ATROCITY EXHIBITION 1: SuicideTok
suicideTok, bridgend, accepting narrative failure
I’m back from America. I might write something about it but this New Yorker article about the tour covers the high/lowlights.
In other news I thought I’d share a non-music essay I’m working on as part of a collection possibly called ATROCITY EXHIBITION: A JOURNEY TO THE TIKTOK UNDERWORLD. I don’t use TikTok but I keep writing about it because it’s the most depraved, pagan place imaginable. Of course there’s a lot of writing about this slop already but I’ve been trying to take a bit of a 20th century approach- using writers like Susan Sontag, John Waters, Camille Paglia, Joan Didion etc- to create some aesthetic distance. Partly because I don’t like ‘internet writing’. As Sam Kriss notes: “Nobody would read a story on the internet that’s about being on the internet, how crazy it is that we’re all online…”. In that spirit, I also digress quite a bit, and bring in a fair amount of memoir.
ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a reference to a JG Ballard novel which psychedelically depicts the 20th century’s media maze of sexuality, celebrity, genocide and assassination. Despite being 55, the book still captures the atmosphere of TikTok better than any contemporary writing. It was also a product of grief. Following the sudden death of his wife, Ballard wrote it because he felt suddenly attuned to “..the sensationalising of violent imagery..…I felt if I could find a key to this, I could find a key to my wife’s death.”
I’ve likewise found that writing about TikTok opens portals to my own grief event: the suicide of my mother. Maybe this is because, as John Gray says, “technologies create whole worlds in which the hidden dreams of human beings emerge more than in everyday lives.” The essay below emerged from spending time on SuicideTok and thinking about the Bridgend suicides of the late 2000s. I’ve changed some names and small details for privacy reasons. Hopefully after I finish these essays I’ll stop writing about my mum for a while. Anyway: maybe I’ll share some more of these between my tubstack posts. If you have any suggestions for a good small press who might want to publish such a thing, get in touch.
ATROCITY EXHIBITION 1: SuicideToK
2009
We’ve been given our first piece of AS Drama coursework: devise a play based on the principles of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Each group is assigned a gritty teenage topic - anorexia, gangs, drugs. Ours is suicide. I haven’t given the topic much thought. None of us have. We also haven’t read Artaud’s Selected Writings. Apart from Rhian- a hammy aspiring actress who won’t go to RADA.
“It’s all about shocking the audience. You have to wear masks and create an immersive experience,” Rhian says.
“We should make it mental,” Rhodri says, and everyone agrees.
We set about writing a script. It will be about a group of friends who kill themselves one by one. Each of us will deliver a monologue about the meaninglessness of life in Wales while the others don masks and snake through the audience making sinister noises. Then we’ll hang ourselves and our mother, usually played by Rhian, will burst into the room, fall to her knees and scream.
At some point during rehearsals, someone brings up Bridgend and we realise we’ve unconsciously based our entire play on it. I suddenly remember sharing a bottle of Glen’s Exciting Vodka with an emo at the fountains, talking about how she knew one of the Bridgend teens. It turns out we all know someone who knows someone. This adds to the general sense among the group that our play is unoriginal. We organise a crisis rehearsal during our free period. The drama room is booked so we find a spot on the rugby pitch. We smoke cigs and watch Rhian crumple into a heap on the try line and sob into her dead son’s school polo shirt.
“Wait,” Ieuan says, “Wait. I think I’ve just had an idea. How about this: what if Suicide….was…like..a character.”
“What do you mean?”
“A character in the play…Like the concept of Suicide is a literal character in the play.
Everyone’s silent for a moment.
“That’s sick,” Rhodri says.
“It also means we can incorporate Artaudian masks,” Rhian says.
My teen is deemed the most/least cuttable and I become Suicide. In the prop box, we find a plague doctor’s mask made of white leather. I creep around in a spindly way, and occasionally do something like swing dancing.
*
The night of the performance. We will receive an E. But for now I’m creeping around my victim’s bedroom, inspecting her Funeral for a Friend posters, slowly encircling as she stares morosely at her forearm.
My eyes drift across the audience- you next?- and I place a finger to my lips. Then I help my teen fashion an extension cable into a noose before dancing Bugsy Malone style off-stage.
Afterwards I fly over to Bridgend and kill two more teenagers. Six years later, I convince my mother that her cancer, though cured, is a sort of divine punishment. That the mere fact of being diagnosed is an indictment of her life. Then I help her hang herself.
