Alice Bolin’s nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including Elle, The AWL, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Vice’s Broadly, The Paris Review Daily, and The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis. You can follow her on Twitter here: @alicebolin
As a kid, I found myself as a second-hand viewer of the Dead Girl show, meaning it was always on in some capacity and was grooming me to be well-versed in the dangers of the world. I felt little to no desire to watch, but I knew the Dead Girl show loomed in the living room. In a tweet by comedian Jen Lap, she points out, “It’s weird how women (myself included) are obsessed with true crime shows, considering we’re typically the victims. That’s like if chickens loved watching Top Chef.” So, why are we drawn to stories of our victimhood?
This is a question that writer Alice Bolin explores in her debut collection, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. Bolin artfully exposes the macabre tropes of the crime genre, provides the reader with a syllabus of pop culture references, and weaves in personal essays of her coming-of-age in Moscow, Idaho, and Los Angeles. With X-Acto-knife precision, Bolin articulates everything a girl growing up in the 90s has internalized such as Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time,” Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, and of course, Dateline NBC. I was thrilled to speak with Alice over the phone on a chilly November afternoon. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Natalie Tombasco: In pop culture, the body of the Dead Girl is depicted as grotesquely beautiful, as if lifted from a Renaissance painting. You point to the body of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer by writing of her “river-wet hair slicked around her porcelain face, blue with death but still tranquil, lovely” Why is the Dead Girl depicted in this way?
AB: There are a lot of potential answers to this, but I do connect it to images that haunted Western culture and antiquities. I think of the virgin martyr and other totems of female purity and death that send this message of dying being the greatest vocation for women, or the highest accomplishment one can achieve in this way that’s honorable or infamous.
NT: You examine the Dead Girl’s purpose by writing, “Just as for the murderer, the detectives in True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” I began thinking about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and how she exists as a catalyst for the male’s coming-of-age and lacks any depth in terms of narrative or desires. Do you think there is any similarity between these tropes?
AB: Of course! Absolutely. What I was trying to do when writing the book was not only think about obsessions with violence or social issues but these narrative tropes that are repeated over and over again and keep our storytelling in this stagnant, boring place. I think any trope where you have a man—often a privileged, white man—at the center of the story and women exist to push his story along, or lead him to revelation or redemption. It’s like whether the woman dies or not, or whether it’s a love story or a murder story, you still have this sort of flattening of experience—the kind of experience we deem noteworthy. So yeah, I totally connect them.
One thing that I’m annoyed by, or frustrated by, is this prevalence of “Prestige TV” that has earned critical praise, where the stories and characters, to me, feel so similar. It’s always this bad dude/anti-hero, some kind of criminal element, and women serve to either hold the guy back, or push him forward, but it’s just this thing that’s repeated ad nauseam. Even beyond my feminist issue with the Dead Girl in particular, I also have an issue with the replication of boring stories in general.
NT: Another trope that I find to be important in the true crime genre is the Attractive Psycho Guy. I’m thinking of Norman Bates’s “boy next door” appeal, Patrick Bateman’s chillingly rigorous skin-care routine, and current films like You and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. America’s infatuation with these figures is incredibly timely considering cases like Brock Turner and Brett Kavanaugh where men with a certain appeal get away with hideous actions. With all the red flags in culture, why are viewers intrigued by, or sympathetic to this archetype?
AB: Well, the way I think about it is sort of the opposite. Because we have these archetypes in fiction, then we can easily forgive the actions of random, privileged men who get away with horrible things. I think that’s the reason we re-create this story about the hyper-brilliant and charismatic serial killer or con man, who is monstrously charming and clever because we want to believe that. We want to believe that people who get away with crimes are smarter and better than the rest of us in some way, and not that we have a culture that’s set up to benefit them. I mean, because then we would really have to examine ourselves, and our justice system.
So, in some ways, it actually bothers me when Ted Bundy is played by Zac Efron in a movie and people say he was “handsome,” or that he was smart. I mean, was he? These are just characteristics that we replicated and then they become true. I don’t think we have any evidence that that’s true. It’s the same with Brett Kavanaugh or Brock Turner—there’s nothing special about them. What’s special about them is their privilege and wealth. Then, they start to fit in with these stories that help us to forgive unforgivable actions.
NT: Right. Yeah, we kind of humanize them, too.
AB: Yeah, or even super-humanize them. There was a story in Steubenville, Ohio, where a girl was gang-raped at a party and the coverage was like, “These football players’ lives are ruined. They can’t go to college.” It wasn’t that this girl’s life is ruined. There is this humanizing element, but also the desire for our villains to be superhuman. Another example is the Dirty John podcast, where the main character is a con man who repeatedly uses women in awful ways, and everyone was like, “Oh, he’s a monster!” But, is he? Or do men get away with crime?
NT: I’d like to transition to the more memoir-centric essays. The first being “The Place Makes Everyone a Gambler,” where you ask: “If the open road is an American totem of independence and escape, what does it mean when the road is actually a closed circuit?” This essay embodies W.B. Yeats’s quote, “the centre cannot hold,” as it attempts to bring order, or “connective tissue” to the collection. Can you speak more on how you feel the Dead Girl theory works alongside the “humdrum danger” of driving and “apocalyptic weather” of L.A.?