Every masochist in the world lives on my tongue. They writhe and seethe, entangled in a hunger for pain only I can quell. They salivate at the thought of me saying the wrong thing, hurling stone words against my glass reflection, cursing in spite of my heart beating red blood and promises of being kind. The lies I tell, for them. I wish to be someone with compassion for myself and others – let them starve for just a while longer. But instead I find myself wishing for a smaller body; a softer voice; a brain devoid of the ability to ruminate over the things that have hurt me most. The masochists feast while I binge-think about the parts of myself I can never change or am too afraid to try to change. In my head, all of it: but if the worst of me was on display for everyone to watch between bites of popcorn and whispers of “bitch,” I would watch myself unravel, too. The self-hatred many of us share, despite the various perpetuations and increments of it, holds us hostage to the mirror of our own repressions.
All of this is to say: I’ve been practicing something akin to “self love.” I’ve also been watching a lot of Black Mirror.
Every summer, I tend to hyperfixate on some form of media that resonates with whatever version of myself I am trying to understand (or hide from so I won’t have to understand). The summer following my fourteenth birthday, it was me (severely depressed, dissociated from my body, huddled under a blue blanket from dusk to dawn with bagel crumbs on my sheets) binge watching The Vampire Diaries and, subsequently, The Originals. Both of these were a form of escapism from my own lost state of mind more than anything else. The me I was last year – a frequent traveler, daily walker, girl who spent her mornings reading short stories before clocking in to a job she hated – watched Gilmore Girls with her grandmother. I could never make it past season seven, when Rory’s ambition and naivety about the world began to, just like mine at the time, fade away. Now I am twenty-one, and aware. Of myself and the ways in which I don’t fit into the only world I will live in. It is because of this awareness of mine that I crave the unveiling of the dark, untouched subterranean of the self (my self) and this 21st century hellscape we are trying to create some beauty out of. I want the curtain to fall. I want anger and surrender to be birthed from unearthed suppressions.
I got what I wanted when I watched “Joan Is Awful.” In this dystopian meta-commentary on Netflix by Black Mirror, Annie Murphy plays green blazer-wearing corporate girlboss Joan, who, like the episode title suggests, is supposedly awful. She thinks her boyfriend can’t cook, has to fire one of her best workers at her Silicon Valleyesque tech job, kisses her ex in a dark bar right after admitting to her therapist she misses being with someone who knows how to fuck her. Craving spice in her dishes and the bedroom set her up for her downfall in this vanilla reality when she discovers a show on “Streamberry” called “Joan Is Awful.” In the show’s show (and eventually the show within this show, where Cate Blanchett plays a Joan), Salma Hayek – or at least the digital likeness of Salma Hayek Streamberry used – is a slightly bitchier version of Joan who does everything the real Joan (Annie Murphy’s Joan) did that day. Annie’s Joan, her bland boyfriend, the woman she fired, the neighbors she was once friendly with, her scarf-wearing therapist, the receptionist she vented to at the tech job, the ex-boyfriend: everyone watched Joan be awful, and started to believe it themselves.
I think about every awful thing I’ve done. Which ones were the worst? There were the fights, both physical and verbal, I had with my younger siblings that I can only half-remember but know I regret. There was the note I scrawled to a boy on the bus, telling him to “SHUT UP” after not leaving my friends and I alone for three days (how dare he want to draw with us). He never found out it was from me. Nobody found out the reason why he arrived home in tears that day. There was jealousy and rage. Lying to friends’ faces and abandoning loyalty. Many sins. There was the starvation and blade pressed to thigh done to the self. I am more critical of my own awful things than I will ever be to anyone else’s. This is one of the things that makes me me, besides a love for coffee, forest green, not brushing my hair, the moon. Which brunette actress would play me in the show about my awfulness? I hope they wear green, too.
“Joan Is Awful” gets weird, fast. Besides that being one of the reasons I love this episode so much, it also serves as the reason why I want to break down this episode / myself into different segments – and if you end up liking my approach to this analysis, I’m down to do more Black Mirror pieces. Comment your favorite episode. I have many.
(And I’m a Virgo. I’m all planplanplan; divise/divide/conquer. Another element of my awfulness unveiled).
MAIN CHARACTER SYNDROME
POV’s, playlists packed with Cigarettes After Sex, bucket lists and recording yourself dancing in the rain: what we’ve done to pretend to be who we say we are. There’s been a real main character revolution since the dusk settled over 2020, where most of us lost ourselves and our ability to be a “real” person. We all watched Tiger King and baked too much banana bread (right? Tell me I’m not the only one. Tell me I'm not different. Tell me I’m not special). So when the opportunity came to go back outside and individualize ourselves once more, we did so with vigor. We were all desperate to be the main characters in our own lives again. But aren’t characters in shows and people in real life?
Joan, poor, sexless Joan, suffered deeply from a lack of main character syndrome. She confesses to her therapist her troubles; how she feels like she isn’t in charge of her own life. In this story, she fears not being the main character – because if she isn’t, then who is she?
