projection as reflection
This Week in Reading
All The Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to by Strangers by Alana Massey
I read a lot of books, and like a lot of what I read, but every so often a book floors me. This book was so good I read half of it in one sitting, whispering what the FUCK out loud to myself in my tent in the mountains of the Angeles National Forest. This book was so good that I read it on my kindle, and then immediately bought a hard copy for myself. This book was so good, I texted four different people telling them to read it before I had even finished it. Thank you to Anne, who correctly told me that I would absolutely love this book.
In our modern era of think pieces and twitter clap backs, pop culture analysis most often comes in the form of the hot take. All The Lives I Want is some of the greatest pop culture theory I have ever read, but it contains no hot takes. If anything, it is a collection of cold takes. Alana Massey is still thinking about an Esquire profile of Britney Spears from 2003, is still thinking about Aaliyah’s death, 17 years after it happened, is still grappling with the promotional website for Lost in Translation, more than a decade after it was released.
Massey takes on subjects that I thought had been exhausted: celebrity body image, stripping, the concept of the crazy ex-girlfriend, and not only delivers a new take on tired topics, but the best take. She writes about the false dichotomy of Winona and Gwyneth, the way Anna Nicole Smith subverts our expectations of class mobility; about the expansiveness and diversity of merchandise young women sell on Etsy featuring the words of Sylvia Plath. It is my favorite type of book, by which I mean that it is a book that I feel I could have written if I were smarter and braver.
Whereas the hot take usually defaults to a critical take down, Alana Massey approaches her subjects with empathy, even admiration. To consume as much media as we all do, simply to disparage the very thing we were so transfixed by, is disingenuous at best. There is a part in Lady Bird (my favorite movie of the past several years) when Saorise Ronan’s character discusses her college applications with a nun at the Catholic school she attends. The nun tells her that her love for Sacramento was apparent in her essay. “I don’t love Sacramento,” Saorise replies, “All I do is pay attention.” “Don’t you think they are the same thing — love and attention?” The nun asks, peering at her from under a robin’s egg blue habit. Anyways, I think that scene is about my relationship with Taylor Swift.
I am not particularly interested in evaluating Taylor Swift’s artistry as a musician, and I am definitely not interested in trying to determine if she is a good or bad person. But I think about Taylor Swift endlessly. Whenever she releases another dumb music video, I spiral completely. Taylor is in many ways vacant. It is not that she give us so much to unpack, rather she is the perfect vessel for us to project meaning onto. That is what pop culture is at its core- it is a way for us to take the temperature of society as a whole. How does America feel about feminism right now? How does our culture process hypocrisy? What is our current stance on female purity? The easiest way of answering those questions is by examining the way we treat Taylor Swift.
When Taylor Swift released the video for “Look What You Made Me Do” last fall, I lost my mind completely. I thought about Taylor Swift nonstop for a week straight, veering closer and closer to the edge of insanity. The song is allegedly is about Taylor seizing ownership of her reputation as a manipulative bitch, but is actually another attempt to pin the blame on the media, on the public, on twitter, on anyone but herself. At the end, a crowd of old-Taylors parade across the screen. Country-star-Taylor with long golden ringlets, ballerina-Taylor, VMA-Taylor clutching a statuette to her chest. “Stop making that surprised face, its so annoying” says zombie-Taylor to fake-nerd Taylor. “You are so fake” one Taylor reprimands another. “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” says award-show-Taylor, quoting one of her own acceptance speeches. It is an instance of shocking self-awareness from Taylor Swift, a woman whose entire career has been defined by a complete lack of accountability. It is a solitary moment where Taylor acknowledges that she is in on the joke, is finally, briefly, upfront about her calculating media persona.
I found myself in the middle of a full-fledged existential crisis. Was I irritated by Taylor Swift because she lacks self-awareness, or because she is completely self aware and refuses to take any steps to remedy her shortcomings? Did this video get under my skin because I worried that my own self-awareness was both my best, and my worst, quality? Unable to come to an internal conclusion, Taylor Swift became a reflective surface in which I was able to see myself more completely.
Alana Massey writes about iconic women, but moreover she writes about the things we project onto these women. We talk about Gwyneth and Lana and Nicki, but really we are talking about the concepts of white capitalism, female sadness, and singular power, respectively. She acknowledges that turning women into ideas does a disservice to the human complexity they embody. But then she does it anyways. She is not close personal friends with Academy Award winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, she is not privy to the human complexity of Paltrow’s internal world. The things we project on famous women do not help us understand them better, but it does help us better understand the society that celebrates and mocks them, helps us better understand ourselves.
Massey writes: “When people ask me how much I weigh, they are often looking for a measure of distance more than a measure of weight. They want to know my weight in pounds, of course, but at the heart of so many inquiries about the weight of small women is a desire to know the difference between their bodies and mine.” All comparisons are a way of measuring distance. To evaluate famous women is a way of orientating ourselves. I make a disparaging assessment about Lauren Conrad as a way of pushing myself further from her; make a list of things I have in common with Winona Ryder to pull myself closer to the continent she inhabits. If I make enough comparisons, eventually I will be able to plot myself onto a blank space of a star chart, will situate myself in a constellation aligned with every woman I have ever seen on the cover of a magazine.
We compare and project as a form of elevating ourselves (I am no Taylor, all vapid victimhood and privilege); we project as a form of self-hatred (I am no Taylor, all golden beauty and success). But our projections can also be a form of intimacy. We imagine shared traits with famous women we have never met as a way of creating sisterhood, forging common DNA that establishes connection with people we admire. (I am Taylor, all shrewdness and self-absorption).
Projection is not something reserved for famous women. We project our conceptions of the world onto ordinary women as well. Months ago, a (middle aged, male) coworker accused me of being insecure. He looked so smug, like he had really figured me out. It was a laughable assessment— one of my most defining traits is my obscene over confidence. But I was also a 23-year-old girl, and 23-year-old girls, at least in his vision of the world, are insecure. And so I, too, must be insecure. Strangers and friends alike project their fears and ambitions onto me, and I return the favor with equal force.
In the last essay of the book Massy describes a photograph of herself and an ex-boyfriend. “In the photo, I am staring into the camera, desperately drunk, with my mouth half open and a come-hither stare. James’s back is turned to the camera behind me, adding wood to a massive bonfire. I have attempted to project meaning into this scene, something about my negligence that he was building an attractive and dangerous fire within my sights.” In the end, she is both the final culprit, and the final victim in this societal impulse for feminine projection. Women, forever the object, are constantly being asked to be more than we are, even by ourselves.
Further Reading:
Most of the best pop culture theory is happening online. The Cut’s “I Think About This A Lot” is a described as “a series dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.” The one about Britney Spears holding a copy of Candide is especially good.
Manrepeller had a great article about the problem with opting out of pop culture
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