The internet in 2023 is so stale and stricken that people are boiling and eating their own shoes for sustenance. If you bring in outside food it will be nibbled the moment you look away, usually by spineless women who refuse to use punctuation. For wherefore art the commas if we have no mushrooms or peas? Cue friendly face peering over its wartime brick wall.
Great artists do not funnel or scurry or pilfer. They steal. The process should be shameless. Cannibalism is only fun when it happens all at once, like the Grecian orgy at the end of Suddenly, Last Summer. Picasso, with his great gulps of African art, had the right idea. So did many of the post-Impressionists, with their pretend geisha and nonce kanji. Well-behaved plagiarists rarely make history. Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
I'm grateful that I was All-About-Eve-d the first time it happened because the event served as my personal induction to our overarching camp superstructure, something that will live forever even if nobody remembers it. MGM had their stable of stars, I have my stable of nemeses. At 22 I am aged actress Margo Channing, stuck in a broken-down car and furiously brandishing a radish. I gaze wryly at the woman who will one day become Marilyn Monroe. Where Bette and Lauren* went once, so too do I go now. Your act feels reductive. Is that good? Look it up. I take a very long sip of tea.
My first nemesis, despite reading very little and not being Jewish, took on the stern moniker and austere London Review Bookshop air of a mythological Sontag. When I realised she was leeching off all of my interests and hobbies I became a young Camille Paglia, disillusioned after Sontag’s boring short story reading at Bennington College in 1973. Like Myra Breckinridge, my camaraderie with the psychosexual Forties has blinded me to any nuance of fault or personality. Thus I find it impossible in my enmity to deliberately identify myself with Bette over Joan, or Joan over Bette. Instead I seek solace in the writerly conflicts of the Seventies. A Woman’s Face is probably one of the best films ever made. Maybe I too would beat my daughter with a wire hanger, if I owned either.
My second nemesis was obsessed with the two Columbine shooters and later also admitted in an email to being obsessed with me. This was not flattering. Out of nowhere she stole my writing style and all of my stock metaphors in order to give a glowing review to the original Suspiria, a film I dislike. Then she said it was fine because I was originally influenced by Camille Paglia and because lots of random unrelated authors had also written about mirrors. I have to get better at stopping these things before they happen.
The stable rots in the rain. My nemeses, like horses, have no means to expel unwanted food so when they have eaten too much they must simply explode. You'll find them in the morning, in bits. Dressage makes no sense - there are better ways to get from G to X. The mirror cracks from side to side. Didion says that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but if you look closely at the camp superstructure and then at her own wave of cut-and-paste autofiction, you’ll find that we actually live stories in order to tell. How else would they hear the beating of my heart, which I’ve stuffed under the floorboards at the BFI Cinematheque? Every tale needs its antagonist.
'Doesn't it sort of defeat the point of a nemesis to have more than one?' asked my dad. But behold the many faces of Eve!!
*Nobody knows that Lauren Bacall, who modelled herself after Bette Davis, starred as Margo Channing in Applause, a 70s Broadway musical production of All About Eve. But I think about it every day and you can find a televised version of YouTube. One of history’s top ten greatest instances of stunt casting.
internally screamed as I read it all......