Everything that follows Joan’s therapy session – the kissing of the ex-boyfriend, discovering her show on Streamberry, her boyfriend and neighbors and coworkers seeing Salma Hayek reenact her infidelity – leads to Joan spiraling out of control. Despite getting exactly what she desired before, which is to say she became the main character everyone fixated on within her life and the show about her life, she panics. Everyone recognizes her blonde money pieces. Everyone knows what she’s done. Everyone will know what she is going to do. Joan’s past, present, and future belong to the big screen, where her awfulness is dissected over dinner. Her house becomes her only place of refuge – until she turns on her tv.
I wanted to be many things as a child, but being known was always among them. As a tiara-wearing four-year-old, being a queen seemed right for me. Even then I knew the rules of hierarchy, how the princess’ power waged less than the older woman before her. I grew up; I metamorphosed through future selves until I emerged as my one true self. Teacher, lawyer, politician. Then, finally, writer. I want to write. I want to be known for what I write. I do, and I will.
There is a danger in this desire of mine. By committing myself to my craft both as a career and as an identity, there is no separation between the mistakes I make as a person and the narratives I compose as a writer. If people hate me, they have every reason to hate my work. If people hate my work, they have the means to hate me. But I am my own spectacle. I am my own means to an end. I accept myself as both writer and awful girl. I am stubborn, a zealot when it comes to defending my personal & political beliefs. I am a wrench without my morning solitude and coffee. I need cleanliness, silence, time away from the world. And I am always the first to judge – myself, and then others. It is not something I even have to conjure the energy for; the flaws come with ease. They are mine first and the world’s second.
For Joan, not being the main character in her own life has led to the opposite happening. Because she does not recognize or reconcile with the “awful” parts of herself, she is unable to cope with the sudden coalescence between Joan as person and Joan as (main) character. What she did in the dark is exposed in the spotlight of her show, where every regret becomes a soundbite. She is what the camera follows. When Joan realizes this, she cannot cope. And because she signed those Terms & Conditions, there’s no *legal* way out of her newfound stardom. Joan doesn’t accept Joan, and neither does the audience. To accept ourselves for our own awfulness is to know who we are when the curtain falls.
TO BE A WOMAN IS TO PERFORM
We’ve heard it all before. We’ve seen it all before. And yes, we’ve done it all before. The performance of gender is inescapable, even for Joan.
Joan as main character is insufferable on the screen. Joan as woman knows this. She understands how the public perceives her human awfulness – so she decides not to cower away from it. Unable to stop Streamberry from creating their show, she allows herself to give them a show. Forgoing shame, Joan dresses up in a cheerleader outfit with a lipstick phallus on her forehead to commit a rather indecent act in a church (and if you want to know the specifics of how she desecrated this space of worship, watch the episode. But don’t eat while doing so). If everyone believed she was awful, then Joan wanted to present her audience with something truly awful to gawk at. More than this, though, Joan’s act of rebellion was borne out of a need for symbiosis with herself, or, rather, the woman performing as herself. In her mind, if her reputation had to suffer, so too did Salma Hayek’s.
This is the most deliberate act of performance Joan takes throughout the show, as she is aware of the gaze, both male and female, watching her by the time she enters the church. It was not, however, the only performative act she took. When her boyfriend, Krish, serves her a congealed bland breakfast mess, she closes her eyes and spews out false praise. At the office, Joan gives a rehearsed speech to the employee she fires, leaving her with a touch on the shoulder and an empty apology. For the ex-boyfriend Mac, a single kiss permits her to play into his fantasy of running away together. Joan snaps out of it long enough to walk away from him and go home, where Krish is waiting for her with more food she’ll pretend to enjoy while he discovers “Joan Is Awful.” Her performance as woman becomes performance as main character. Both are seen as real, which is exactly what women are taught to accomplish as children. If they can’t see your displeasure, then it must be pleasure you are feeling. If you aren’t unhappy, you must be happy.
For years, I decided to be kind rather than honest. I knew truth carried more power than sentimentality, but I didn’t trust myself to wield such power. I settled for betraying myself to please others, which earned me praise for being “nice”; “sweet”; “a girl’s girl”; “chill.” Men thought me to be malleable – since I didn’t show much of my own interests or personality, they attempted to impose their own on me. If they were sports fanatics, I dredged up what knowledge I had from playing basketball to keep the conversation going. If they were passionate about music, I listened to their perfectly curated playlists for hours. If they bragged about the animals they killed, I sat with my hands folded in my lap, silently. This is how I was liked best by them, quiet & docile; something they could project pieces of themselves onto. I believe it to be my hidden stubbornness that prevented me from latching onto an arm I knew couldn’t hold all of me.
I felt the need to perform even with the women in my life. While writing this, I found an old video of myself in the ancient treasure chest of “Snapchat Memories” many of us used in highschool. In the video, which I remember sending to a friend at the time, I talk about a situation I had with someone I didn’t get along with at work. My words at the end are what I found to be most important about this now entirely unimportant occurrence: “I deserve an Emmy for how well I pretended to get along with them. Nothing’s changed between us, but she’s acting like something has.”
