Perfekt Syte
by Marc Andreottola
Tangled strands of hair like alien breath. They snake away from her face, foreboding and odd, slightly unnatural, giving her an out of joint appearance. She broadcasts her loneliness in video posts to the world. They are uneven, a kitsch parade of ideas of how she’s been trained to think a woman should be. She sashays into a room and acts surprised. She holds her phone camera at arms length from her face. “Ok, guys I just wanted to show you my beautiful Christmas tree!” She flashes a smile with two rows of blinding teeth, dead hidden eyes, chicken lips curled at the sides - a tense fractured smile. Then she tosses her hair to the side on cue. Cut to a series of shaky shots showcasing her twenty foot tall Christmas tree bedazzled with shimmering ornaments, set to holiday music. It looks like it was transported straight from Nordstrom’s. She acts like she made it. It’s unlikely her attention span would even allow her to set an ornament on it. There are never people in the big lonely mansion. She is not alone, but is helped by minders. Cut to a cascading sequence of shots of her on the balcony, on the veranda, in the tea garden. Tossing her hair from one shoulder to the other. Half-squinting her eyes. Shoulders always clenched. Jaw always tight. A look of uneven uncertainty forever in her eyes. Her tongue recoiled in her throat like a serpent scared to leave its cave.
I’m riding to Vermont. I’m driving on the deep road to nowhere. I watch her with horror, regret and willful complaisance. I don’t know her. I’m not even in the entertainment industry. But I have a connection to her. We are all Perfekt Syte. I have a little tube in my mind that tunes in, where they stick a cord and pump me full of her brainlessness. I look at her and wonder how very gone she must be.
I’ve come to Vermont to chase after a photograph of the blue butterfly. I’ve learned that the color blue is extremely rare in nature, almost non-existent. The blue butterfly isn’t even blue at all. But it has a mechanism which refracts shimmering blue light from its wings. It’s peculiarly chosen as the butterfly emoji on my phone. I send Jane a text with the blue butterfly, letting my heart explode once again.
The Sunday, December 15th Instagram post. “Syte Christmas”. I pore over Perfekt Syte’s social media feed. It fuels some sort of quest to satiate my boredom. “It’s funny how people always want to take a chance to be mean ! ! ! Never letting someone just live. If you have a problem then don’t follow me ! ! ! It is the season of giving and I don’t want any negative energy here ! ! !” Her words spurt out like a disgruntled teenager. She posts a picture of her on the veranda in the shadows. Her yellow extensions look like they haven’t been changed in days. There’s a stain on her shirt. Her eyes look dead and tired. There’s no way to see her pupils. You wish she was more than this. I look up at the sky. I think about all the soldiers and explorers who marched across these territories, spilling blood onto the indifferent carpet of dirt. Perfekt Syte must be an alien to them. Because she is insanely rich, has nothing to do and is trapped in bubble of boredom.
I made the mistake of saying she must be on pills. My boss, Tiffany, reprimanded me - “Let’s not make fun of someone’s mental health. I went driving in Vermont that weekend and kept tossing around Tiffany’s casual pedantry in my head. Why were they treating Perfekt Syte with such kid gloves? Was it not clear to others how far gone she was as a result of drug abuse? That started the juices flowing. I couldn’t help but call a spade a spade. And I went to bed in that lodge that night thinking - “Why can’t she just take a break from social media? From public life? What is this weird obsession with posting workout videos and yoga headstands in her backyard? When she’s clearly grinding her teeth and clenching her shoulders from being over-medicated. What in the culture has gone so wrong that we don’t think being over-medicated is a problem? What is mental health, anyway?
My girlfriend broke up with me for that last part. She said I was being “insensitive”, “cavalier”, riding a fine line between “cultural critique and mental health shaming”. I just lied in bed feeling dead inside, staring at the ceiling as she packed up her things. I kind of didn’t care. It seemed like there were so many questions in my head that the culture wouldn’t let me ask. It seemed like the best way to kill something was to paint me as a violator in some way. Someone who was out to shame and claim superiority. I thought about morals and ethics, but even those two words would get me into trouble.
I was passing through the mountains at that time. I couldn’t help but notice the twin mountains peaking up ahead, reflected in the still mass of water below. Like two diamond eyes staring back at me.
