Acid
I’ll tell you about a time I really got ripped, wrecked, hit over the head by online comments, and couldn’t shake it off. Had a hard time shaking it off, for a while. Look, it just happens. You’re famous and people want to cut you. We talked about that. So, I’m doing a Google search of myself. STOOPID. Yes, I know. Quite dumb, you’re right. Should never have dived in there. Stupid. Why? I guess you get curious. Want to know if you’re still “in there”? Are people talking about you? Not the trolls; I’m talking about real people and reputable publications. You’re taking the temperature. You’re not on the red carpet, but you’re taking a Fame temperature online. Looking. Stupid. (God, I want to get this date for you, of when this happened, and I hesitate. Don’t want to put those search words in there, because I don’t want to see that shit again. OK. Going to do it quick. Quick.) OK, about 2009. In 2009, I put my name into the Google search bar. Justine Bateman . . . and the auto-complete comes up.
The auto-complete says that the top option is, Justine Bateman looks old. I blinked. I wasn’t even shocked. I was pre-shocked. I didn’t have a container for it. I was 43. That’s it. Always looked young for my age.
Justine Bateman looks old.
Did I? Really? I looked in the mirror. I thought I looked OK. Looked fine. Hmm.
I CLICK. Yeah, that’s right. I CLICK ON THAT SEARCH LIKE A GODDAMN IDIOT. Right there. Oh, I would love to have gone back in time and, right there, grabbed my little index finger on my right hand and pulled it off the fucking mouse. Pulled it off so I could not click, so I could not let this disease into my head that would stay there for years. So, I click. Like an idiot. Like I’m Gretel and the witch uses candy to get me into her gingerbread house with the oven, only she doesn’t even use candy; she’s holding out this moldy crust of gingerbread, maggots in the icing. I know what’s in store for me. Is this delightful? Is this interesting enough to me, to look at that moldy gingerbread, that Justine Bateman looks old piece of lure, and think I should click? Go into that gingerbread house, because I want a big plate of that? Jesus, I don’t know. What made me do that? Arrogance?
“Oh, there’s no possible way someone really thinks that. Based on what? What evidence are they talking about?” This is me, not knowing “them,” whoever has said this thing. I don’t know them. They don’t know me. But the Fame, yeah, the Fame. My years and years of not being able to control what people said about me and being so famous, but now not being very famous, relatively speaking. Not being so famous and still, STILL people are saying something about me, and goddammit, I must have some control now, now that the Fame is less, right? Some control over people saying things, even in this Mentos-in-a-gallon-of-Coke eruption rate of online comments and out-of-control celebrity attention on the Internet. I must have some control, because I’m not that famous now, right? Yeah. You tell yourself that, Bateman, and welcome to the House of Moldy Gingerbread Hell.
You can guess. I clicked and IT WAS SO MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE. Yeah. That’s right. I thought, knew, suspected, how can you not, that there’d be some moldy gingerbread. I mean, that’s what the witch is holding out to me, to get me in there. Moldy gingerbread, so I have to assume there will be more of that there. Yum, what are you thinking, but OK. Well, instead, “Welcome to a bowl of sarin-laced acid soup, you idiot.”
Justine Bateman looks old.
No, not just that. That’s the moldy gingerbread I knew I’d have more of. This, the rest here, is the sarin. (Ooh, I can feel the acid in the soup trying to seep back in me as I look online to get some good quotes for you. I’ll do it. I’ll wade into that acid for our rowboat ride.)
Looks like the sea hag.
Did not age well.
Looked really old.
Looking rough.
Looks like she’s 55.
Willing her to eat something.
Meth addict?
Awful, botched facelifts?
Poor health?
Has aged rather rapidly and had no body, either. She could have found work in an Iranian brothel, but now forget it.
Time has not been kind to her.
She’s a smoker.
Why does she look so bad?
Looks like death warmed over.
Is she sick?
I’ve noticed she’s aging poorly.
What the hell happened to her?
And my personal favorite: Justine Bateman looks like Eric Stoltz in the film Mask.
* * *
A couple of things. First of all, I feel poisoned now. I just stuck my hands and my arms and part of my body into that sarin-laced acid soup, to get some juicy quotes for us. Secondly, actor/director Eric Stoltz, in the film Mask, played a character with a rare disorder, nicknamed “lionitis” because of the disfigurement the face suffers as a result of cranial enlargements. You got that picture? He wore a full-face prosthetic. I mean, his entire face, besides his eyes, was covered with rubber. So, yeah. I look like that. Just like that.
And here’s what fucked me up. (And, oh yeah, congratulations, you stabbers, you hit a main artery there. You did it. Good aim, thrust, carry-through, all of it. Very well done.) What fucked me up was that I couldn’t get my head around it. Not at first. Going to sound arrogant for a minute here. It’s not my intention, but here. I’ve always been pretty. Born with a pretty face. I never saw it as some accomplishment; just some card I got in my deck, like brown hair, two legs, etc. Just a card in the deck, a pretty face—or a face that this society thinks is pretty, more accurately. So, a pretty face. See, I had never been attacked for my face. I’d never been criticized for my looks. It would have been like a tall basketball player being criticized for being short. That would be bizarre. So, there I was. Sure, 43 years old. Sure, don’t look 16. So what? Never wanted to look 16, even when I was 16.
