"Death is your gift."
- The First Slayer to Buffy
I brought a handgun to school with me pretty regularly during most of the spring of 1973. A 22
caliber Ruger. I kept it in my Hollywood High School
locker in a paper bag. I figured it would come in
handy for hunting small animals when the world came
to an end.
But the world didn't end when I was 17, and now I'm
watching Sue de Beer channel the adolescents we
were, and still are, through a mix of empathy and
sensuality that barely contains the dreamlike horror
of complete exposure. In Black Sun, she creates a
luminous and layered narrative, which turns
repeatedly to face its own past. Naked young feet
creep up astroturf-covered stairs. The doubled
projection screens draw us toward a door, coded with
the orange-red light of movie violence. Inside the
red glow, an older woman undresses, restaging the
vulnerability and confusion of youth as the frailty
that reemerges with age. She lies down on the bed,
the skin on her chest is rippled. We are too close
now, helplessly intimate as she crosses her hands
slowly over her chest, becoming a corpse.
Now the girl is younger, and I'm not trusting her,
this graceful little girl in the pink leotard - how
can she be more than an object - I resent her
cleverness and satisfaction, but most of all the
charm of her slight awkwardness. Self-loathing. I
was never this little girl, but I was. Your double,
your twin, the one who mocks you, the one who offers
redemption.
And then it works, you start to feel them, and you
feel her, but there's yourself, too, all the
bitterness and misery comes with it. Her girls are
pretty. She is the younger sister, the watcher now. She waits patiently, directs her story without
hatred, but your ghosts are the older sisters, they
are too much, they wish they could be sweet, but
they are what they are. They are killers and it's
too late, the little one is dead.
The woman is undressing upstairs in the red light
again, but now the night-light is cool and blue, and
the teenager - the one who can act in the world -
not just in her room - has gone to the graveyard.
She wears the symbol, rather than simply being the
symbol. In her death mask and ghost costume, she
laughs, and meets a friend. The teens pour their
drinks - you pour yourself into them, pour your
heart out, tear their hearts out - a toast.
There in the symbolic of death, they escape from the
horror show that marks the betrayal of development
and mortality. If, in the world around us, death has
become our only symbolic, then is it through our
identification with de Beer's characters that we can
we move beyond the paralysis of self-consciousness,
the nightmare of our own mutability? We are the
rotting corpses unless we wear them.
In the red light, the little girl tries on the black
wig, combs the dead hair. She lies down, nestled in
the bed, in the dead.
Sue gives us these children to love. Making careful
notes, she gives us back our experience through her
dreams. She cleanses us of our memories by forgiving
them, showing us to ourselves as the vulnerable
young people we were when we first had apocalyptic
visions. The bi-polar strategies of mania and
despair are the twins designed to shield us from our
own innocence. But de Beer gives us back our
fallibility through the realness of death. Death is
her gift. Her death is our gift.