Gabrielle #7 – Terrible Devourers
Obsessive desire and the freaks who feel it. Also: Leonardo DiCaprio's face circa 1996-1999.
Leonardo DiCaprio is staring at me and he is in pain. He’s always in pain, seems like. There are three A1 posters of him plastered across my bedroom walls – I’m around 8/9-years-old here – and he looks vaguely upset in all of them. I’ve covertly scrawled ‘let’s kiss’ in pencil on the back of one where he’s pulling an oversized grey jumper up over his mouth, but it hasn’t made a difference. He looks like he’s about to cry.
Evidently, that's the appeal. It’s the late 90s and Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for two things: being beautiful from every angle and tortured in every film. And, along with everyone else, I can’t get enough of him. It’s basic, but what can I say? God has yet to create a more perfect face than the one that man had between 1996 and 1999. A literal heart framed by unruly curtains and buttery highlights; a bottom lip groove – something you rarely see on celebs now because everyone has filler – that becomes its own paid actor whenever he jams an unlit cigarette against his bottom teeth; features so androgynous that, in the right drip, he could easily pass as a lesbian.
I probably don’t need to explain this to you. This is a figure who defined a decade in male beauty standards and induced a global sexual frenzy that Sherry Lansing, Paramount’s chairwoman in 1998, likened to peak Elvis. Professionally, Leo managed to shake off his brooding teen image and parlay the hype into a career as one of the most adept lead actors of the 21st century. Sexually, he’s curiously stunted, like he entered a Faustian bargain that gave him the world but trapped him in a state of boyish desirability while his body hardens and swells with age. A Greek tragedy set in Hollywood Hills.
Not that he’d be the first to act it out. There isn’t a sex symbol in history who hasn’t been at least partially obliterated by becoming an object of desire. Some die tragically young, some have chaotic affairs well into their 80s, some anal-and-airpods their way through a steady stream of 25-year-old blonde models. To each their own. What I’m saying is: much like Elvis, or Marilyn Monroe, or anyone whose charisma is so powerful it has to be referred to in supernatural terms like “something else,” I don’t think Leonardo DiCaprio had much say in how he was first received. Physical beauty enters the public domain like a work of art: without fixed meaning, shaped by the experiences, memories, knowledge, and prejudices of the observer.
Every kid runs through their share of fixations and, in retrospect, this one was probably quite short lived. It only sticks out because it was all-consuming and unpleasant, which bears some resemblance to how I experience desire now – not as a swooning sensation to be doodled out in gel pen, but as a state of physical distress. It’s more confusing when you’re young, obviously, because you have no fucking clue what’s happening. One minute you’re watching Hey Arnold! with a packet of Skips, the next you’re having a rage blackout because you sat on your foot weird.
What makes matters more confusing is that desire in young girls is seriously underestimated. The purity mapped onto them from the outside renders anything that runs counter to it abnormal, pushing universal feelings like desire and anger down into isolating experiences. When they do arrive, they burst out in hysterical ways. I was a shy and near-mute child by all accounts but the one time I did throw a tantrum was when Titanic came out and I was too young to go see it. There was new footage of Leo, three and a half hours of unseen Leo – billboards everywhere rubbing it in, news of it constantly screaming out of the TV – and it was being withheld from me for reasons I didn’t understand. I literally dropped to my knees in the middle of a shopping centre and howled because I couldn’t access it then and there.
The Simpsons tackles a similar thing in an episode where Lisa (roughly the same age as I would have been having this embarrassing fit) gets addicted to the Corey Hotline. At the start she’s fine, her normal self, laughing at Marge for having a crush on Bobby Sherman. By the end she’s clucking, shrieking impatiently at Maggie, unable to sleep because her will to live now rests entirely on calling a $4.95 per minute line to hear a heartthrob pictured in Non-Threatening Boys Magazine mumble words that rhyme with his name.
If it weren’t for social conditioning, falling to my knees in public is how I would respond to a devastating nude as an adult. So I can only imagine how disorienting it would be to experience a feeling like that for the first time. No priors, no context, no understanding of desire as an energy that hollows you out like a pack of wolves going to town on a carcass – just this incoherent urge that floods your brain like radio static. For most hyper personalities things go one of two ways, after that. Desire is either flung outwards in the direction of something specific; loud and almost threatening in nature (the essence of fandom). Or it’s turned quietly inwards, settling behind the eyes in the form of a remote darkness (the essence of the phrase “it’s always the quiet ones”).
In either case it’s destructive. The object of desire is stripped of their humanity, and the desiring party has their brain overtaken like they’re being Ratatouille’d by the most depraved rodent in Paris. Everyone gets eaten alive by fantasy. It’s like that Deleuze quote: “Even the most gracious of young girls is a terrible devourer, not because of her soul but because of her dreams.”
