What is it about dead couples that captures the imagination? Is it the idea that some people's love lifts them out of autonomy -- and that can be both transcendent and terrible? Is it pondering the ease with which people can slide from selflessness to self-destructiveness?
Whatever it is, there's been some ink devoted to the suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. She took her life on July 3 this year; he followed a week later. Their friends are still groping for an explanation -- something about shared paranoia and conspiracy theories. The New York profile is a good start -- "Conspiracy of Two" (Aug 20, 07) -- and for those of us who remember when CD-ROMs and videogames for girls were cutting-edge, it's like a sobering footnote to the dot-com boom years the same magazine covered in "Silicon Alley 10003" (Feb 28, 00).
Vanity Fair follows with their Jan 08 piece, "The Golden Suicides," which echoes the New York narrative: Los Angeles' entertainment industry culture was rough on the couple, who had been riding high after a decade in which they were lauded as gaming-industry pioneers and included in the Whitney Biennial. VF also includes a link to the film Duncan made that was included in the Biennial.
Those two pieces take a decidedly East Coast-centric view, blaming Los Angeles for wreaking havoc on the delicate psyches of two gifted artists. It's unsurprising that the L.A. Weekly's "The Theresa Duncan Tragedy" (Aug 1, 07) has a different perspective; in her take on the whole situation, the reporter argues that Duncan and Blake didn't develop demons in California; they had been there, sleeping, all along.
In any event, I think watching how this story was covered -- first by the nimble weeklies, then by the local publication, then by the national glossy -- demonstrates the staying power that the doomed-lovers trope has for storytellers and readers alike.
Wow, I really worshipped her in the mid-90s and didn't know about the suicide earlier this year. I'm sorry to hear it.
As awful as it is to think, and as antithetical as it is to the spirit of her early girl-games, we would not still be hearing about this story if Theresa had not been capital B Beautiful. The legs of the story may be somewhat attributable to the "doomed lovers" angle, but I think it's mostly about Beautiful Woman kills self, mixed with a bit of schadenfreude for tragedy befalling a dot-com success story.
Posted by: Kip | 2007.12.21 at 11:21
Capital B Beautiful and capital C Creative. It's what allowed everyone to overlook the signs of her mental illness.
What I find fascinating is how wrapped up in each other they were, and how her mental illness infected him until it was a mutual delusion.
Posted by: Kerry | 2007.12.21 at 12:40
Part of what fascinates me about one of my favorite authors is an almost unbelievably grim end-of-life story. Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr, suffered from depression her whole life. Her husband was himself suffering from Alzheimer's. One day, when his decline had progressed past some point only she could see, she shot him and then herself, leaving behind a suicide note she'd written a decade prior.
I highly recommend checking out her work. There's a collection entitled I think "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" that contains all of her short fiction (which is really the only stuff worth reading; though her short work was brilliant, her novels were oddly terrible).
Posted by: Rochelle | 2007.12.31 at 05:21
It's funny you mention Sheldon/Tiptree -- "The Screwfly Solution," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and "The Women Men Don't See" are three of my favorite sci-fi stories of all time.
However, I didn't know about her collection! I'll look for it.
Posted by: Lisa S. | 2007.12.31 at 08:30