The Bookbat

I sing Video Games for the fourteen-year-old girl I once was

Yes, we are all tired of hearing about Lana Del Rey. But there is something happening here, for me: this naked, unembarrassed fantasy of what it’s like to be a Sexy Young Girl, it just gets more compelling as it gets more obviously fake.

The comparison to Angelo Badalamenti’s music in Twin Peaks: I can hear it. I can hear Air, too, which makes me think of the Virgin Suicides, which is perhaps the only piece of media in which a girl’s dead body was ever more decorative than Laura Palmer’s. And it is true, maybe, there is some inevitable connection between dreamy girlishness and violent death (maybe dead is the only way you can acceptably be a body—maybe you have to be completely pure or completely gruesome—maybe you have to be buried before you can stop walking on air—I don’t know). But it is also true that a few nights before Christmas, a few hours before dawn, I put Audrey’s dance on the stereo and laced my hands around the back of a man’s neck and whispered I’m Audrey Horne and I get what I want and knew exactly what I was evoking—all the way down to the plastic wrap—and used it, wanted it, wanted to be one of those girls. One of those girls that everyone is always violating, because it’s a masquerade, because she isn’t real, because there is no flesh there to break.

And then I tried to write a story about that moment—and I get what I want—and how much I didn’t get what I wanted, and in the course of writing I read this whole interview with Marie Calloway. I despair of the idea that “young female subjectivity” means nothing more than constant awareness of who wants to fuck you and how much, but God knows that is a mirror you can look into forever, if your self-control is just a little lacking. Remind me that I am real, that I am flesh, and then tear that flesh away. Everything you want about me is a veil and you know it and I know it. Look at me anyway. Please look at me.