Petra likes Death!

A quick look at my vertical stack of DVD’s, I used to think, didn’t reveal much. Not only because I’m pretty resolute about refusing to believe that taste reveals much about people, but also because I really spend very little time watching films outside of the cinema, so I tend not to buy DVD’s for myself. The DVD’s I own are, by and large, gifts, and they’re usually from people who don’t know me well enough to know how little time I will spend watching them.

There are exceptions, stuff I grabbed off the shelf with genuine love and hunger and can’t live without. The Twin Peaks box set, Fire Walk with Me. Kramer vs. Kramer. Happiness I stole from the library; I literally couldn’t give it back. The Bjork documentary, the Lightning Bolt road film. Certainly not enough to construct an aesthetic, you wouldn’t think.
But the people who don’t really know me, it seems, have other ideas. Petra likes Death! they unanimously chorus. Donnie Darko, the Ice Storm, Magnolia, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, both Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky, Kids, Blue Velvet, the Straight Story - my DVD collection is the equivalent of a lesbian mix tape: a total thematic flatline. Every dark cinepop moment of the last 10 years or so has reminded someone of me. And it turns out they’re probably right.

I’ve noticed, only recently, that my interest in pop culture is a shade macabre. The art I like that’s glossy and cheerful always undermines itself, always eventually corrodes. Somewhere in me I knew it was ok to love Britney the mouseketeer. I felt the abject gutter slut lurking, dreamed of teasing her out. Beyonce will come to me, too, one day, just you wait. She’ll join me, Britney (whom I’m renaming Fusty Princess Fallopia) and Charlotte Church in a gigantic, underfilled waterbed, where I’ll throw them all around by their weaves and fist them with fried chicken.

My favourite songwriters, with the exception of Bjork, are all addicted, suicidal, mentally ill, or otherwise utterly miserable: Courtney Love, Kristin Hersh, Morrissey, Elliott Smith, Lou Barlow, Kathleen Hanna. (I like lots of bands that sound miserable too, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think of an entire band as all sharing the same affective disorder.) Singer-songwriters are so genteel in their self destruction. Even Elliott Smith, who stabbed himself in the heart, makes despair sound effete. Perhaps I should stop being such a tasteful bourgeois coward and go goth. But I hate goths; I have all kinds of violent fantasies about them - about sawing off their awful long hair with knives, pushing them under buses, and otherwise punishing them for their weedy insistence on death as a familiar. I always thought I was offended by that idea, but maybe I’m jealous - too insistent on my superior understanding of morbidity: I’ll show you death!

It’s a running joke among my friends that my superpower is making people cry. I just look at them and they’re off. Even relative strangers get right to exhuming when left alone with me for 5 minutes. What’s wrong? I ask, and they tell me they don’t know why they‘re so upset, then out it comes, whatever it is. And my close friends - there isn’t one who hasn’t told me their most terrible secret. Come on, you know it’s true. I’m not a party friend. I’m the one with the flaming sword; the one you trust to go first into the dark. Right? Right?

Since you’re all, by default, asking the rude question, the answer’s this: yeah, you’re right, death is my subject. It’s my subject cos it’s my enemy, assholes. I have no intention of dying, and I know you can all smell it on me. I’m sorry it makes you all cry. I don’t know why it would. Is there something I should know?