*
Suicide is failure. Worse than an E. An F. Not only failure to honour your life and the lives of your loved ones, but the lives of those living through strife and suffering. A cosmic failure : an insult to the complex miracle of life.
But some suicides are bigger failures than others. The most successful ones are compellingly circumstantial: warfare, terminal illness, a looming prison sentence. These are what Emile Durkheim called Fatalistic Suicides and, like Altruistic Suicides (for some greater good or part of rituals like seppuku), there’s an obvious causality at play. The slightly less successful ones are Anomic Suicides, which arise from big circumstantial shifts: sudden bankruptcy, the murder of one’s family, a societal shift into economic depression.
But the most common type, especially today, is the Egoistic Suicide. Egoistic suicides always carry a whiff of overreaction. An F within an F. They are the most confusing ones. My mother’s falls into this category. And, if anything, hers was on the more baffling, Egoistic end of the spectrum. An F within an F within an F.
Which is why, up until recently, part of me found it a bit feeble. She was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer, had a mastectomy, got the all-clear then became obsessed with the mere fact of being diagnosed. Then she killed herself. If cancer is a battle, she surrendered as soon as war was declared. Worse: as the enemy troops were retreating.
*
Between 2007 and 2008, around 26 teenagers, many of whom knew each other, killed themselves in Bridgend.
I grew up in Cardiff, about 20 miles away, and remember the media storm. Tabloids hounded the families and splashed the faces of each new teen on the front pages. Sometimes they blamed Bridgend (often conflating the town with the county), depicting it as a place so grim it had the power to drive ordinary kids to suicide. But, as Carol Cadwalladr noted at the time, anyone familiar with Bridgend knew it wasn’t uniquely shit- there were (are) similar places up and down the UK. American magazines turned up and wrote more sensitive longform articles, often pointing out that suicide clusters have been a mysterious phenomenon existing since antiquity. Alex Shoumatoff, in Vanity Fair, described several such instances:
“Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets….Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying it’s a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love…prompting young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives.”
But Shoumatoff, too, riffed on the idea of Bridgend having a kind of mystical malevolence to it. He wrote tantalisingly of Bridgend’s Celtic heritage:
“The Druids…actually promoted suicide as a religious practice. They had a maxim, Alvarez relates: "There is another world, and they who kill themselves to accompany their friends thither, will live with them there”…And this is the old Druidic heartland.”
The real reason for the level of attention, though, was that Bridgend signalled something new: suicide in the digital age. Very early versions of social media had emerged and many of the teens used Bebo to post tributes to their dead friends. The fact that many of those who posted would then commit suicide themselves led the tabloids to wax lyrical about an ‘internet death cult’. This was debunked- many of the teens didn’t have access to the internet- and it became clear the presence of traditional media was actually causing the most measurable harm. Each new headline would trigger another suicide. Most would take place in public, and Shoumatoff quoted an expert who suggested there was a kind of exhibitionism to the act: “They wanted to feel seen.”
The closest anyone came to a sensible explanation was that, like other clusters, each death added to a permission-granting effect. When a teen would find out their friend had killed themselves, suicide suddenly became an acceptable reaction to whatever struggle they were going through. The option was unlocked. The media, then, was implicated because it amplified news of each suicide, thereby proliferating the spread of the permission effect. But this only really seemed to explain the acceleration of the contagion. The question remains today: why Bridgend?
For a while, that question felt linked to my own question: why my mother? There were other parallels: some of the Bridgend suicides were female (less common than men) and they all hung themselves (not a common method for women.) There was also the absence of any previous suicidal ideation or the usual risk factors. Like Ballard, I began to feel that if I could understand Bridgend, I might be able to make sense of my mother’s death. I wrote the cluster into the novel I was working on, and had my protagonist investigate it using the real information and reportage available online. This obviously didn’t lead to anything. No one real, let alone fictional, could fully explain Bridgend, even if they could gather plenty of compelling contributory factors. The same was true of my mother. I’d followed leads, thought about her difficult childhood, made breakthroughs in therapy. One of the most useful revelations, which I write about in another essay, was reading Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. It taught me that a cancer diagnosis can bring with it its own punitive, shame-based metaphors: metaphors generated by society. But the trail still went cold, ultimately. Sontag herself had been curiously immune to the metaphors, whereas my mother had absorbed them. So again: why my mother? Why Bridgend? Why anyone?
