You’re in your twenties, born into the age of selfesteem. From your earliest childhood, television characters from Mr. Rogers to Big Bird have been lovebombing you with messages about how special you are. At school, entire curricula have been established to enhance your sense of self-worth. You’ve been named Star of the Week, Student of the Day, Kid of the Millennium. You have been encouraged, appreciated, and applauded.
So when it comes time to rebel — if you are the sort who does rebel — it’s going to be self-esteem itself you rebel against.
You’ll go in for self-mutilation; you’ll drive a metal rod through your face and call it body piercing. You’ll get some lowlife with a needle and a drinking problem to engrave a tarantula tattoo on your chest. You’ll uglify yourself, with scruffy chinsproutings, baggy prison pants, oily hair, and that abused-hooker look you see in the fashion magazines.
The market being what it is, whole industries will spring up to cater to your rebellion against selfesteem. If only to establish your own independence, you’ll go through a period of stylish self-denigration and self- mortification. And, at least for a time, you will join the masochist economy.
The easiest way to signal your rebellion is through your appearance. When you begin to investigate, you will find that the fashion designers have marshaled their mighty energy to help you look as ugly and disreputable as possible. It began a few years ago when British stylists started taking their fashion cues from the very epitome of self-mutilators, heroin addicts. Photographers like Corrine Day and Craig McDean were shooting these hollow- eyed anti-fertility goddesses, cold and clammy with the junkie sweats, sometimes with their left sleeves pushed up to their elbows. The rock singer Courtney Love popularized an American version of the junkie look. Then came the Broadway musical Rent and the Scottish movie Trainspotting. And now, if you want to see high-priced models with the I-Just-Overdosed-in-My- Underwear look, you can open the fashion magazines or turn on a rock video and there they are.
The mavens keep declaring the look dead, but Detours magazine recently ran a fashion spread that showed a bunch of bruised, catatonic, barefoot men lying on seedy motel-room floors wearing Gucci suits. Giorgio Armani ads feature women with matted oily hair, bony anorexic chests, and sunken dark eyes that give them the pallid self-congratulatory demeanor of somebody who has just initiated a spectacularly successful suicide attempt.
The ugly look has now spread to bohemian neighborhoods everywhere. Recently in Silverlake, an arty Los Angeles neighborhood east of Hollywood, I saw a young woman who could have served as a model for sexy masochists everywhere: skin paler than death, blank Sylvia Plath eyes, proudly post-hygiene hair, and a body as stretched and sickly as a Soviet chicken. Her baggy brown jeans hung so low you could see the top of her black underwear and a touch of pelvis (a protruding pelvic bone is the height of eroticism for today’s emaciated avant-garde). Her brown-and-black tank top clung tightly, leaving no rib to the imagination, and her black bra-straps dangled loose over her shoulders.
It takes hookers years of heroin and physical abuse to achieve this happening, hopeless style, but with some money and fashion sense, any bohemian can perfect the image in just a few months. Remember, you’re not only rebelling against the official self-esteem authorities, like teachers, but also the whole army of social hygienists who preach self-enhancement. So you’ll start smoking compulsively, preferably in places with bad air circulation so your eyes can keep up that red-rimmed, teary look. Your shaving will be irregular, as if you were trying to gain admittance into His Majesty’s Order of the Scraggly Goatee. And you’ll layer your hair coloring, blond highlights on top, black underneath — to suggest cavernous greasy depths.
Poor skin tone is the foundation of it all. It helps if you bruise easily, but if you don’t, you’ll want to show wide expanses of blotchy epidermis that brings to mind the tortured consumptive look of your 19th-century progenitors. Helmut Lang, whose clothing line is available at Barney’s and other high-end stores, is running ads showing a paler-than-pale woman with lifeless blond hair in a ripped, misshapen white tank top. Of course she is wearing no makeup, so the drab colorlessness she projects is just right for an afternoon spent lounging around the state mental hospital.