Number three - a Roald Dahl quote from her Instagram, sitting in a Syte box surrounded by marigolds. “If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely.” I wonder how she felt posting that. Or even if she posted that at all. Was it possibly just something her mother clipped out of a Reader’s Digest and placed on her night stand after a week of frantic midnight calls? I thought of what she must think when she looked at her face. When I closed my eyes to really deeply think about it, I felt shivers. Because it wasn’t just her - it was everyone. Every little morsel of media fed to every little girl since the words “goo goo” and “ga ga” fell out of their mouths. How to sit, how to stand, how to show off, how to be. How to be sexy. That was the word, sort of - but not all of it. How to be attractive. Getting closer. How to attract.
I went to get an ice cream cone that night down the street. While standing in line I looked at the large-scale of a giant seven-foot cone piled with scoops of creamy vanilla and chocolate walnut chunk ice cream in the warm lattice of a honey waffle cone. The gooey ice cream dripped on the anonymous hand holding the cone. A giant wild pink tongue plunged into the scoop’s melting creamy side. How to attract. I ordered a large. By the time it arrived my body was already preparing for it. Saliva gushed from the glands beside my tongue; the warm bowels had already begun excreting a delicate sequence of acids in preparation for the gooey sweet guest. Most of all that mental picture had formed. I was ready to be swept away by the pleasure in consumption.
They say a big turning point for the pop star Whitney Houston was when she starred in the ill-fated reality show “Being Bobby Brown”. A spiraling caught on video of sorts - a part of the thrill was the icon’s downfall. The “did she just do that” nature of the show. That was before social media for the most part. Before everyone started “just doing that”. And it made me wonder - when does it stop? When would it be too much?
As I drove through the beautiful Vermont forest, I began to think that maybe we would just arrive at the fact that it would never be too much. “Reality” and “social media” were great ways to take advantage and make money off people - to draw interviewers - to keep the fire going. So were drugs. There was no doubt about it. It was easier to manipulate people when they were on something, or easier to forget. About how stupid the world was. If your life had been stupid from the start.
Plate four: November 2nd. “Perfekt Syte - The Zone”. I’m entranced by the prospect. The Perfekt Syte Zone Experience is underway. She advertises it with a cheap video showcasing four sets from her heyday music videos. The video quality looks like late 90s Doom or early ‘00s Sims. She gushes about how she “can’t wait” to “share this experience with the world ! ! !” Sometimes I think her triple exclamation points act as a sort of morse code - a cry for help for someone to look for such things. As for the Zone experience, one has to wonder exactly what it is. Though I see it will take place in Vegas. Another way to capitalize. Even better - she won’t need to be there. Because she can’t. Because something is terribly wrong but no one will say what. At some point or another they make more off you if you die than if you live.
I kept driving. I think I was in Maine at this point. I’ve always wanted to do this sort of road trip. There’s something endlessly grand and beautiful about that freedom - I’m living the dream. I quit my job and I bought the Chevy Taurus. I don’t have a plan and I don’t know where I’m going. In a way I’m lost.
Have never felt a part of anything - except for through my projects. Those are how I interface with the world. I don’t like people enough to want to put together a team making a film. The only way it can ever work is if it’s just me - if I have total control. I sit on a picnic table in Acadia National Park and I watch the postcard perfect sunset. Up ahead is a family - each one of them with their phones pulled out, arms extended. From any other point in history they’d be seen as sun worshippers in a way - tossing out their arms in order for the light to touch them, to embrace them. But right now I see the impatience. Each of them move about, hoist the phone camera up and down for the perfect angle, and snap away. Then they each disperse, submitting the image to Instagram, sharing a moment with the programmed world. As I look at them I think about how banal my observation is - how obvious. Because who cares if they are wrapped up in the sunset - or whether they’re snapping it on their phone for preservation. As the sun hits its purple-hued finale then descends into darkness, it’s the quiet darkness that fascinates me most. There’s nothing to capture here. You are all alone with the stars. There’s nothing to tell. There’s no one to be. It’s Perfekt.
Plate five: She swam sixty laps today. October 17th. Her face is cut off as she speaks to the camera, with an almost goldfish-like absentmindedness. She is gushing about how she swam sixty laps - how “beautiful and glittering the sun is” - how “Perfekt today is”. The video then cuts to a sped-up clip of her walking back and forth in a pool, waving her arms. Evidently what she calls “swimming”. Watching it I have to wonder how these videos get out. Surely, there’s teams to vet these things. Why is no one around her telling her how crazy this is? How absurd it looks? For a forty year old to pretend she’s seven.
