even keep their clothes on—my, oh, my, how awful. My, oh, my, how shameful.

My, oh, my. Isn’t it strange, these crazy girls. You just can’t look away.

Fleury’s choice to turn a human-rights violation into a soft-porn showcase might be more shocking, were it not for the fact that it was an approved psychiatric practice at the time.

Enter Doctor Number Two.

Pinel Liberating the Madwomen
hung in the lecture hall of Jean-Martin Charcot, the neurologist who gave La Salpêtrière its other great historical distinction: as the cradle of “hysteria.” The word had been around for quite some time—it was what happened when a woman’s uterus got out of place and made her act badly, or when she was sexually frustrated, or when she was too promiscuous; whatever it was, doctors theorized that up to 75 percent of women were afflicted—but Charcot was the first to codify it as a disease of the mind. He even theorized that some men could have it, though it was rare.

But hysteria didn’t make much sense, even as a mental illness. Not quite epilepsy, not quite insanity, hysteria was what you had when the doctor didn’t know what you had. Women who cried too much had it. Women who laughed
too much had it. Women who masturbated at all had it. So did women who disliked sex. Charcot was tasked with bringing clinical specificity to a disease that thrived on not being anything specific. He didn’t succeed, of course. But he did have a flair for public relations. And so, to keep the world abreast of this amorphous yet dangerous epidemic, he resorted to photography, bringing his patients into a professional studio so that he could capture them as they screamed, arched, grimaced, and twitched.

Publicly exhibiting the mentally ill was an old practice; beginning in the 1600s, English tourists could pay a penny to visit the cells of chained lunatics at Bedlam. It was supposedly a morally uplifting reminder to restrain one’s own animal passions, though according to accounts from the time, most of the visitors were laughing. But, where Bedlam imprisoned men and women alike, Charcot’s emphasis on women in peril made him a sensation.

His most famous subject was a fourteen-year-old rape victim named Louise Augustine Gleizes. Louise Augustine was younger, and prettier, than most patients—
“the camera likes her,” photographer Paul Regnard explained—and Charcot published photographs of her writhing on a bed in her underclothes (these were her “passionate poses”: “ecstasy,” “amorous supplication,” “erotism”) accompanied by descriptions of the strange states she fell into under hypnosis. (
“She closes her eyes, her physiognomy denoting possession and satisfied desire; her arms are crossed, as if she were
clasping the lover of her dreams to her breast; at other times, she clasps the pillow. Then come little cries, smiles, movements of the pelvis, words of desire or encouragement.”) All of this was for educational purposes, mind you. Sure, sure. And people visited Bedlam to improve their souls.

In addition to the photography business, Charcot performed his hypnotic treatments publicly, allowing the world to see the power he had over his broken women. Louise Augustine turned in a few performances, but his star in these live shows was Blanche Wittman, “queen of the hysterics”; she could do the most remarkable things under hypnosis, including kissing members of the audience on command. Indeed, there were many remarkable things about Blanche—chief among them the fact that, after Charcot died and the hypnotism sessions ended, she never exhibited another symptom of hysteria for the rest of her life.

Still, despite these little factual infelicities, hysteria was a smashing success. Charcot became the most celebrated doctor in France; he even got his own painting, by Pierre Aristide Andre Brouillet,
A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière
(Painting Number Two). It shows Charcot’s handsome male assistant holding Blanche, who is wearing a low-cut gown and opened corset for the performance, and swooning in his arms as if she’s posing for the cover of a romance novel. A group of rapt young men crane their necks from the stands, trying to get a good look at all the hot, hot mental-health care going on.

And, just as
Pinel Liberates the Madwomen
hung in the lecture
hall of Charcot, a copy of
A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière
hung in the offices of one of Charcot’s most devout admirers: Sigmund Freud. Doctor Number Three. Freud felt that Charcot, brilliant though he was, had not done enough to emphasize the sexual causes of hysteria; his own studies were dead-set on unlocking the secret carnal desires of women. Freud could be remarkably insensitive about said desires (Dora, perhaps Freud’s most famous patient, relates an incident when an adult man cornered her and forced a kiss on her as a little girl; Dora claims she did not like this; Dora, Freud concludes, is lying about the fact that she did not like this, because Dora is a hysteric; et cetera) and his studies were often, shall we say, suspect in their methods. One woman, who had gone to Freud with leg pain, remembered him only as the “nerve specialist” who
“tried to persuade me I was in love with my brother-in-law.”

But, like it or not, Charcot was a mere Obi-Wan to Freud’s Darth Vader: The student became the master, and the contemporary idea of mental illness took shape in Freud’s office, under the watchful cleavage of Blanche Wittman, and inside the long history of broken, exposed and shameful women.

So flip forward. Look at the photos again. Here is a woman unconscious, mouth wide open, head thrown back. Here is a grimacing woman with a shaven head. Here is a woman in
a flimsy slip, sobbing, straining against the handcuffs that fasten her to a hospital gurney. Here is a woman starving and half-naked, wandering the street, her face twisted into a rictus. Here is a woman stepping out of a car, her skirt pulled aside to expose her vulva.

Is it starting to look familiar yet? When you envision the tourists at Bedlam, or the demonstrations at La Salpêtrière—the strange, half-dressed girls contorting and flirting, not even in control of their own bodies—can you tell yourself that you’d be too sensitive, too good at heart, to ever find yourself in the stands?

The “hysterics” of Charcot’s time, or Freud’s, would now get different names: They’d have anorexia, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personalities.

But no matter what they had, they would still be spectacles. They belong to the visual history of the Madwoman: half-clothed, unhinged, somehow both sexually titillating and fundamentally abhorrent, grotesquely exposed and irresistibly available. Half the time, with “crazy” celebrities, we don’t even know what these women’s diagnoses are, or whether they have them: Try to prove that Britney Spears has bipolar disorder, or that Amanda Bynes is schizophrenic, and you wind up at a dead end, defeated by doctor-patient confidentiality. Amy Winehouse was undoubtedly an addict. But her emaciated appearance—the source of many, if not most, cruel jokes about
how ugly she’d become—was largely due to bulimia, which no one in the media knew she had until years after her death.

But it doesn’t matter that we don’t have a diagnosis. We already have a name for it; we already know what disease you have when the doctor won’t say what disease you have. Add sexual overabundance to emotional overabundance, and throw in an element of danger or death, you have the sum total of what we once called a “hysteric.” Now, we call it a “trainwreck.” And then, as now, the treatment is the same: a few racy photographs, maybe a live meltdown. Now, instead of going to the nerve doctor, there’s a publicist to call in the morning. We never stopped exhibiting these women; we just moved the show, from the hospitals to the grocery-store checkout line. If anything, it’s easier than ever to attend. You had to pay a penny to visit Bedlam, but you can visit
Perez Hilton
for free.