Titanic entered the household eventually on VHS and I ran it back until the tape wore out. It’s hard to explain why. Three and a half hours, several times a week, is a big commitment just to look at a dude. I’ve never gone in for traditional romances either, but I suppose Titanic was overwhelming in all the right ways. Strip away the crap dialogue and Celine Dion of it all and you’re left with a fairly gnarly series of plot devices: forbidden chemistry between a broke artist and a free-spirited woman who just tried to kill herself. Car sex. Threat of disaster. The triumph of nature over mathematics forcing imperially-minded Brits to experience hubris... Goes kinda hard on paper. Although it is basically the maritime version of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet – the aesthetically superior film in which Leo, wet throughout, broods and dies by some ethereal, nonviolent means like a woman of Victorian literature.
It’s the mix of desire and death that makes both films so alluring. Perhaps I’m projecting because I wanted to put Leo’s head in a jar and carry it around under my arm like a step ladder, but the driving force of each story is a desire so intense it becomes intolerable. It compels the characters to do insane things like fake suicide or fling themselves off a lifeboat to climb back aboard a sinking ship, because the prospect of being together in death is preferable to a guaranteed life in which the other’s presence is unknown. That level of mania has nowhere to go. It burns hot, like a fever, until it breaks.
It’s the most palatable, predictable, mass market version of the French tradition of l’amour fou – the crazed love – which is uniquely present in the work of Marguerite Duras, whose characters are always being consumed by strange desires or destroying themselves for love (responding to a question about why sex and death are always entwined for her, Duras, who often spoke in non-sequiturs, made three statements: “It's difficult to articulate. It's erotic.” / “I had a lover with whom I drank a lot of alcohol.” / “I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists.”). Speaking more explicitly on Duras’s treatment of eroticism and l’amour fou, the academic Jennifer Wicke explains: “It’s a bleak world view, the opposite of a lyrical text. It proposes a tragic end, because desire can’t be sustained. It will either turn into obsession and, thus, ultimately destroy its object, or it will see itself deflated by the very cruel contingencies of history, or death.”
When desire tips into obsession, there’s usually a degree of narcissism involved. As soon as someone becomes your ‘object’ the whole thing is about you. The ‘object’ is a reflective surface that only has the power it does because you perceive a) aspects of yourself in it, b) things you would like to have, or usually c) both. Teen heartthrobs are sensational to prepubescent girls because they play both knight and damsel at once. They embody typically feminine qualities – ugly crying, melodramatic declarations of love, familiarity with hair conditioner – while doing the hero’s work. Often the first time a girl will get see the full extremity of her emotions exhibited and given precedence is through a young man, which is mesmerising. In adulthood most people require less validation and covet more empirical things, like competence (being able to fix a toilet flush… highly eroticised in our ‘theory-pilled’ age), self-respect (nearing extinction), and driving a pick-up (I’m willing to accept this might just be a me thing).
It’s all fantasy, at the end of the day. It’s having a notion of what you stand to gain and never being able to get close. Even if you manage to jump the hurdle of your object being ‘world famous,’ you’ll still have to contend with the fact that what you want doesn’t actually exist ([Duras voice] “It's erotic.”). It’s just a sexy simulacra of stuff you want in life and hate about yourself, which is sort of helpful to know but doesn’t stop you wanting them to hit you with their car just so you have a reason to speak.
None of this is the same as simply finding someone hot, just to be clear. Like porn, lust in isolation is quite clinical – boring, almost. Got a charismatic walk and a great set of cum gutters do you? Sound. What’s that? Your arm to boob ratio goes dummy and t-shirts fall effortlessly on you like they used a blueprint of your upper body to design the hanger? Cool, I suppose that’s something I’ll turn over in my head for a few weeks. Even true love, love in practise not just in declaration, is comparatively clean cut. It’s a wonderful thing to just look at a person and think, for whatever reason, “hell yeah.”
Obsession is a hell fucking no. It’s too oblique. It creeps in through the cracks. Wherever there’s distance, delusion, deception, withholding, a centre that cannot hold… the erotic will come and fuck you up. That’s when you get the nausea of being corroded from the inside, like you’ve pounded four Red Bulls on an empty stomach. That’s when you start acting increasingly erratically until you reach a fever pitch where you’d gladly prostrate yourself across railway tracks for someone you can’t be sure would even text you in a crisis. And that has little to do with appearance. It’s because of all this that I once flew 3,000 miles to pursue someone without knowing what they looked like at all, but that’s a story for another time.
This had me chuckling hard.