Alexandra Kleeman’s Not-So-Distant Dystopia
“This is the girl,” a character thinks to himself on the
first page of Alexandra Kleeman’s latest, Something
New Under the Sun, as he watches what turns out to be a paparazzi video of
a blonde actress snapping, á la
Britney Spears, under the pressure of surveillance. That this phrase will make
most readers think of David Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland
Drive, a movie about delusion in which terrible things happen to an
actress, is presumably no accident. This novel, a Hollywood satire that is also
a profoundly unsettling work of sci-fi eco-horror, certainly has Lynchian
moments, a familiar air of Los Angeles menace. The zen koan–like repetition of the phrase “this is the
girl” in Lynch’s film, always in reference to a young star who is fated to be
famous, is designed to help us see that “the girl” is not and has never been
one person, but a role filled by a series of hot babes with outsize dreams. The
actress in the paparazzi video in Something
New Under the Sun, Cassidy Carter, is 26 years old and, because women in
the industry are seen to age in dog years, already a tired veteran. She is a
former child star, an insurance liability, a diva, very jaded, and continuously
underestimated, so that she is not a million miles away from several real-life figures—Lindsay
Lohan, say, or Miley Cyrus, or the aforementioned Spears—who have at one time
or another been chewed up and spat out by the publicity machine. The man watching the video is Patrick, a novelist whose work
is being adapted for a film that Cassidy Carter will appear in, and a
non-Hollywood civilian who is out of touch enough with celebrity news that he
has never seen “the girl” before. “In a face rigorously conditioned to be
beautiful,” he thinks, observing Cassidy furiously upending a whole bottle of
detergent on the man behind the camera, “ugly feelings come as a violation of
basic principles.” Ugly feelings, as he is about to learn, are not unheard of
in the movie industry, even if they are usually shown off camera. Somewhat
naïve about the position he will occupy in the production, he is vastly
disappointed to discover himself working as a glorified P.A., driving Cassidy to
and fro at her command as the sweltering L.A. landscape routinely catches on
fire all around them. Water, in what we are led to presume is near-future
California, has been replaced by a factory-engineered substance called WAT-R, conveniently
provided at a cost by an enormous corporation and available in variations with
banal, sinister names like “WAT-R Extra,” “WAT-R Pure,” “WAT-R Wildly Wet,”
“WAT-R Misty Morning Dew,” “WAT-R Kids,” and so on. A mysterious illness,
something like dementia but not quite, has been surfacing in young Californian
people, zombifying them until they become brain-dead enough to forget to blink.
Whether or not these two developments are linked is something I will leave
mysterious, although if you have already read a novel or seen a film that might
be described as “dystopian,” or if you have recently glanced at the news and
noticed how enormous corporations treat the general public, it is possible to
guess.Cassidy admits to thinking of her famous, perfect features
as “a layer of Cassidy-shaped armor, the real person beginning a few
millimeters down.” She is so beautiful that Patrick, who is nominally a
professional writer, is rendered inarticulate by their first meeting: “Her hair
like a doll’s,” he notes, taking inventory, “and her face also like a doll’s.” (When
he sees her on the screen, he is reminded of “his daughter, or is it a
combination of his daughter and his wife?”—a funny and depressing joke about
what 40-year-old men might look for in a famous, sexy actress.) Real and
ostentatious beauty trumps most things, maybe in part because it is not built
to last—like a melting glacier or an animal on the cusp of going extinct, a
doll-like face has a built-in expiry date.Something New Under the Sun is a story about blatant self-deception,
a skill as essential to surviving in the hostile, rotting modern world as it is
dangerous.What begins as a black comedy about movie stars and mortals
quickly turns into a novel about the endemic squandering of finite, valuable
resources of all kinds, from pretty girls to fossil fuels. Something New Under the Sun is, too, a story about blatant self-deception,
a skill as essential to surviving in the hostile, rotting modern world as it is
dangerous: the actress’s belief that she is not like all the other actresses who
have been swallowed up and then forgotten; the writer’s belief that his
literary, semi-autobiographical novel will be adapted with dignity and care
when it is turned into a mainstream popcorn movie; the personal assistants’
belief that their menial jobs continue to have meaning even when the world
around them is quite literally on fire; the public’s belief that a corporation
