The Gloss, the Reflection

selves shaped from the outside in

I’ve done a lot this weekend, though our capitalist culture would like me to think I’ve been unproductive. As with most breaks, I had a goal of writing a complete novel in my five days off. Instead I watched films, read, journaled, started a puzzle, did yoga, and finally figured out which writing project I’m focusing on for December.

On Thanksgiving night I watched Judy, starring Renee Zellweger. My mom loved Judy Garland and, as she often did with famous people, would preface her love with Judy’s history: how she grew up trapped in the film industry, drugged with uppers and downers in order to stay thin, likely sexually exploited, and with no will of her own.

For some reason I tend to conflate Garland with Karen Carpenter, a singer who died of heart failure at the age of 32, likely because of complications with anorexia. When Carpenter was a teenager her doctor advised her to go on a diet. She did, and, like many women, began her lifelong disordered relationship with food. Carpenter was a talented musician. She started drumming in marching band and also played the piano. In the video below you can see her skillful drumming (start at the 1:20 mark).

Of course, Karen Carpenter isn’t necessarily comparable to Judy Garland, except that my mom identified with both of them, maybe as many women from her generation did. My mom would tell me about how she’d been forced to wear skirts (because girls weren’t allowed to wear pants) and, when my mom was a tween, she watched her sister get sent somewhere to give birth to an illegitimate baby. I remember once, when I was a teenager, my mom looking at a picture of herself as a teenager and saying that she’d thought she was fat. She looked at me as if she were confused. “But I wasn’t fat.”

By now, I’m old enough to have that experience myself, although unlike my mom, I’ve learned to accept my fat body. She never got to crawl out from under the way society expected her to look. Though I will say, it took me years to do this, and I spent over half my life as a bulimic.

My mom played the guitar. Somewhere I have a picture of her sitting on top of a guitar, strumming. She sang, too. When my mom was home some evenings, she’d sing me absurd songs, like Strangers in the Night and Summertime, and I’d envision the lives behind the songs. I’d hear the longing in her voice, for a different life. What did that life look like?

The film Judy, about one of my mom’s beloved women, intersperses scenes of Judy’s last days performing in London with scenes from her adolescence, when she was filming The Wizard of Oz. The juxtapositions have the effect of exposing Garland’s fragility. Zellweger, though she doesn’t much resemble Garland, was the right actress for this job. She embodies Garland’s thinness, her tenacity and tenderness and fear. At one point Garland, as an adult, is scared to go on state and her handler forces her. We can see the way she grits her teeth, the jerkiness of her movements, as Zellweger inhabits the grit of Judy Garland, every time she had to go onstage.

Was it that Garland didn’t want to perform? Or that Garland, like so many women, was forced to live in a body and persona that was meant to be consumed, not experienced? Her body, from the moment her manager gave her the weight loss pills (erm, speed), ceased belonging to her, and her perception of herself, like many of ours, didn’t come from an internal place, but from a public gaze of consumption. She was taught to see herself from the outside.

The public saw Garland as a sweet girl; the girl who sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow and clicked her red heels. The studios saw her as a way to make a profit, but only if she was consumable by the public.

This sweet girl singing this lonesome song went from black and white to technicolor. But Garland herself was never allowed to live a full life. When her drug use and drinking got out of control she was deemed uninsurable, and unemployable, despite her reliance on drugs being fostered by the studios who exploited and discarded her.

Here’s a different version of her iconic song.

Here’s Judy, talking about her mom and defending her gay fans.

This interview fascinates me, because it’s clear that Garland was such a self-aware person, cognizant of the ways in which she’d been exploited. Even here, where it’s clear she isn’t sober, she has so much clarity. As someone whose mother suffered from addiction, and whose grandmother did as well, it’s also clear that Garland never learned how to be with herself. In those moments that most of us find respite- the quiet moments- it was too loud. The things that had been done to her. What she’d survived.

Here’s a clip from the film Judy, with Darci Shaw playing the young Judy Garland on the set of The Wizard of Oz.

All the things Garland gave up. Simple things like friends, going to see films, eating full meals. She gave it up so film studios could make money and then discard her.

I’ve been thinking so much about how many years I’ve spent seeing myself from the outside. Manicuring my movements, my voice, everything— simply so I can appear in a way others deem as palatable. But I project my assumptions on others. I assume I know what they want. I assume it isn’t me.

I’ve promised to write this newsletter once a week. My little inner perfectionist says it needs to be more than what it is. But I’m sending you this in the hopes that something I say resonates.

I’m here, if you want to chat.

Love,

Stacy