"Maybe she felt like she was not the, like, skinny, pretty girl...And then the next few movies she was thinner, blonde, you know, at MTV Awards and all sorts of things like that, and going out with Eminem and Ashton Kutcher... I think she felt the pressure to become a different sort of commodity to survive in show business, and I think it was awful."
Clueless director Amy Heckerling to blogger Scott Feinberg
The death of Brittany Murphy--kooky, adorable, and promising, then progressively emaciated and considered to be "troubled" in Hollywood--is a tragedy of social proportions. As the coroner's office prepares its report, the media speculates on the cause of death. The initial assessment that she died of "natural causes" only increased conjecture about how we might understand the passing of a 32-year old woman we may have felt we sort of knew. Murphy is said to have suffered from diabetes, an eating disorder, and habitual prescription drug abuse after a number of painful plastic surgeries. But ultimately the cause of death may be that she was young, female, and on the B-list in Hollywood.
It's hard for those of us who are not part of it to understand the culture of ruthless assessment, devaluation, and denigration that young women are subjected to when they enter into the Hollywood star and wanna-be-star system. Carrie Fisher's reminiscences of what it was like to be young and hot after she hit it big as Princess Leia in Star Wars--the coke, the parties, the fame--are the same as Drew Barrymore's tales of early, stratospheric stardom, and then rehab at age 12--except that Murphy never made the white-hot A-list like Fisher and Barrymore, or her peers Angelina Jolie and Alicia Silverstone. Murphy acted with the latter two and was every bit as impressive (in Girl Interrupted and Clueless) but never "broke out."
It has been suggested that this is because of her struggles with her weight and her drug use, which gave her a reputation as "erratic" and "difficult." Perhaps she caved to pressures not entirely unlike the ones her character Tai experienced in Clueless--a culture of harsh, mean girl hierarchies and unforgiving, nearly impossible-to-achieve standards of physical beauty and high-end designer wardrobes. But Hollywood is a little different from high school. In high school there is a ghost of a chance that the grown ups in charge will have your best interests in mind, and may even help you. Hollywood is a place where men in charge of studios sit around arguing that animated female characters in rated-G Disney movies should be more "fuckable" and telling already gaunt actresses to lose ten pounds.
One Oscar-winning actress I interviewed several years ago told me that, after playing a pregnant character, she received script after script for roles--all of them fat women. Yes, she assured me, those steering the ship are really that concrete when it comes to female movie roles. I'm told reliably of a known actress who appeared in a wildly popular series in the nineties who used to lock herself into rooms in order to not eat. And earlier in her career Gwyneth Paltrow famously quipped that the worst part of being an actress was always being hungry. Before you object, I've already heard the thesis that James Cameron likes strong female leads and I couldn't feel less placated. For most of us, an avatar isn't good enough. Jane Campion and Nancy Meyers--that's all very good. If you can clone them a hundred times, we might just get somewhere.
Are these young actresses victims, or are they complicit, when they turn to insane diets, cocaine use, and general self-hatred in the face of narrow standards that reduce them to slabs of movie meat? Does Hollywood attract unstable, narcissistic women without any core sense of self, or does it make them that way? Is it a little bit of both? Let's keep talking about it. Meanwhile, speculation like this, published in the Huffington Post, makes one's blood run cold:
"Murphy's mother told paramedics that her daughter suffered from diabetes. If true, this could have played into any body image problems as many young female diabetics use the dangerous practice of skipping insulin injections to control their weight."
Skipping your insulin injection to stay skinny. Just imagine the trailer: "In a world...where women are literally dying to be beautiful and famous..." And ask yourself, how might this movie end?