would not allow them to drink or eat something that might not do them any good.The fake, in Kleeman’s California, has finally superseded actual
nature, so that nature—long-abused and overlooked, marginalized by the
relentless march of commerce—has no choice but to fight back. Patrick’s wife, Alison, who once caused scandal in their suburb by experiencing a public nervous
breakdown, is the novel’s voice of reason, in the sense that she has no
delusions about the imminence of the apocalypse. One night, having worked
herself into a frenzy picturing dying whales and burning forests, she walks out
onto the family’s front lawn and begins digging, ripping handfuls of the sod
out of the ground “with a sound like hair being ripped from scalp” in an
attempt to let the garden grow back into something wild; some time later, she
departs with their young daughter, Nora, for a commune in which
pro-environmentalist hippies live ethically off the land. She wonders,
pragmatically and not totally unhappily, whether the commune’s purpose in the
face of climate change “is not to pay tribute to all this planetary loss, but
to sort and codify it … to keep the end within sight, but make it feel livable.” Such a consideration is less science-fiction than it is nakedly factual, making
the instances in which Alison thinks about the future some of the most
frightening passages in Something New
Under the Sun. She shows what happens when a person does not, as the patron
saint of doomy stories about L.A. once famously put it, tell themselves stories
in order to live—the truth about our planet and its future is so bleak that to
acknowledge it can make a person sound insane, like a conspiracy theorist
rather than a realist. As a writer, Alexandra Kleeman has traditionally excelled at
satirizing the relationship between the individual, or the individual’s body,
and the mores and technology of the future; if Something New Under the Sun resembles anything aside from Kleeman’s
own previous work, it is a movie novelization of Cronenberg’s 2014 Maps to the Stars as written by Alissa
Nutting. “Some people, a select but growing group, have evolved the ability to
perceive money as a natural extension of their other sensory systems,” an
assistant on the film set theorizes, a particularly Kleemanian touch in its
suggestion of the merging of biology and capitalism. Similar themes appeared in
her 2017 debut novel, You Too Can Have a
Body Like Mine—cults, commercialism, the marketing of sinister products
that may or may not have dangerous properties, et cetera. In that book, a game show called That’s My Partner! saw players “sent into a pitch-dark room in
which a number of completely naked people waited in the blackness, one of whom
was their loved one. The clock would start, and then they would have three
minutes to grope everyone they could get their hands on. When they found the
person whose body they thought was their partner’s, they had to hold on to them
and drag that person out of the room and onto the studio.” If the individual
they chose was not their partner, the game’s rules decreed that they would part
ways permanently, forfeiting the game and ending up alone in one fell swoop. It
was the perfect conceit for a science-fiction novel set in the near future: close
enough to what exists to feel entirely plausible, but dark enough to give the
definite impression of a downhill cultural slide.With that detail, Kleeman joked about the fundamental
interchangeability of human bodies, the tremendous gulf between how much we
think about the flesh we move around in and its actual significance and
specialness. (You Too Could Have a Body
Like Mine is, in addition to being sci-fi, also in some sense a novel about
disordered eating.) Cassidy Carter, in one of the loveliest lines in Something New Under the Sun, calls
herself “an individual who ha[s] clawed her way out of the realm of the
temporary and into the sunshine of the real and lasting.” It is another
self-delusion, overlooking the inconvenient fact that almost no celebrity
becomes iconic enough to be “real and lasting” to the generations that succeed
them, and the even more inconvenient fact that in this version of the world,
there may be no more generations to remember movie stars at all. Her attempts
to copyright her perfect nose job will not do much to ensure that anybody can
recall what Cassidy Carter’s perfect nose job actually looked like when the
world is underwater, or on fire, or some combination of the two. Far more
likely is that Cassidy will stumble her way out of the pitch-darkness, after an
undignified and frightening period spent being groped by perfect strangers, and
discover that her life’s work had no meaning—that instead of open arms, she is
met with catastrophe, finding herself ushered offstage into the wings not with
a bang or with applause, but with a whimper of regret.
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