Her boyfriend will buy shirts several sizes too large so they can hang off his cadaverous frame. And he’ll keep them unbuttoned to the mid-chest level, so everyone can see the randomly spaced splotches of chest hair and the bones protruding from his sternum. He will never button his sleeves. The loose cuff enhances the emaciated look, and it gives a suggestive glimpse of the blue veins of his forearm.
The only makeup that appears in the masochist ads is blue or black around the eyes (for both men and women). It gives just a hint of death pallor.
If there’s anything original in this pose — and probably there isn’t — it is that its aficionados are not blaming society for their alienation. There is no rage at the class structure, or at racism, or the generation gap, or uptight social codes. This is a lost generation with no one to blame but themselves. They want to project a heroic image of rugged dysfunctionalism.
Clothes are allowed to have color, of a sort. If you go to a club or coffee shop in a neighborhood like Silverlake or in the East Village in New York City, you’ll notice immediately that black clothing is out. Most people look good in black. Brown and orange are in. Most people look terrible in brown and orange. They are the ideal hues for uglification.
After I saw the perfect masochist trudging across the 7-Eleven parking lot in Silverlake, I suddenly felt the need for a snack, so I crossed the street to the Back Door Cafe, where the regiments of the demimonde were drinking cappuccinos out of beer mugs. Most of the locals seemed to work in the music industry — doing quite well, as a matter of fact — and their apparel was fashionably hideous.
One young man wore baggy brown overalls with brown leather straps. Another wore shorts with brown and yellow checks. A woman wore a dark slip with a fraying hem. T-shirts that zip partway down the front, one of the excrescences of the excruciating 1970s, were also back in evidence.
The masochist look has signaled an important shift for the demimonde. Traditionally, white hipsters have aspired to be black. From Norman Mailer to Jack Kerouac to Mick Jagger to early Madonna, blackness has represented a superior world of liberation, soul, and risque fun. But today’s masochists don’t try to mimic black culture. They’ve crafted a hipness for post-O. J. America, an age of racial separatism in which whites are stuck with their own pathetic whiteness. And what could be more conducive to self-hatred than that?
The white-trash look has inspired a lot of the sartorial self-mutilation of the hipsters. K-Mart clothes, purchased secondhand at Goodwill, are the very thing a heroin addict might be seen in on a bleak Tuesday afternoon. It’s not for nothing that the band U2 recently announced their world tour at a K-Mart, while wearing polyester shirts and vinyl jackets. The Gap now advertises a line of checked shorts your grandfather wore with knee-high black socks while mowing his lawn in the early 1960s. Chic designers like Yohji Yamamoto now design rayon trousers perfect for a $ 2.99, all-you-can-eat family smorgasbord circa 1971 (although the Yamamoto pants carry a $ 450 price tag).
But the masochist look is not just a shallow matter of fashion and appearance. It’s not just about denigrating yourself on the outside. It’s also got an important spiritual dimension. To be part of this counterculture, you must distinguish yourself from all those selfindulgent baby-boom hedonists who now teach English at the high school. You have to practice anhedonia and perfect your inability to experience pleasure in any form. Thus, you’ll not only want to look like a veteran of hundreds of porn movies, you’ll want to act that way too. You’ll want it known that things that are pleasant for other people, like sex, are for you nothing more than boring forms of self-abuse.
But unlike the punks or the grunge rockers before you, who were vaguely anti-sex, you’ll want to be sexy and have sex — only in a way that is utterly degrading. So you’ll spend a lot of time talking about the scene in Flirting With Disaster in which Patricia Arquette has some guy lick her armpits. You may get your clothes designed by Chandi Lancaster, the creator of the depressingly erotic fashion line C — t Clothing. And if you are a mid- level rock or movie star and you are photographed in a hip magazine, you’ll want to show plenty of skin, but in a spirit of sleazy ennui. You’ll want to be overlit so that your features are bleached out, and underdressed so that none of your moles goes unnoticed. Bijou Phillips, who was one of the models in the seminal Calvin Klein kiddie-porn ad campaign, poses in ripped tacky underwear in a seedy hotel room for her profile in Arena. Model Amy Wesson shows off her concentration-camp shoulders while downing a large can of beer at an industrial loading dock in her photo shoot for Surface. Sandra Bullock poses on the toilet for Detour.
