Demo - "Mixtape"

Trying to describe the events of "Mixtape" is like, and not at all accidentally, trying to describe a particularly vivid dream - criticism of the logic of the plot is beside the point. Nick wakes up to an empty bed and finds his girlfriend, Jess, lying dead in another room. On the floor beside her is a tape for Nick that he puts into his walkman. It's one half of a recorded conversation. The tape speaks to Nick, tells him to go outside, reminds him to bring a hat, responds to his comments and sometimes answers his questions. He is able to see Jess and tries to make this most of this last day together. Through the tape, Jess points out that Nick didn't ever really know her, that he only loved the idea of her, and that he needs to take more time to understand why she did what she did. Jess advises Nick to let go and to move on, but the story ends with Nick unsure about whether or not to throw the tape away.

Ugh. "Mixtape" doesn't flow with the thematic resonance of a dream-story, but without the character motivations to be discussed logically. The only way to take the story on its own terms is as an extended metaphor the distance between people, how that space can ultimately kill the relationship, and the paradoxical impossibility of wanting to be understood but remaining separate.

The problem with "Mixtape" is much like the problem with "What You Wish For." Wood & Cloonan want their characters' actions taken seriously in the context of the story, but it's difficult to do so when they are so obviously meant to stand in for something else. In "What You Wish For," Ken didn't just let his anger loose - he killed people. Although the text of "Mixtape" goes to great lengths to wear out the possible ways of saying that Jess killed herself without actually stating it, the fact remains that Jess commits suicide. There are no obvious wounds or vomit - though the cover shows blood none appears in the story itself. It's as peaceful a death as could be, almost as if it just happened on its own. I wonder about the ethics of portraying suicide in this way, but that's my hangup. In the story, Nick never seems upset, only slightly distraught at the conclusion when faced with the prospect of getting rid of the tape (which, of course, represents Jess). Given the muted reactions and emotions, and the dream-logic of the narrative, the suicide stands in for something else. This is a problem for me. The act of suicide is very difficult to deploy metaphorically. It has too many connotations to be controlled. It demands too affective a reaction. It is not an act that stands in for something else - it is an act that ends metaphoric possibilities rather than enabling them.

Jess is a more rounded character than Amy in "Stand Strong" or Kendra in "One Shot, Don't Miss" but she lacks definition. As readers, we know almost nothing about her other than she thinks she was a bit of a doormat for her boyfriend and feels as if he didn't understand her. That is it. That and the fact that she likes sundresses even in winter. The irony of the image of optimism contrasted with her suicide is only a gesture toward a personality, however. The potential contrast is never explored. She's a cipher.

Jess is a cipher quite deliberately - she is Nick's ideal. She contends that he doesn't know the emotions and desires that lie underneath the surface elements that attract him though his responses back her up somewhat, it may be that he just lacks the ability to articulate how he understands Jess as separate from him. Jess, for instance, asks Nick if he likes her because she wears cute sundresses or "becasue you can go to the bar with your friends and you know I'm home waiting for you." She asks if he likes the idea of Jess more than the "real" Jess. She demands an impossibility from Nick, illustrated to the reader by the utter denial of any information about Jess as a character. He, like the reader, has no access to the "real" Jess, if such a thing exists.

This is the emotional core of the story. She tells Nick that "in time, you'll understand, and appreciate what I'm saying. Take that time, remember me, and understand me." When, two pages later, she tells Nick to throw away the tape that stands in as a distillation of their relationship, Jess isn't being contradictory. Nick needs let go of Jess in order to mourn the loss of the relationship and understand why it ended. He can't do one without the other. However, it leaves Jess as an unknowable figure, one who Nick is asked to understand - a task for which the reader isn't equipped.

Again, though, the problem of Jess's suicide looms large. After she gently chides Nick for liking the idea of her more than her real self, Nick shows a bit of emotion. "So what, Jess, you think I don't like you so that's why you did what you did? Lame, Jess. That's like an afterschool special." The fact that Jess never reveals the reasons for which she took her life stands as evidence that Wood & Cloonan seem determined to keep this strange meditation on death and relationships from falling into the simple moral platitudes of an afterschool special. But, by using suicide metaphorically, they deny Jess's actions of any clear motivations. Did she kill herself or is that just a code for breaking up with Nick? Though the stereotype is that afterschool specials preach rather than try to understand, "Mixtape" doesn't seem interested in trying to understand suicide either. Jess is such a blank, and her act is so separated from consequence, that her death rings hollowly.

"Mixtape" seems to be, foremost, about the struggle for two people who love each other to understand each other. The ultimate impossibility of that, but the need to try. What is interesting, though, is how a relationship is constructed in "Mixtape" as precluding outside involvement. The tape and walkman insulate Nick from the world: he spends the whole issue wearing headphones. He speaks to a voice that no one else can hear, and no one notices. Other than Nick and Jess, there are only two faces that appear in the issue and they are both incidental background characters. No family is involved, no friends - though we hear that Nick apparently has some.

It's a bleak portrait of romance, though not without some poetic images. As Nick goes to throw out the cassette, the tape twines itself around him. The final two images are of Nick's hand holding the tape, unsure about letting it go, and Jess's legs as she rises above the city, the tape twisting up over her body. The connection is beautifully illustrated by Cloonan. This image of the tape coiling around Jess appears during her conversation with Nick at the point she asks if he likes her because of her dresses and her willingness to wait up for him. It could almost be blood streaming from her wrists, and it's one of the few links between her sadness and her death, though the dialogue one page later forecloses that possibility. The black tendrils are shown to emanate from the tape, further illustrating how it stands in for her. The dream-like quality of the story serves to allow these images to be considered outside of the rigid logic of plot dynamics. The images seem to suggest that the intangible connections, the ties that bind, are not so simply cut. Even after the end of a relationship, or a life. Though access to the "real" person may be forever denied, it is worth struggling to try to understand these bonds.

I'm sorry, but that is a crap use of suicide as a metaphor. The lack of emotional intensity in the issue, Nick's strange passivity, Jess's mournful pseudo-wisdom, grate on me in a way that no other story in Demo does. Jess, pardon my French, fucking kills herself and it's treated as a sad but ambiguously meaningful gesture. I'm not arguing that the story endorses Jess's decision to kill herself, but the story doesn't explore it at all. It's a means to enable Nick to listen to a tape and for Jess to ruminate on how he never understood the "real" her. There are limits to how far a metaphor will carry you, and the dream-like quality of "Mixtape" doesn't seem interested in exploring what those limits are. Rather, it seems content to make an obvious point dressed up in some shallow ambiguity.

In three weeks: "Breaking Up"