*
I’m working on a book about TikTok - a survey of its paedophile hunters, rapping therapists and OF lolcows. I need the algorithm to send me the most depraved slop possible, and this has led to some pro-suicide videos. A lot of it gets cleaned up by the moderators but I’ve figured out the euphemisms. This kind of content is currently at the heart of several trials being brought by bereaved parents of SuicideTok kids. But, as with Bridgend, as with my mother, it all seems a little lightweight. Could these trite TikToks really drive a teenager to suicide? A video of a flickering streetlight, AI voiceover saying ‘It will just be like going to sleep’.
I find a New Yorker article in which Andrew Solomon explores the rising teen suicide rate, and speaks to some of the parents taking part in activism to improve safety precautions on the app. It seems these days, clusters are bound by digital rather than physical geography. TikTok’s culpability seems irrefutable. But in the second half, Solomon suggests that, like the tabloids in Bridgend, TikTok is more accelerator than root cause. No one can find any strong causal evidence to suggest social media is inherently dangerous in itself. One expert says, “Just because social media is the easy target doesn’t make it the right target’ and suggests there’s an equal amount of data to suggest TikTok can help isolated teens build community.
I wonder about the parents’ activism. How it must help ward off the narrative failure of it all. The impulse to campaign, to investigate, to find a culprit. Who would want to take that away from these parents? I can relate. It’s very tempting to wholly blame cancer and its metaphors for my mother’s death. And maybe it’s not even healthy or brave to keep writing towards some elusive truth. As Nietzsche puts it, “The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to a judgement…The question is rather to what extent is it life-promoting.” And yet I (and presumably some of the parents) can’t deny the nagging sense that there will never be a real answer. And what to do with that?
Surprisingly, there’s on quite mental guy who can help:
Antonin Artaud.
*
In her essay about Artaud, Sontag writes:
“Both in his art and in his life, Artaud failed.”
He was too nuts, too contrarian, too tormented by the limits of his consciousness.
“Metaphors he uses treat the mind as a physical substance that is intransigent, fugitive, unstable, obscenely mutable.”
He was forever documenting his failure to curate his thoughts. His scattershot attempts as poetry, polemic, film scripts, historical fiction and opera weren’t particularly great. Sontag calls them a ‘broken self-mutilated corpus.’ Instead of a body of work, he left a ‘phenomenology of suffering’ a ‘tireless and detailed record [of] the microstructure of mental pain.” He was a bit like a TikTokker: obsessed with trying to communicate pain but always failing, too much, cloying, personal, vulnerable in a stressful rather than sympathetic way. He had brainrot before it existed:
“He describes his mind as fissured, deteriorating, petrifying, liquefying, coagulating, empty, impenetrably dense : words rot.”
But Artaud’s genius was to recognise his failure and the failure of art generally. Bigger than that: our failure to truly know the suffering of others. His rejection, in Sontag’s words, “liberated him”:
“For Artaud, the extreme mental -and also physical-pain that feeds ( and authenticates) the act of writing is necessarily falsified when that energy is transformed into artistry : when it attains the benign status of a finished, literary product.”
Artaud attempted to develop an alternative method which would circumvent the failures of consciousness and artistry. What he created, The Theatre of Cruelty, was a technology which tried to reach true suffering by doing away with the author, the text and language itself. It drew on pagan ritualism to grasp towards the unknown, the unknowable. And while it was Artaud’s only real success- an important development in the history of the theatre- it also failed. Artaud wasn’t able to use it effectively. No one was. This is because failure was baked in- grasping is just grasping. But the Theatre of Cruelty still does what other forms can’t: it acknowledges the presence of that larger, truer suffering. The suffering within you others will never reach, the suffering of others you’ll never reach.
Artaud helps us acknowledge the shadow world from which something like an Egoistic suicide emerges. That strange illogic which has always caused humans to feel and act in ways which defy expectations, causality or pathology. The illogic whose twin is love. Think of Montaigne’s famous line at the end of ‘On Friendship’:
“If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”
We cherish Montaigne’s mystery and hate Artaud’s.
But Artaud’s can still be liberating. An explanation - social media, a childhood, a shit town- is comforting but still carries a cost. Certainty leads us to believe that something concrete, mortal, trivial can account for so profound a loss. There is dignity, then, in consigning our loved ones to the ranks of those countless souls who have defied nature and logic for reasons no one ever truly understands. To think of them all across time: souls from Bridgend ; from Paris ; failed souls ; successful souls; souls everyone expected it from ; souls no one did.
And to think of suicide as a creeping figure in a white mask.