Tearing the Veil
The Law and the Black Swans of Hollywood
Spoiler alert: The conclusion of the film Black Swan is revealed below.
Dear Reader,
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. taught that the gold standard of American legal practice was to play the secular prophet. According to Holmes, good lawyers would survey the circumstances of client matters under the law and accurately predict the future for them. And good judges would invent rules that would be so reasonable that they never would be unsettled by future courts or legislatures, making them tantamount to prophecies by judicial fiat or what is now called “manifestation.”
In American literature, Joan Didion candidly embodied Justice Holmes’s ideal. By accurately disposing of the Hippies’ hypocrisy with prognostications of American doom, Didion became rather glamorous in her day. Some still liken Didion to a sphynx for her peculiar way of combining mystery and violence into prose that gave Americans a sense of certainty in an uncertain world.
But such self-soothing prophecies were always unsettled by Hollywood’s black swans. Black swans are world changers we do not, or cannot, foresee. They remind us that our dooms are not set in stone. No matter how dark the clouds on the horizon look, there is hope for us still.
But hope is far more uncomfortable than certain doom, or at least that is the lie at the bottom of our hearts. In fact, America designed its judiciary systems upon the Puritanical lie that we can trust our own innate sense of pleasure and pain, rather than “the thing with feathers” Emily Dickinson was talking about. Obviously, our dogmatic trust in our emotional memory of the past over our hopes for the future has led to contradictory results.
Even in the full light of Lili Anolik’s renascence of Eve Babitz’s life and works, Americans appear to keep choosing Didionic horrors over Babitzian felicitations. The apparent fate of Babitz as intentionally forgotten and Didion as beloved, is a soft, society-wide proof of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Nobel Prize winning thesis. I.e., the general preference Americans have for Didion over Babitz appears to show that human beings do not have the inherent capacity to remember their own pains and pleasures accurately.
In fact, Eve Babitz addressed this paradox when she commented upon the miracle of Hollywood’s self-enchantment in the face of America’s “ever-present fear[s] of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders).”[1] Babitz constantly reframed our feelings of doom, expressed as distrust for the Santa Ana winds, worry over natural disasters, or fear of random violence, into a morality play about the impermanence of human life in Hollywood, California. In her way, Babitz opened a path for future black swans to tell us about a so-called “beauty in the breakdown” in order to help us hold the line against Joan Didion’s doom prophecies.
Black swans can do this by simply being themselves, in Babitz’s words, “freakish, beautiful outsiders.”[2] At their best, a black swan can inspire the future by allowing their audiences to tear the secular veil of American society; to see what lies underneath popular prejudices and beliefs monetized by Didionic prophets. But there is a dark side to this tale.
The fate of humanity misinterpreting its pains and pleasures in the short game, probably best captured in Michael Lewis’s real-world exposition in Moneyball, causes us to misallocate temporal rewards and punishments. We favor those who seek our destruction, like Joan Didion and Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose doom prophecies were never neutral. To be clear, Joan Didion was a literary ninja who knew exactly how to cut her subjects to the very bone, to make them suffer and bleed, and whose obsession with professional security caused her to deny mercy to nearly every victim she felled with her literary blade.
Curiously, however, Didion seemed to protect and help Babitz, at least at the beginning. Didion defended Babitz, despite Babitz’s countervailing nature as a potential destroyer of Didion’s practice of prophecy in literary spaces. And Babitz generally admitted that Didion was glamorous in her day, and, so, Babitz seemed to openly covet Didion’s status.
But, perhaps, it is inaccurate to say Didion was protecting Babitz simply because Didion held a coveted status in the literati of her day. Maybe Didion’s projects in prophesying were facilitated by Babitzian black swans all along. As one of Hollywood’s black swans, Babitz fed Didion’s prophecies with fresh material, and was undoubtedly a key source of Didion’s Hollywood mystique.
Though history records Didion as a near-instant success and Babitz as a late rising star, Didion needed Babitz to keep her position as America’s favorite prophet. There is plenty of evidence that Babitz magnanimously imbued Hollywood with its open door to outsiders like Didion.[3] Though Babitz herself embraced Didion as an L.A. woman in her own right, in Los Angeles, Didion was known as “‘that lady from Sacramento’” who dubbed Jim Morrison “one of the ‘missionaries of apocalyptic sex,’” while Babitz notably managed to have sex with Morrison without causing the world to heave and collapse.
As Anolik noted, this was a significant failure of Didion as she and her husband attempted to write movies and wished to inspire Hollywood as Babitz seemed to do naturally. But Didion became a Hollywood critic, not a Hollywood muse. And there is significant evidence that, despite the highfalutin litarati status she held, Didion was actually the most covetous of the pair; a point which Anolik was criticized for making too harshly, perhaps, for Babitz’s taste.
