Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

We live in a nation whose every other impulse is theatrical, but whose every other impulse is to insist upon “authenticity.”

All of your years of practicing are going to “pay off,” that distinctively American phrase that conflates all work with reward, all positive outcomes with money.

You will discover that “make it,” as an expression, emerged in the American vernacular during the Gilded Age. The wealth disparities of that era are reflected in “make it,” which evolved to mean both mere survival (make it through the winter) and wild success involving money, fame, and/or acclaim (make it big), forever linking these two vastly different outcomes in the American mind.

A wayward speck of cuticle crust on a violinist’s finger can cause a high note to become painful to hear—

“Only America has fake fute smell. If you want to smell fute in Moscow, you have to smell a real fute.”

children should learn music as if it were a language, and that they should begin lessons as early as possible, ideally at the age of two and no later than five. Research by Oliver Sacks and others has confirmed this claim. After a certain age—somewhere between eight and twelve years old—the window for learning a spoken or musical language with native-level proficiency slams shut.

The Composer’s music is artificially enhancing your emotions—the way a film soundtrack makes a banal conversation between lovers seem epic.

In an orchestra, the conductor inhales a gulp of air right before the first downbeat of his baton. The orchestra breathes with him and that’s how everyone starts at the same time, breathing together, like one organism with forty sets of lungs.

The implication is that if we forget to smile, we could kill someone.

So much about The Composer—his music, his performances, his smile—is ripped off, imitated, or downright fake. But when it comes to the most genuine gesture an American can make—giving away money—The Composer is the real deal. The profits from his CD sales are spent doing free tours for PBS and producing benefit CDs for charities. On some nights after our concerts, he gives away as many CDs as he sells.

Left Behind series, the Evangelical thrillers in which the Rapture saves only the purest, most Protestant Christians while the rest of humanity is “left behind” to suffer hell.

“You know,” he begins, “being in this old house really reminds me of the olden times, and like, how romantic it is.” The audience looks back at him, their faces blank. “In the olden times it was so romantic,” he continues. “There were candles.” He looks at the candle in his hand as if it will help him understand what he means. “And you know,” he continues, “there were horses and buggies. And slaves.” Harriet and I look at each other. Slaves? Kim shakes her head in embarrassment. But no one in the audience seems bothered that The Composer has just called slavery romantic.

Your goal is to be the best at everything and the most liked by everyone.

You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it.

Then something happens to you. It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused. And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all.

The potential for your life supposedly has no bounds. But by your twelfth birthday, you have a sinking feeling. You can’t do life in this body. Not this body, the one that is appearing slowly, then suddenly before you in the mirror. This body is a stranger; you don’t know it, you don’t like it. It’s certainly not the body you would have ordered from a catalog. You have a new vision of yourself, a vision of what you are actually going to look like as a woman. And in that vision—a short-legged, big-thighed brunette with monstrous eyebrows and a crooked smile—you no longer see a place for yourself in the world.

“Those boys just like you.” But even then you know that this is profoundly untrue. Those boys do not like you. Those boys have sniffed out your growing insecurity and have pounced on it. It’s the nineties! Those boys—victims of the backlash themselves—are becoming more aware by the day that girls are a commodity, like livestock, to be traded with other boys, and that your value is in a period of deflation.

Everywhere you look—magazines, TV, movies, high school pep rallies—you see that not being pretty enough will mean your life will be much different—more difficult, more restricted—than you would have ever imagined a few years before. And even if you somehow did become beautiful, you know it would not be enough to put you on equal footing with the boys.

“I know what you must be thinking,” says Kate Winslet’s Rose after her suicide attempt in Titanic. “‘Poor little rich girl. What does she know about misery?’” “No,” Jack responds compassionately. “What I was thinking was, what could have happened to this girl to think she had no way out?” Life in the body.

It’s the nineties! Don’t we know that girls can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough?

What we want to be is skeletal. By fifteen your body is begging you for calories, to let yourself grow. You are losing weight instead, your work ethic turned inward, toward your own flesh, which you are convinced you can eviscerate.

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.

But dozens of subsequent studies fail to replicate even the minor increases in IQ achieved in the original study. Most of these follow-up studies conclude that any music that puts the test taker in a better mood increases his test score.

While the actual effect of listening to Mozart while taking a test is minimal at best, the effect of the UC Irvine study on American culture—The Effect of the Mozart Effect, one could call it, or the Mozart Effect Effect—is tremendous and undeniable.

The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is far more organically American: marketing. Megacorporations like “Baby Einstein” are born and flourish by promoting the disproven belief that blasting Mozart toward a baby—or even a fetus—can fast-track the kid to Harvard. In 1998, Georgia governor Zell Miller allocates over $100,000 in state funds to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music, arguing that it will help Georgia’s kids outperform their peers in math and science.

Americans increasingly believe in the tangible benefits of classical music, while simultaneously knowing less and less about the art form.

In the last paragraph of the original UC Irvine study, the authors speculate that the change in IQ they observed might not be due to an increase from listening to Mozart, the experiment’s variable, but instead a decrease in IQ from listening to the experiment’s control: overly simplified and repetitive relaxation music.

“We predict that music lacking complexity or which is repetitive may interfere with, rather than enhance, abstract reasoning.”

The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage. I’ve tried everything within my power to appreciate it (and I do, God, believe me I do, but it’s not enough). I appreciate the fact that I and we have affected and entertained a lot of people. —Kurt Cobain, in his suicide note

The Northeast, as you imagined it, was a society of neo-Pilgrims who spent long winters contemplating God, looking for their souls in a spiderweb, philosophizing on boring, uncontroversial subjects.

But you had mistaken her success for happiness, which turns out not to be the same thing.

Let us now speak of the children of the American suburbs, a group with its own culture and subcultures, a species as foreign to you as wild chimpanzees, their hometown neighborhoods so stratified and gated and segregated that the kids who lived in million-dollar houses rarely mingled with the kids who lived in $800,000 houses.

Let us confess that you struggled with addiction, that what began with coffee and then cigarettes accelerated into Adderall and cocaine, and that you used these stimulants to stay awake Monday through Thursday in order to work and study. You intended to graduate a year early to save money; because of this you signed up for heavy course loads. Let us acknowledge that stimulant abuse cut into The Money that you were staying awake to earn.

There is no way to know that the new America will have very little interest in learning anything accurate about the Middle East—that instead there are powerful interests that will need Americans to think of the Middle East as a homogeneous region full of terrorists. That Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran are all the same.

You lose weight—weight you don’t need to lose—and you look skeletal, anemic, ill, yet people compliment your weight loss, another paradox of life in the body.