And music must also be robbed of its joy. On my foray into L.A.’s heart of hipness, I stopped by several clubs including the Viper Room, the Sunset Boulevard club where River Phoenix overdosed. The Viper Room now caters to kids from the Valley as much as to the people the Valley kids are aping. But even the wannabes have mastered the masochistic attitude of utter boredom. The band, called “It,” launched into a set with a sound that could be called ” mainstream alternative,” and everybody in the club just stopped and stared in the manner of zombies watching television. Up front, three or four groupies tried to bounce to the music, but the rest of the crowd was utterly immobile. Between songs there was some desultory clapping, but mostly people just stood there, cigarettes dangling from lifeless fingers. If you can yawn big, you’ll never go home alone.
Further out on Sunset Boulevard is a place called Toi’s, allegedly a Quentin Tarantino hangout, that deserves an ad campaign of its own: Absolut Boredom. It’s a restaurant with overly spiced Thai food that tries to look like a dive. The tables and chairs have been beat up and the filthy carpet has been splattered with paint. But the air of pure ennui derives from the memorabilia on the wall. The whole heroin canon is depicted here: from Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to the Sex Pistols and now the Primitive Radio Gods. It shows the parade of youth revolt reduced to a musty tradition, a Lenin Museum of the counterculture. It allows diners to sit in a cul-de-sac of alienation, making the same rock-rebellion gestures as their big brothers and sisters, as their parents, as their grandparents. They can punish themselves with the parched sameness of it all.
The masters of the masochist style have achieved such self-abnegating perfection that they will not even leave any residue when they are gone. Every bit of clothing and every artifact is derived from the past — from ’60s thrift shops, from Saturday Night Fever, from mod or glare or punk or skaters or zoot suiters or The Brady Bunch or Bing Crosby or bowling leagues or the Little Rascals (in one club I even saw a woman bringing back the Gertrude Stein look, with a dumpy dark sweater and a long wool skirt). The whole derivative stew is blended into flavorlessness, each of the suberas stripped of its distinctive meaning, before being served to the young masochists at room temperature, to their complete non-satisfaction.
The self-esteem movement had to spawn this sort of reaction. The authority figures of self-esteem grew up on New Age mush and social libertinism; they took all the illicit fun that used to be countercultural and made it mainstream. Their message was that each of us possesses an Inner Wonderful. And no matter what we do — drugs, adultery, illicit fund-raising — nothing can mar that Inner Wonderful. You can always feel good about yourself because that’s the real you.
This put the next generational rebels in a bind. Since the countercultural terrain has been drained of liberation and self-love, the only way to rebel is to grasp the Inner Miserable.
You have to pretend that deep inside you there is this awful dysfunction, that no matter how many platinum records you make or successful fashion shows you put on, you still have this Inner Miserable that signals your rebellion against the sunbeams working in the guidance counselor’s office.
And it doesn’t matter if you actually live in an upper-class suburb like Silverlake. You still have to nurse your Miserable just to keep up your creativerebel bona fides. Even though you never actually do heroin, you have to appropriate the look. And even though you are beautiful, you have to work arduously at being ugly. And if you are ugly, you still have to work at being ugly, because in this world those who are effortlessly ugly get no credit.
The underground types used to stand for pleasure in their revolt against the repression of bourgeois life. They used to stand for freedom in the revolt against the restrictions of the establishment. But now to revolt against “Free To Be You and Me” and the MTV mainstream, the rebels have to side with dysfunction. To rebel against mainstream self-indulgence, they have to stand for masochism. Suddenly the demimonde is having less fun than the regular monde.
Yet one has to admit it’s a cool form of non-fun. In their junkie-inspired stupor, the masochists are actually snobs; they look down on people higher up the social scale. In their hopelessness, there is hipness. And in their revolt against self-esteem, they have actually created a perverse form of self-love.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