Judging from Didion and Babitz’s literary offerings, it is difficult to say which one led, and which one followed. Both have books titled after famous albums of their times. Didion’s White Album may have gone to print first, but Babitz credibly claimed to have been the L.A. Woman her book and The Doors’ album is named after. Babitz took longer to place her writings, but she was a self-made muse and inspirer of her own works and the works of others — giving Steve Martin his white suit, and helping her sister bring leather to rock music for example.[4]
Black swans, like Babitz, take flight and change the world before the public can take notice. They do not wait to pester travelers with riddles about fate and doom, but hope to inspire travelers, sometimes to better paths, before travelers even know they have been inspired. The fact that black swans are unseen prior to changing the world appears to be more due to public preference for the comforts of the status quo than the swans’ preference to remain invisible.
The hopes and fears of all the years, as the old Christmas hymn says, are fundamentally linked. Yet, the prognostications of doom presently flooding into America from all corners of the globe are falling out of fashion. Didionic prophesies of doom always existed to comfort Americans who felt that American culture was changing too fast.
Neither those who fear, nor those who hope, are the audiences who were ever the patrons of doom. Didionic dooms were always purchased by purveyors of the status quo, who, in a previous era, invented eugenics to keep the status quo of white superiority. Like Didion later did to degrade the hopeful resistance of the Hippies, the eugenicists would raise the prospect of dooms like “being swamped with incompetence,”[5] to justify heinous crimes against humanity that ultimately weakened America and degraded the public welfare.
Yet, hope is having a moment in the eye of America’s storms, as several Babitzian black swans are taking flight, almost synchronized, to change things here. And the brighter the light of this hope, the deeper the shadow. Those who spread hope in America are hunted by the fearful, and the nihilist adherents to the status quo alike.
The final result of such a hunted individual is depicted in the 2010 horror film Black Swan, which ends in suicide. The film Black Swan depicts the very nature of being a black swan as a burden leading to self-destruction. Yet, if Babitz can be believed, being a black swan is the burden of bearing momentary extravagance, glamour, and wonder before the eyes of a star crossed public who long to pass through death into new life.
Perhaps hope in the face of death is the madness of Sylvia Plath depicted by Natalie Portman above. Or, perhaps, it only looks mad to those who cannot see how a black swan is transforming herself, or preparing herself to be transformed, into a new way of being. As Hannah Arendt wisely reminded us, the cries of the newborn exist to challenge the foreboding dooms of the Didionic sphynx and the madness depicted by Natalie Portman to reveal them both as basic defenses of the status quo in the face of natural societal change.
Like a pregnant mother, a ballerina past her prime has the glorious opportunity to remake herself anew. Perhaps, the ballerina must die so that the woman can become something more than she has been. To such a woman, death is a doorway.
A woman in transition can call forth all her phoenix fires to burn away what was, in order to make way for what is to come. She can let go of her prophetic powers to let the next generation have a choice, but in so doing she can become an inspiration to the youth by provoking dreams. To do this, like Forrest Gump, a black swan must be fearless about the unknown future and step forth in faith like Eve Babitz did to contest all the dooms of Joan Didion.
A phoenix-muse like Babitz stirs as dooms are lobbed at her like grenades so that she can emerge transformed by the very things set in motion to destroy her. As such, after Babitz actually did burn half her body, she reportedly said: “I’m a mermaid now.” Even catastrophic change does not have to defeat a black swan, because she can use it to reveal her capability of charting a course through transformations however painful and traumatizing it might be in the moment.
Now that Anolik’s renascence of Babitz is in full swing, the legal profession can only guess whose renascence might similarly unsettle the legacy of the formerly favored Justice Holmes. In my scholarship, I proposed a revival of Phillis Wheatley’s muse to break apart Holmesian prophecy. But the pattern of black swans in the course of social change cannot be doubted, and perhaps a new voice is needed, like Valarie Kaur, who is presently singing the great American clarion call to hope.
There is a place for Eve Babitz in American legal discourse as the person who successfully disputed the dooms of Didion in a former day. Both Babitz and Didion’s contributions to the confessional art genre were made possible by Wheatley’s original defense of copyright law in America. Critically, Babitz remains a viable example of persistence in the face of challenges rather than succumbing to the suicidal ideations featured in Sylvia Plath’s, perhaps, more glamorous arsenal.
As Babitz appears to hold, the artist does not need to succumb to death in order to transform herself; so too might the American judiciary in the future. The great surprise in the mysterious unknown future is the blessing of Babitzian art. Babitz’s carefree way of unsettling American dooms is the marvelous realization that hope is not actually uncomfortable at all. Finding our way home might be as easy as clicking our heels, and this profoundly American thought assures us that hope is as freeing and restful as a dream.
Yours Cordially,
Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.
[1] Eve Babitz, Black Swans : Stories 50–51 (1993).
[2] Id. at 195.
[3] Eve Babitz, L.A. Woman 19 (1982) [hereinafter Babitz, L.A.] (“For L.A. women became L.A. women if they got there young enough, no matter what they had been born into.”).
[4] Babitz, L.A., supra note 3, at preface; Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve 221–34 (2019).
[5] Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).