Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”.
It feels easier for me to say why not I would not desire to be ‘someone else for a day’. Let’s take a modern fable from Lou Reed’ s Walk on the Wild Side as a beginning, which contains the story of the non-binary Jackie, who identifies with the female pronoun in discourse but dreams of the life of a mythic queer man.
To be ‘James Dean’, though, is hardly easy nor clearly indicative of who or what that ‘life for a day might mean’. Dean built a star persona based on characters whose whole being is made up of mythic fable and symbol: the weird icon of the American dream where a figure starting as an outcast fashions an iconic being; whether by the discovery oil in the bleak ranching countryside of Texas in Giant which film he died in the middle of filming (use the link to see an earlier assessment if that film), or becoming the Christ figure in East of Eden, or the ‘bad boy from a good family’ in Rebel Without A Cause. If Jackie is ‘speeding away’ until she ‘crashes’, as I will asert late, her mode of being tells a truer story of the outcome of Dean’s life than her dream of being him.
To be an outsider may seem an attractive idea, especially if limited to only one day’s experience of that condition. For some the status of outsider is a romantic notion offering endless possibilities of escaping, at least to see how it feels, the constraints of the days we are seemingly bound to serve – of drudgery, neglect by self or others (or just the sense of being neglected that you can’t shake off – I do not know which is worse) or of actual violence and environmental degradation – from war, social or domestic power inequalities. This possibly is certainly the condition of Jackie and other persons on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side: Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy and even the nameless ‘coloured girls’ there to provide the chorus.It is a song where rhythmic swing defies misery, perhaps especially for the ‘coloured girls’ given no story.
Holly came from Miami, F-L-A
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows along the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"
Said, "Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side"
Candy came from out on the Island
In the backroom, she was everybody's darling
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She says, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"
Said, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"
And the colored girls go
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo
Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City is the place where they said
"Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side"
Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets
Looking for soul food and a place to eat
Went to the Apollo
You should've seen him go, go, go
They said, "Hey sugar, take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"
Alright, huh
Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would've helped that bash
She said, "Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, honey, take a walk on the wild side"
And the colored girls say
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo
Doo
These characters escape the idiocy of rural backwoods but only to become commodities. The ‘wild side’ feels SO ATTRACTIVE’. And for Jackie that is ‘James Dean for a day’ Yet the Dean she wants to be is the one to whom the quote in my opening illustration borrowed from ‘Today’ is attributed, but not definitively so:
Dream as if you will live forever; Live as if you will die today.”
James Dean?
The uncertainty is important too, for life for Dean was often neither a ‘dream’ nor lived as fully as his myth-makers in the studios wanted us to believe. that he lived life as if he will die today is perhaps proven by the fact that he died from injuries involved from cutting him out of the speeding car he crashed causing yet more severe internal injury. The truth is that the harsh conditions of mid-twentieth century USA – not least for young queer (probably bisexual in his case) men – were very much what really made Dean work to fit a saleable image of himself.
The narrator of Walk on the Wild Side is convinced that Jackie wanted to be a James Dean, of the manufactured self- image at least, for much more than a day. Their voice of advice to, or about Jackie, is that when your desire to be other than your current experience makes you depends on drugs with the capacity to bring dreams about as if they were realised rather than fantasised. Had the combination included Valium, he opines, it might have been a more effective ‘bash’ (Urban dictionary defines ‘bash’ as sometimes an adulterated drug) might have had a more convincing affect. Instead Jackie crashes (which Urban Dictionary describes as ‘hangover or other ill physical and psychological after effects as a result of a drug leaving your system and your body craving more’), although the word surely references the means of Dean’s death too.
After the crash of James Dean’s car: see https://www.vintag.es/2018/04/james-dean-car-wreck.html
And isn’t that the point – the desire to be some ‘other’, which is itself other than the name we give it – for no-one would see James Dean’s real life as a mere dream – is itself little other than the equivalent of an addictive craving, which when it doesn’t disappoint us, may well kill us in the process. Sorrow rises in my heart as I think of one beautiful man who went that way to perdition, forever dreaming other lives better than his – forever finding those lives only in the worst of the mind-changing drugs – the ‘downer’ we call alcohol.
So why would I wish to be ‘someone else for a day’. The self i would choose would be unlikely to be other than a mirage of a possible existence, and the means of getting there dangerous and dubious – and followed by some awful crash as the means I used to capture my dream wears away and demands replacement by something as fatuous of purpose as itself. The energy I might waste on such dreams and means might be better used in embracing the fact that the pursuit of a ‘self’ (even the real, or true, yourself meant in the ‘Be Yourself’ common admonition) is stymied on the fact that we are in truth not ever a unitary self but ‘distributed selves, which operate in negotiation with environmental demands on us. There may be all kinds of fake selves we can cite as operating in and for ourself or other people but that doesn’t presuppose that there is or that there must be a true one – the world is not and never was so binary in its operation.
Well, that’s me (or one of me at least) for today.
With love, Steven. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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