As I drive into Nova Scotia I wonder what I don’t know about. As a regular person, you hear things but you never know the full story. There’s a part of me sometimes that wonders if Perfekt Syte is even a real person at all. Perfekt was what her parents named her. She came from the Syte family of Mississippi.
She was trained from a very early age to be this thing - having joined the Mickey Mouse club after a successful stint as a six year-old on Star Search. She had the demeanor of someone stuck in a child’s vantage point of the world - of someone in retreat to that purity of excitement and play. But needless to say, like Baby Jane, she was now veering into grotesque comedy, with no self awareness at all. Just the impulses of a constant need for approval. And as I drove I thought about that look in her eyes. Two sad post-dead orbs that felt they were executing “self care” by popping the pills they’d been prescribed. It made me angry. Anyone with half an ounce of sense would know that ten years from now they’d be talking about “over-prescription” and “over-medication”.
I saw how it worked with Jane. Before we broke up she was accessible, smart as a whip, erudite, focused. It was the loss of her brother in a car accident that was the first blow. Then she got laid off and was forced to face a slump in employment. She turned to those medications to erase the stress. She told me she felt no joy in life - that she was bored and unmotivated. At first it was one sequence of medications, then her psychiatrist layered on another. There wasn’t an immediate change - it was gradual and immersive. One day I could just see something had flipped - she was some other version of herself, but also missing something integral. What I also noticed is that she was easier to control. Whatever the mainline of conversation was in the culture, she wouldn’t contest or question it. Suddenly everyone was talking on radio shows and on TV about “living your best life” and “self care”. And she wouldn’t talk about how these phrases might be hooks for other things. But then again I’m cynical. I just see that there’s money to be made and services to be rendered. But Jane came back at me with the “mental health” thing. For her, there was no conversation.
At this point in my journey I was in rural Canada with thousands of miles of flat terrain ahead of me. As I looked ahead I wondered why anyone needed to share anything. I thought of how little we needed, actually. This vast expanse of nothingness enveloped me. It was bliss just to let go and drive.
Plate 06: “You guys - omg - I just got back and look what they did to my closet!” This video unfolds in a typically scatterbrained way. We flash through a sequence of Perfekt Syte’s closet, organized by color and sometimes theme (“nineties”, “Christmas”). But what I notice - what I can’t take my eyes off of - again - is Perfekt Syte’s tangled tresses - a weave that appears to have not been washed or combed in weeks. Her blotted mascara revealed these two overly widened (scared) raccoon eyes. And then there’s the posture (everything) - which resembles a child at salute - a seven year-old who is taught how to engage and interact on camera - someone stuck in a rendition of themselves. That same old record playing again.
This landscape is endless. I see things I never imagined I’d see. Throngs of caribou pepper the landscape - at least a mile long mass. The herd of animals shifting over the interminable passage with no vegetation for miles. I wonder how it is that we get so caught up in the minutiae of our stupid little lives. What if every man could just have a car and a road before him - and be able to freely roam. Without abstractions or distractions - on the endless plain that is the world. This drive is the first time I’ve ever thought of my attention as a commodity. My refusal to look at every stupid little thing I’m told to look at seems valiant to me. And yet - in some domain of my brain circulate thoughts of Perfekt Syte. Of who she really is. And it irritates me. Because I see the chaos behind it. Because like knows like and I know what’s going on.
Perfekt Syte strikes me not only as someone who wants to be liked, but as someone who has become so used to the attention that her life seems empty without it. Maybe that’s my issue with social media. There’s the idea that you cannot live your life fully unless you are capturing it for display on social media. It’s like working a job without ever getting paid. The whole “just a click away” concept of modern life I find nauseating. Part of me feels Perfekt Syte feels the same way. Somehow it was safer when a record company controlled everything. And everyone was pushed further back. And all you had was just the mystique.
I remember exactly when Jane started “joining the conversation” on social media. Maybe it was because she felt the world didn’t care enough about her. Maybe it’s just that she wanted to join the club. Suddenly she was posting on her Instagram in half-formulaic ways - with a redemption story, a personal growth story, a flashback story. Without a clue of who she wanted to be - but desperately wanting to be something.
