07 September 2008
valley of the dogmeme
Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls is a treatise on time to rival anything Heidegger ever wrote. Far more than the 'dolls' - the depressants, uppers, sleeping tablets and diet pills of the title - it's time that proves the real downer, stripping the girls of their looks, pulling power and careers by the age of twenty-five. Horizon of possibility? That's a showbiz lifespan to rival the mayfly. And unlike Heidegger's death, which, after all, simply coincides with the end of Being-in-the-world, even if one paradoxically can't quite live one's own demise ('Dying is not an event'), for the aging girls of Valley of the Dolls one is, in the blink of a heavily made-up eye, dead within life - 'washed up'. If you haven't taken care to get a trustworthy husband, secure your finances and preserve your reputation, then you might as well take too many pills and get it over with. Die, you flabby, sexless bastard!
What would a washed-up little hasbeen like you know about a vibrato? I've been on top for thirty years and I'll stay on top as long as I like. But you better keep singing for free, because that's all you'll get. Sure you'll get applause - any audience will applaud for something extra they get for nothing. But you're finished, washed up.' - Helen to Neely
Anne, the mimsy-pimsy heroine of the novel, despite having been ridiculously chaste, kind (read: boring) and well-behaved for the whole of the book ends up lying in her bedroom listening to the sounds of her wayward husband getting it on with a teen starlet, who stumble in unaware of her presence. Anne thinks to herself:
She could always keep busy during the day, and at night - the lonely ones - there were always the beautiful dolls for company.
No longer 'young' (though not yet thirty), no longer able to compete with the latest crop of teen girls, Anne commits a kind of temporal crime, an offence against authenticity, by creating a kind of temporary death within life (a life which is itself over). For Papa Heidegger, death may well reveal itself as that possibility which is one's ownmost, and not comporting oneself towards it might be an existential mischief punishable by twenty years hard idle talk at the coal-face of Being, but he never had to worry about wrinkles, did he?
[This post has officially broken every Dogmeme rule assigned to it (no women, no philosophy, no books, no complaining, no sex, no yearning for a world free of capitalism, no humour, no flippancy of any sort, no exclamation marks or rhetorical flourishes). Dogmeme08 has now been dissolved. All outstanding Dogmemes are henceforth cancelled]