I mean, that’s the irony. (I made a video about this; you can watch it online.) I couldn’t wait to look the way I finally looked at 43, or the way I look now at 52. Oh man, I couldn’t wait. When I was younger, I would look at European actresses with cheekbones and dark circles under their eyes and lines on their faces and I would want that. I would look with envy. I wanted to look like that. I wanted my face to represent me, to reflect who I was. Moody and dark and mysterious and deep. Not pretty and wholesome and available and approachable and all-American. Now listen, I didn’t think about this before I was famous. I was fine. Fine with the pretty face, whatever. It was fine. It was after, after I became famous, that I began to resent that my face, or how I imagined my face, was betraying me. That this nice, wholesome, BEIGE actress girl type that everybody was projecting onto me, this hope and desire that I was all that AND that I was also just like the character of “Mallory.” Oh, that was the ultimate dream, I suppose, the idea that I was just like her. Living, breathing, walking around. Available. Well, not me. I love her, she’s mine and mine in a way no one else can ever have, but no. Not me. She is not alive, doesn’t walk around. She’s dead in the TV. You can watch her animated by the magic of reruns in there. That’s where she lives.
So, my opinion of what I looked like from 16–21 was one of slight disdain. Not a rejection of me, of my face, but that my face seemed to make it so damn easy for everyone to project some reality upon me that wasn’t me, didn’t fit me. A reality that was bound to collapse and elicit their disappointment when I didn’t play the part behind it, when I didn’t support this reality they wanted from me. Obviously, I couldn’t do it. I fucking tried. You know I did. I tried to be nice and smiled when people made their assumptions. And it became too great and over and over, and it tumbled over me. I felt I couldn’t get out. But it was OK. I had my friends, my people. I told you about them.
So, the “lionitis,” the “drug-addict face” these people assumed of me. (Oh yeah, how the tables had turned.) I didn’t know what to do with that. It was so bizarre to me, so outside the realm of criticism I’d heard in my life, that I didn’t know how to handle this. I wish, wish I had been able to skip over it like I did with the gold-dress-Blackwell’s-worst-dressed-list episode. Maybe I could skip over that then because I was more famous. I could laugh in the face of that because I had company. Other actresses on that list who I thought had great style. To be on that list was to be in that group. Fine. But this.
Hey, I wasn’t out there, you know? Out, as an actor, seeking attention. Why was I being hit? I was doing the writing and the producing and the digital media. I wasn’t out there in the public eye, really, and yet the attack, the fury, the anger was as if I was very famous, right at that moment. And I wasn’t. And so, I tried (oh, fatal mistake), I tried to “understand where they were coming from.” I can’t tell you what a wrong turn that was for me. Stupid. Bad mistake. Should have dismissed them all as maniacs and moved on. But no. Their comments were so bizarre to me, so outside the realm of things I felt could be critiqued about me, that I had to start to try to see it “their way.” Yes, terrible idea.
I looked at the photo they were referencing. I thought I seemed fine. Another criticism, of another, different picture. Hmm, I seemed good, fine. I looked at one of these pictures up against a picture of me when I was 16. The 16-year-old face, OK, no lines, but big, round face, no character face, whatever. Not that attractive to me, for my taste. I look at the picture of me that they hate. The one of me at 43. I like it. I think I look represented. I look like “real me.” Back and forth between the two photos, trying to make sense of it. Trying to see what they see, what they have discovered about how I look. I do this over and over. (Yes, I know. Bad.) I do this, because I can’t understand what they’re saying. And so many people are saying it. So many people, whole message boards. So, what, I’m right and they’re wrong? All those people are wrong and me, inside me, I’m right?
And here’s where I make a decision that would partially wreck me for a few years. I decide that they are right. Christ. I just made myself cry. I just made myself cry hard with that line. Oh, that took my breath away. Didn’t see that coming. See, I’ve “worked through all this.” I’ve processed this. This, this episode was years ago. Years ago. You little sarin-laced acid-soup piece of shit. You really worked your way in there, didn’t you? You really stabbed it with your steely knives, didn’t you? Little metal shards of acid sarin. in. the. blood. Oh FUCK. It’s not so bad, don’t worry. I’ll be OK. Just crying a little. I’ve been here before. It’s good. Flushes the shards out. It’s fucking OK. DON’T WORRY. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
Listen, I take responsibility. I volunteered to go in there again for our emotional time travel. I guess I had to, needed to. I volunteered to go in there and get us some juicy quotes. OK. I couldn’t avoid this route. So, here we are, you and I. You, who maybe wrote those lines, maybe stabbed me with your steely, heat-seeking, long-range Internet comment daggers. Maybe it was you. Maybe you’re reading this book right now and are ashamed. No, maybe you feel satisfied that you wrecked my perception of my face in a way that I could have never expected. Maybe you feel a twinge—no, not a twinge, a thrill of victory.
