This Young Monster by Fox Charlie;

Author:Fox, Charlie; [Charlie Fox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4805260
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2017-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

The poor goth princess Francesca Woodman caught my ghostliness just right in plenty of her photographs, many of them self-portraits taken with preternatural elegance when she was still a teenager, too. To be a girl within Woodman’s private dreams means being an enigmatic creature: she spends shadowy days indoors with her double, she appears as a blurry wraith, bones gone to light, as she nuzzles a stuffed badger in a vitrine. Her silhouette appears, snow angel-like, creepily spread-eagled in powder on the floor. I may be present in these pictures in spirit – allow the double meaning of those words to flicker for a moment – since I did plenty of vanishing myself. (Was I the first non-fairy girl to feel her body vanish and reappear? Twinkle-toed, I did it long before that dumb cunt, Tinkerbell.) But in her desolate New York studio and elsewhere, Woodman produced shots that are homages, ranging between the oblique and the obvious, to my original adventures.

Wearing a plastic toyshop version of the Rabbit’s head, a naked dude, ripped as Mr Universe, waits for us at the door of a derelict house. This sinister pic, taken at an uncertain time between 1972 and 1975, is an adolescent girl’s erotic daydream, the Rabbit luring her into a (undead?) world of desires that lies darkly beyond the tangled weeds and filthy windows. She played around in a polka-dot dress, too, that picture from 1978, ‘Polka Dots’, shows her at nineteen, a Hanging Rock dame, bent in the gloom with a blurred hand to her ear as if listening to something buried, howling, in the wall. Strange to see myself so acutely embodied by a dead girl, even if it’s no exaggeration to say evidence of my unshakeable presence is everywhere (a rare fate for a child star, except for Shirley Temple, obviously) from Balthus’ enchanting vixens to the Looking-Glass Los Angeles surveyed in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001): ‘This is the girl’. Nor was Mr Carroll a stranger to these sensations himself, as he recorded in his essay ‘Alice on Stage’, writing about an actor who appeared in the first theatrical adaptation of my adventures: ‘To see him enact the Hatter was a weird and uncanny thing, as though some grotesque monster seen last night in a dream should walk into a room in broad daylight and quietly say, “Good morning.”’ Good morning, indeed. I was the most troublesome ghost in his head: ‘Still she haunts me phantomwise,’ he wrote, and I get a tickle of that feeling myself when I look back to see all those copycats chasing my shadow.

For Woodman, turning herself into me was a way to brood on the precariousness of the body and being: she became the phantom in the attic or she merged with the walls of a decaying house to hint at her own unheimlich interior. She could’ve directed a grungy downtown adaptation of the story, switching the potions for opiates, and had Nastassja Kinski play me – well, she

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