And therein lies the duality of gender performance. On one hand, we perform to avoid conflict and maintain a false sense of security within our relationships. If I had been more honest with my coworker and NOT pretend we were friends, I would have saved myself a lot of unnecessary annoyance and stress. But the me I was then would rather have a false friendship than an honest conversation.
On the other hand, we perform because we feel a need to. Often this need is derived from that promise kept buried within women’s bodies to never create fires – only put them out. What I mean is we are seen as nurturers, the ones who heal and fix what was broken by others. But to start conflict ourselves in the name of something greater? This goes against the grain of gender perpetuated by (patriarchy, capitalism, leaders of the supposed “free world”... choose your perpetrator). So instead of telling our boyfriend we don’t like his food, we smile and tell him – and ourselves – it’s delicious. We perform for the benefit of those watching us, much like Joan did when she went to the church to perform for the show, and for ourselves. If we tell ourselves we like something or someone long enough, we start to believe it. The performance becomes the self – or the self consumes the performance. We become who we say we are.
To be a woman is to choose which performance we want to put on: the one we are born to do, or the one where we crash a church wedding with a smile on our face.
IT STARTS WITH THE SELF. THE REST IS META.
Towards the end of “Joan Is Awful”, Joan and Salma Hayek meet in real life to develop a plan to stop the show from running. Joan is tired of her life being a bizarre reality tv nightmare and Salma doesn’t want her digital likeness to do all the awful things Joan is making her do. So they break into Streamberry’s headquarters and watch the girlboss creator of the show getting interviewed by a journalist. The girlboss reveals the company possesses something called a “quantum computer”, which is basically AI on steroids. It will generate a version of “Joan Is Awful” for every Streamberry subscriber. Everyone’s awfulness will become everybody’s entertainment.
“Why awful?” the journalist asks.
Girlboss answers: “When we focused on [people’s] more weak or selfish or craven moments, it confirmed their innermost fears and put them in a state of mesmerized horror. Which really drives engagement.”
Engagement, as in watching, rewinding, viewing, dissecting, divulging, devouring the digital. We become so worried about becoming the show we have to keep watching the show. We detach ourselves from engaging – touching, feeling, playing, making mistakes, doing awful things – in our real lives.
What the girlboss says is true. If, let’s say, Nina Dobrev (or Alexandra Daddario? Jena Malone? Emma Watson? I’m open to suggestions of who would possess my sharp tongue on camera) were to suddenly appear on my Netflix home page underneath the title “Alexandra Is Awful”, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I would press play and watch the horror unfold. What is worse: to know how awful you are, or to not know how awful you can be? Paralyzed by the simulacrum of self, I would stream my own downfall, unable to say I know what’s coming.
The ending of “Joan Is Awful” goes deep into the meta-verse: when Annie Murphy’s Joan destroys the quantum computer, it’s revealed that she, too, is just playing a Joan. She’s not the real Joan. The real Joan is an ordinary corporate worker being secretly filmed by Streamberry, The Office style. Every choice the real Joan made is one Annie Murphy’s Joan made, and then Salma Hayek’s, Cate Blanchett’s, etc etc etc. There’s a lot to be said here about Annie Murphy’s revelation of her false personhood as Joan – will versus freedom, avatar autonomy, performing for establishments of surveillance as an act of survival – but I think the Terms & Conditions, of our lives and the entities we sign our rights away to, cover most of it.
Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. I don’t want to add to this effect by incorporating another media reference, but what Fight Club says is true for the Joan’s and their awfulness. Every performance by a Joan was based on a performance by another Joan. No one knew the false parameters of the reality we witnessed until another reality was unveiled. Ctrl + V = another Joan being awful.
It all starts with hating one person. Typically ourselves. From there, we either perform to cover up the awful parts of ourselves through dishonesty, or we embrace it all to spite those who agree – we are awful! When Annie Murphy’s Joan destroys the quantum computer, she gives power back to the original Joan. The original Joan is arrested for breaking & entering and destroying the computer, but she doesn’t care. She is free! The episode ends with her and Annie Murphy at a coffee shop, where Joan’s ankle monitor flashes red before the credits roll. The weight of being free was worth more to Joan than the weight of any device the legal system could strap on her. When she first discovered her show, she couldn’t turn away from herself on screen. She watched in horror, as we all would have done. By the time the last episode rolled, Joan gained what she never could in the show: acceptance. The truth is easier to swallow when you’re the one holding the pill.
This episode of Black Mirror changed the way I view myself. In the mirror, in the car, talking to people I don’t particularly vibe with at work, getting ready for a night out, doing something I shouldn’t be doing with someone I shouldn’t be with. Who am I? (Exactly this). Who was I afraid to be? (Exactly this). I never question if I’m awful anymore. I already know I am. Because I have reconciled with this truth, there is no reality in which I don’t understand myself. To engage with the self as opposed to performances of the self is freedom. Don’t touch grass because someone told you to, touch grass because you miss the way the blades kiss your bare feet. Wear the lipstick because you like the way you look in it. Watch “Joan Is Awful” because you want to. Not because I’m trying to convince you to. Be awful, because even if you don’t, someone is going to believe you are.