When I was a kid, my best friend’s parents had one of those huge Time-Life photo books. I became obsessed with it. It was very disturbing stuff and I was drawn to it with a queasy fascination. I was 9, 10, 11 years old and some of those pictures – the most famous pictures of the 20th century – were NOT fit for child viewing.
There was the Buddhist monk on fire. Holocaust photos. A line of people kneeling by a huge open grave, with a firing squad behind them. Horror. The famous photo from Vietnam of the guy pointing a gun at a man, and it’s the moment just before firing. I’m an adult and I’m traumatized by that photo. The “napalm girl.” The unforgettable picture of the woman who jumped off the Empire State Building, landing in a car below, perfectly placed on her back, tidy and trim in her gloves and suit and lipstick, like she was asleep. I was so haunted by this photo, I cannot even tell you. I could not get this woman out of my mind. Every time I was at my friend’s house, I couldn’t resist. I had to go look at it. The car was crushed. The woman was perfect, beautiful, eyes closed. She was like Sleeping Beauty. (Sheila. Put the book down. Go play dodgeball and get your Keds and Toughskin jeans all dirty.) But I would close my eyes and see the expression on that Vietnamese man’s face right before he was killed.
Clearly the book made a huge impression on me.
One picture really grabbed me. I was drawn to it like I was drawn to the suicide photo. I would look at it as deeply as I could, trying to understand it. And I’m not sure, still, what it was I sensed. I was just a child. A girl stands in the ocean, long blonde hair, arms outstretched, wearing a white shirt with the word JESUS and a heart on the back.
There was some caption about the Jesus movement and all the counterculture kids running away to join communes, cutting all ties with their middle-class imperialist corporate-pig parents.
I didn’t get it, but I vaguely understood the concept and it scared me. Who were these kids? Where did they go? Weren’t their parents worried?
Again: Sheila. Go outside. Hang upside down on the jungle gym. Fall off and knock your tooth out. Do anything else.
For whatever reason, I was so struck by this woman in the ocean. I wondered about her life. Had she run away? Was she okay? Where did she live?
Ironically: the picture shows her in a state of bliss. But I felt anxious looking at it. This is not retrospect talking. It’s one of my most vivid childhood memories. This book and those two photos, in particular.
Cut to 2014.
I haven’t thought about Jesus Freak Lady since I was 4 feet tall, wearing scuffed Keds, a Star Wars T-shirt, with a battered baseball glove in my backpack. I’m years away from that book in 2014. I go to a screening of Inherent Vice. I am absolutely in love with the movie from the first second. I am in heaven.
Then comes this moment:
And it all came rushing back, and I knew EXACTLY who she was. I knew EXACTLY Paul Thomas Anderson’s inspiration. Nobody can tell me different. And even if he admitted to it later in an interview that I haven’t heard, I clocked it all on my own. I love it when that happens.
It’s part of what happens with memory and how connections are made in the unconscious and the connections are yours, because they come from your experience, and you bring all those memories to bear when you’re immersed in a work of art. The calling up of those memories is PART of the experience.
Even though that book seriously disturbed me, and I could not get the image of piles of bodies in concentration camps out of my mind, and I was haunted by that peaceful Sleeping Beauty suicide (“why????” I agonized as a kid, staring at her peaceful face), I’m not sorry I found it. It helped me enter the world.
This brings us back to Inherent Vice. When I was a child, I kept hoping that Jesus girl was okay. I didn’t know why the photo made me anxious and I didn’t question it. All I knew was I looked at her, and I felt like she was floating untethered from something, that she was lost.
When I saw Inherent Vice decades later, I thought of that photograph. When the final moment of the film came … I knew. Back then, I was picking up on something. The darkness flickering on the periphery of the Age of Aquarius.
9-year-old me sensed something back then. I was right to be worried.
I wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson felt the same way.
Footnote
In case you don’t know the photo, here is Evelyn Francis McHale, dead from jumping off the Empire State Building in 1947.
Here is a fascinating 2009 article – which I read avidly at the time. Incredible investigative journalism there. Her suicide note is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.
This post was a whole journey. Thanks Sheila.
I had been wanting to write about that Jesus photo and Inherent Vice for a while! Put up a thread on Twitter but then wanted to “finalize” it here.
I love to make these connections.
Thanks for reading!
Hi Sheila
I saw the photograph od the lady on that car at 12 years old, and it made feel so “grown up”. It was just like someone put her to sleep on the roof of the car, the broken metal like a wrinkled bed.
Another story about a suicide lady involves an actress and I can’t look at the letter H of the Hollywood sign on movies or documentaries without thinking about her, Peg Entwistle, poor girl. Also similar last note.
c –
// and it made feel so “grown up”. //
I had the same feeling! I looked at it and knew the world was filled with mystery and darkness and things I didn’t understand – but that I would someday. It was a disturbing sensation since I was so little but I can’t say I’m sorry I had it.
and yes – Peg Entwistle! Karina Longworth covers that incident in her book on Howard Hughes. It’s haunting.
Thanks for your comment!
Haunted by images. I get that, I think.
The darkness you mention–I often sense that undercurrent in movies made in the 60’s and early 70’s, and it’s in these images, too. One of the films that have stuck with me the longest is the Woodstock documentary, because of the interviews that are included. Some of those kids broke my young heart, and like you, I didn’t know why.
Thank you, Sheila.
Barb – yes! The Woodstock doc is a perfect example. Everyone is so lost, and their “utopia” is full of predators and everyone’s on so many drugs who can tell what’s real anyway? They’re not clicking INto something, they’re checking OUT of something.
Now who knows – Jesus lady may be perfectly fine. I know nothing about her! But the photo (imo) is a good one because it evokes something larger than what it shows – and I picked up on it. The caption helped too. It wasn’t just a girl standing in the ocean. She was part of a “movement.”
I need to track down a copy of this book.
Got here by way of the Paul Thomas Anderson ‘films that I love’ piece…don’t you love the internet sometimes? I was permanently and deeply impressed as a child by that Best of Life book as well. The photo of poor Evelyn was definitely one of the ones I’ve never been able to forget. For me the most unforgettable remains the one where this grinning fool of a kid is clubbing a fox to death, while surrounded by a bunch of grinning fools of adults. I can’t tell you how sorry I feel for that poor fox! And much the same as you suspect that Paul Thomas Anderson was influenced by the Jesus Freak, so do I believe that the Simpsons’ Whacking Day episode was inspired by the poor foxes.
Keep up the good work!
Roger T Shrubber
Just read that the Simpsons episode was in fact inspired by something else (Rattlesnake round ups). My bad. Probably should have researched that one first!
Once a work of art is out there, it’s up to us to interpret it. Or the associations you make might not be deliberate on the part of the filmmaker/creator – but it’s still valid. I don’t know if PTA was influenced by that pic – but I’d put money on it!!
Roger – hey, thanks! Nice to hear from someone who also remembers that book and has vivid memories of it. I was too young to understand the context – but I didn’t need the context. I just knew life was difficult and violent and REALLY scary.
It’s kind of wild to me that the Jesus Freak had an impact on me – because if you look at it, the image is rapturous and peaceful, unlike many of the other photos. But I really remember being a little uneasy about it. What could I have been picking up on??
I hadn’t thought about that pic in years and then that shot in Inherent Vice brought it all back.
I think I blocked out the foxes. Ugh. It sounds awful.