Dahlias and matches
Content advisement: I talk about true crime, murder, and aspects of childhood neglect/trauma.
As I mention in other blogs, I’m doing a Jungian seminar where I read a lot of fairy tales and a lot of books on alchemy and other woo-woo topics. One of the first books I read was “The Matrix and Meaning of Character”.
Author’s Note: I’m not recommending this book to anyone. Not that it isn’t a great book, I think it is, I’m just declining any responsibility for reactions to its contents.
One of the first chapters of this first book was on a “schizoid character structure”. I imagine that language could have some activation around it, but for now, just trust that it’s a deeply avoidant kind of person. Someone who has only found safety and enjoyment in their inner world, but they are also terrified of their inner world. This kind of person is usually developed in a context of intense neglect.
The authors use the story of “the Little Match Girl” to illustrate this kind of character structure. A little girl, rejected, cold and alone, tries to sell matches to stay alive. However, one day no one wants her matches, and so she sets a fire to keep herself warm. Spoiler alert: she freezes to death. Rather than seek comfort or safety by knocking on the doors around her, she fantasizes about comfort and safety until her matches go out.
If you can’t tell, I was deeply impacted by this chapter. Actually, I was wrecked by it. In true schizoid(+trauma+neurodiversity) form, I don’t lean toward outward emoting. There’s always a lot happening inside but it’s not perceptible to most people, which feels a lot safer than being seen, as so rudely noted in the book “abandonment is a lesser danger than engulfment,” (p. 34).
Thinking about a little girl, frozen to death, also made me think about my relationship with true crime, the kinds of horrors I watch from a distance, while avoiding my own voids. There’s a real comfort that comes from staring into those particular match fires. If I only keep an eye on it, those things won’t happen, or at least I can anticipate them.
I’m also fascinated by the nature of evil acts, and why people do what they do, again, from a distance. Without the risk of going meta, I’m also fascinated by watching the other watchers.
I started out, way too young, with fictionalized murder, Agatha Christie in particular and her character Hercule Poirot. There was a clear hero/villain, right/wrong dynamic; in the end the killer is caught and peace is restored due to the hero’s brilliance.
It’s usually a specific kind of brilliance; the ability to see what no one else sees and to make connections no one else can make. This brilliance is what’s most important about the story, the dead person is in the backseat of the narrative.
I see the throughline for myself, with Christie’s work (she went on to have her mystique and mythic stories) to storytellers like Last Podcast on the Left (LPOTL).
LPOTL is my problematic favorite and, much like the book, I’m not recommending it. I’ve consumed probably thousands of hours of true crime media, and I’ve seen a cult of personality spring up around it.
For a while there was a desire to be clever, funny, edgy - we were laughing through the pain. Laughing so we didn’t cry etc. But then the community decided that wasn’t okay anymore. So the new performance is around “centering the victim”. Rather than being edgy, the “good” ones are “empathetic” and “sensitive”, even though they’re telling the same stories and still profiting off the suffering of others.
Again. I’m a consumer of this genre. I’m a fan. This isn’t meant as an indictment, but a noticing for myself and the media I choose to consume.
As someone who has spent a lot of my life staring at match fires, fantasizing myself into near oblivion; why do I consume these stories?
I think about the stories that would be told about the little girl when she’s found in the morning. Would the stories be victim-blaming? Would there be a romanticization or virtue-signaling of this child’s death? Would there even be a story at all?
It’s like I want to engage with what happens when the fire goes out. If I don’t get a chance to define myself, how would I be defined by the observers?
Which brings me back to LPOTL and their recent series on the Black Dahlia. This is a known case for anyone even cursorily interested in true crime. I won’t go deeply into the story or any details here. But I’ll say this; there was once a young woman named Elizabeth Short and she was murdered, and when it happened the murder was “more famous than Pearl Harbor” but it was never solved.
She got engulfed by the observers; the men who maybe did or didn’t kill her, the details of what was done to her body, that’s all that mattered. When LPOTL tries to talk about her, there isn’t much to say, because it seems like Short was a deeply private person: “No one really knew her”.
A lot of the stories people remember her telling about herself, just weren’t true. People also described her personality and way of being in the world in very different ways. She’s so distant from her story that it’s not even known by her name.
I think this is another aspect to being a match girl; sometimes the fantasies and stories do come out, but they come out as lies and half-truths. This has certainly been true for me in different phases of my life. When I felt too weird or different, or conversely not interesting enough, I’d make up a story. Sometimes people believed me, sometimes they didn’t. And sometimes, I think I knew some people weren’t deserving of my actual story, and I was wise to stay inside of myself. It’s a mixed bag, having this kind of character structure.
But, in some ways, I’m glad Elizabeth Short took herself with her.
Short and so many others (match girls or not) didn’t have any say or choice in how their story ended. Not everyone has a door to knock on, but if you’re reading this, if you’re breathing, try to look somewhere beyond the small fire that you think is keeping you alive. It might actually be killing you, and it can’t actually keep you warm.
