Tox Report 68. A difficult woman

[Re-up] Not every woman gets a redemption arc

There’s no new issue of Tox Report this week as I’m on holiday. In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing new essays about the graveyard of lost neologisms and self-hatred as a form of feminine bonding. But for now, I’m re-sharing this issue originally from June 2022, when this newsletter was much smaller. (If you read this first time around, skip to the end for some brand new links.)

As you can possibly tell, I wrote this when I was in the thick of work on Toxic, and I was deeply interested in the question of who does or doesn’t get a reputational reassessment. It makes a good two-parter with a Tox Report from last year about Netflix’s unconvincing effort to mount a revisionist life of Anna-Nicole Smith — so why not read that next?

Finally! If you have a question for me about anything — the noughties, Lawrence from Felt, why I can’t stop writing about Videodrome, literally anything — please hit the button below to ask away, and I’ll answer them in a future Tox Report. Ask away!

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Emma Appleton and Louis Partridge in Pistol.

The reviews for Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols biodrama Pistol so far have been bad, and when mine comes out it isn’t going to even remotely shift the dial,¹ although I went in with a certain amount of hope. And one thing in particular that made me think this might be worth watching was the title of episode five: “Nancy and Sid”.

This is significant because the other major version of the Pistols’ story is, of course, Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. I haven’t watched Sid and Nancy for a very, very long time, but my recollection of it is that it’s a grossly romanticised telling of the relationship between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen — a relationship that ended with Vicious stabbing Spungen to death in room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea (he died of a heroin overdose while on bail).

In Cox’s film, this is portrayed as a suicide pact gone wrong. In fact, in the film Vicious tries to renege on the pact and only stabs Nancy after she attacks him for failing her. In other words: it’s a tragedy, and the real victim is Sid. But this is all supposition. What we do know is that Vicious was violent, both generally and specifically towards Spungen; that both were drug addicts; and that she was a prostitute as well as a groupie. She was only twenty when she was murdered, a sad traumatic end to a sad traumatic life.

So putting her name first made me think, in post-#MeToo style, Boyle might be trying to tell her story this time. Actually the Nancy of Pistol is another squeaky voiced nightmare, selfish and squalid and impossible to sympathise with. The show skips over the actual violence of her death and shows us a heartbroken Sid discovering her body under the sink. It was, after all, true love — the kind of true love that happens to end with a female corpse.

I hate this. I hate the fact that for so long Nancy was presented as the female face of punk, even though her main contribution to the music was fucking male musicians. I hate the recasting of violence as passion. I hate that they overlook how lonely she must have been as an American kid in London. I hate that representations like Cox’s and Boyle’s both glorify and diminish her, making her a willing sacrifice to male genius (genius being quite a large word to use about Vicious).

But I can see why there is no revisionist version of Nancy, because she was, objectively, terrible. She was an addict — something which, regardless of the substance, rarely promotes likability. She seems to have used sex only transactionally. She attached herself to the most aggressive man she could find, and she clung on until he killed her. People on the punk scene knew and liked him, and they didn’t know or like her, so there are scant accounts testifying to anything but her obnoxiousness.

Nancy is the kind of woman who is not just #MeToo-proof, but #MeToo-repugnant. She looked for danger and she ran towards it. It’s hard to unpick a “real” Nancy from the fictions I’ve consumed, and the defiant Courtney Love appropriation of her bottle-blonde look, but this is someone who at the very least made a lot of terrible decisions, and seems to have been excited by proximity to violence. She is a bad victim, and she’s still a victim.

I imagine her as a little like one of the women now posting their love for Johnny Depp, impervious to his admitted acts of violence towards Amber Heard (a headbutt, a kick) and his vicious texts about raping and murdering her. For these women, Depp’s actions are either proof that Heard provoked him, or evidence of a passionate nature that they would gladly prostrate themselves for. For some, the fantasy is of taming a wild masculinity; for others, it’s of proving their love through submission. Both are varieties of a depressing feminine masochism.

I think one of the weaknesses of #MeToo is that it doesn’t have a very strong explanatory mechanism for bad victims like Nancy (or Heard). It’s founded on an analysis that can explain sexual harassment and violence within power structures, but not why some women apparently confound aggression with love. It asks for absolute trust in women, and then collapses on contact with women who are not trustworthy

Addiction is, of course, a major confounding factor for impulse control and memory; so is the kind of brain damage caused by cumulative concussions; so is early experience of neglect or emotional abuse. This is a half-formed thought, but in other words, the more desperately some women need understanding — true understanding, not simply to be recast from the role of Lilith to the role of Virgin — the less equipped our dominant model for male violence is to provide it.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• For UnHerd: on Demi Moore’s horror movie The Substance, and female ageing as the ultimate monster. (The film itself is definitely too long but also a lot of fun — as I left the cinema I got caught up in a gaggle of teenagers who were so thrillingly appalled by what they’d just seen, one of them turned to me and asked if I was traumatised.)

• While I was reading the reviews for The Substance, I came across this Little White Lies essay about the “hagsploitation boom” from 2022. Pros: it defines a convincing trend. Cons: a sentence like “The best of horror doesn’t reinforce societal discriminations and we shouldn’t praise it when it does so, we should demand better” is the kind of tedious, hectoring anti-criticism that I will not be sorry to see fall out of fashion.

• Netflix has made a documentary about Prince and you’ll probably never get to see it because it contains serious and distressing testimony about his violence against women, as well as his undoubted genius (NYT).

• Fiona Harvey has won the first stage of her libel action against Netflix over her identification as Martha in Baby Reindeer (Variety). It’s possible that “this is a true story” will end up being among the most expensive five words ever published. But if they hadn’t been there, I do wonder whether I (and a lot of other people) would have found the show so compelling.

• All the allegations against Diddy (New York Magazine). Depressingly, reading this just makes me think about the probably inevitable expose of some contemporary equivalent in ten or fifteen years from now.

• So many ways to honour Maggie Smith’s legacy, but why not start with Kenneth Williams’ anecdote about going bra shopping with her?

1. And indeed it did not.