“I got that fucking actress, fucking D-rate actress who I used to jack off to, but who now looks not like the girl I thought I could be with, the one I thought I could take advantage of. No, now she looks like a woman, an interesting someone, and she stole it. She stole something from me. She stole that touchstone. Yeah. She stole that touchstone to that part of me, that version almost, of younger me that I really liked. She was a treasure trail to that part of me. But, now she’s stolen it. She shut it up, dead and in the TV and not even retrievable through those reruns, because I know they are reruns and they’re not Now. I can’t get to Me Then, Younger Me, Touchstone Me, because I’m Me Now and I hate Me Now. I AM MISERABLE.”
But, that’s probably not you, reading this book, sitting in the rowboat with me.
* * *
OK, here’s what happened. And there were other comments, sure, she looks great and all that, but I wanted the fucking, goddamn TRUTH. Because, you know, I’m all about that. And if so many people were saying that I looked like a crack whore, then they must be right, with me being wrong. I decided that I didn’t look right, that I did look terrible, like something gone wrong. I decided that and I walked around ashamed of my face. That decision riddled my entire body with the belief that to look upon me was to look upon Horror. That people were choking back the bile when they had to speak to me face to face. That I disgusted them. That they were brave souls to be talking to me and allowing such pleasant looks to remain on their face during the exchange.
I began to feel grateful to each person for not collapsing in a pool of exhausted vomit from looking into my face. I began to feel ashamed. Yes. Every time I walked out of the house. Every time I sat across from someone at a table, over dinner, coffee, anything, and had a conversation. Every time a waitress would ask if there was anything else she could get me, every time a cashier in a store would hand me back my credit card and bag my purchases and tell me to “have a nice day.” I felt the gratitude.
“Thank God I got through another day without someone fainting from looking at my face.” Yeah, you laugh. (Or you’re one of those fucks who wrote that about me, so you’re saying to yourself, “Damn straight. You should have felt the gratitude.” Whatever, I’m not talking to you right now.) Hell, I’m laughing too. How did I do that? Make that kind of decision?
I’m willing to break it open right here with you, right now. What would it have meant for me to reject that, that whole batch of comments, users, all those people saying those things? To decide they were wrong and I was right? What would that have meant? Well, let’s look at the gold dress situation. I was able to reject that criticism. I wasn’t alone. I was being criticized for my style, for this one outfit, first of all, and I was lumped together with a bunch of other famous women whose style I liked, so I was keeping good company. Hey, there’s even an awesome comment in HuffPo about that gold dress that I found when I was rattling around in there, on the Internet just now:
Justine Bateman’s 1987 look . . . saw her reject the floor-length dress code for pieces she could actually wear. Red carpet style doesn’t have to be stuffy or old; it can take risks, provoke conversation, and make challenges—which is exactly what Bateman did. By pairing a nude mini dress with a contrasting cropped jacket, she brought street style to an award show that lacked it. (And still does, if we want to get real, which we always do.)
Thank you, writer Anne T. Donahue. You’re boss. Oh, and the picture of me in that dress has been the identifying photo for the Wikipedia entry for “1980s in Western Fashion” for years. A real honor. Just sorry Mr. Blackwell isn’t alive to see that.
* * *
So back to the tearing open of Why I Let the Gold Dress Episode Go, But Not the Face Disaster. To reject the gold dress criticism meant, bingo, that I would still be in this company, still keeping company with all the other rad women Blackwell had also put down. Now, for me to have rejected the face criticism . . . that meant—oh Christ, this is going to sound bizarre—but to reject that face criticism would have meant rejecting Fame. Now, stay here with me. If my Fame is faded, don’t have much compared with what I used to have, and the mentions I’m getting are mostly toxic, then I have to choose. Toxicity Fame or no Fame. And, you guessed it, I chose the Toxicity Fame. Unconsciously. It was unconscious on my part.
Look, it’s like this. You might have some bad relationship in your life. A parent, a sibling, a friend, maybe even your mate, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, like that. You’ve got this one relationship and it’s bad. You fight, they get under your skin. Jesus, you hate being around them, really. So, you have a choice. You know you do. You can simply not be with them. You can not know them. Leave them, not go home for the holidays, stop inviting them over for parties, you can stop. So ask yourself: Why haven’t you? What’s holding you back?
For most people, it’s usually this: “Because at least I have something with them. IT’S BETTER THAN NOTHING.” It’s better than nothing. See that? That’s what I did. Unconsciously. That’s what I did. I grabbed hold of something toxic because it was better than the nothing I assumed I’d have if I rejected it. Sure, it sounds like, “Oh, Justine, you poor thing. You poor victim of Fame. You poor casualty of Hollywood. You poor thing.” But, it’s really OK. It’s just one of those deep-set, unconscious choices caused by an irrational fear.
Once you expose that kind of fear, it begins to die.