I remember one time she posted and only got three likes. She also noticed that two people unfollowed her. These sorts of things really got in her head and ruined her night. “It’s just the algorithm.” I reminded her. “I don’t know why. What have I done wrong?” That was what killed me. That she was filling her head with useless junk trying to figure out how to best play the game in order to be liked. As if it was a duty in her life. It bothered me. I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Jane, you don’t owe anyone anything.”
After that I actually uttered three words that even I was shocked by. Namely because they were words that seemed to be just a patch of sloganeering manufactured and churned out by the culture - “You are enough.” She shed a tear. But I felt dirty saying it. Because what if Jane wasn’t enough. If she wanted to be accepted - enough for whom? That’s how I look at the whole social media thing. It created a “conversation” where there once was the peace of nothing. I was another drama to worry about. It elevated everything and made our lives ridiculous. Suddenly everything was a reality show. I never wanted to be part of the conversation, but now it was not optional.
In Northern Canada I saw a dead bird. It was a strangely beautiful red canary - very tiny. Maybe it’s wings were frozen in flight. There were so many beautiful things in the world that would go unnoticed. I wondered where that red canary was flying to - in the middle of an endless nowhere. Ambition was an ambiguous and world-distorting state to be in.
Plate 07: September 2nd. “Good writing is always a threat ! ! !” A quote against a backdrop of old nineteenth century books - among them, Keats poems and Gulliver’s Travels. And below that, she writes in her caption: “But my question is - what is genius writing?” This sort of post makes me most curious of all. I look at it and wonder if there’s not some hidden meaning. She has a strange commitment to the three evenly spaced exclamation points. I try to imagine her reading Gulliver’s Travels, but I can’t - and if she did, what would be channeling through her head while reading it? Is it a dream of being someone else entirely? Of imagining an escape to another life? And why is writing a threat? It’s her quote - not taking from anywhere, but her. Are her lyrics somehow a threat? Looking at her back catalog I see suggestions - all alluding to…a dark world of desire which she lives in. “Hit Me”, “Slave”, “Blacked Out”. It’s all those phrases that are so overused and overwrought to portray a brand of endless lasciviousness, a myopic sex kitten, an interminable case of physical devotion.
I think of an image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. Pensive, bespectacled, hand beneath chin like Rodin’s The Thinker. Did she actually read that book? Was it a PR stunt? Was it an effort to connect or “be taken seriously” by then-husband Arthur Miller? We only have a sea of images, half proclamations and suggestions now. Marilyn Monroe nowadays might have been very much like Perfekt Syte. The pores and cracks and facile conjunction with impulsiveness seemed to thrive like mold on the worst parts of people. An eagerness to watch a train wreck, the thrill of being a train wreck, the vapid desire for constant affirmation, the reversal of privacy, the eradication of self and the constant promotion of a persona confused for “the real you”.
I’m finally in Anchorage. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. Just a bit more to go. Anchorage is a cute coastal northern city, reminding me of Minneapolis in the late sixties. There’s a certain gone-ness in a place like this. Like a time capsule almost. It’s refreshing to be somewhere else on American soil and yet so remotely located. It’s so odd to find a slice of America way up here. I toy with the idea of moving here for good as I sip my coffee. A little town where I can think, write, and escape into the epic hinterlands all around. Perfektly anonymous living.
She would have never let me go. I would have been stuck there forever - building a family, mortgaging a house, burdened with children. I just wanted to be free, do what I wanted, go where I felt I needed to go. It’s hard to let go of an idea of yourself which you’ve held onto for so long. It’s hard to build the new habits or take the plunge to find that other self. When finally the cravings mostly ceased and I found this other person inside and realized that through the passing I had finally shed the previous skin.
The landscape on the morning I leave Anchorage is clean. There’s a thick blanket of pure Syte snow against a crystal blue sky. The air is so pure with oxygen and untainted with chemicals that it almost makes you feel like another person. It’s almost as if by not being stuck to our homesteads that we become other people, better versions of ourselves, moving closer to who we want to be.
Plate 08: July 27th. She’s dancing to”Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” - she marches with boxy shoulder stiffly towards the camera and manages a hair flip and head tilt, then turns away. You’ve seen the rehearsed move in countless music videos. If there’s a music video camp where Mouseketeers go to as children, they teach that move there. Except now, approaching forty - it’s stiffer, calculated, lacks ease, lacks fun. It’s robotic. I start to wonder if she in fact is a robot - yet there’s too much pain in her eyes for that. She’s suffering from something much worse - a chronic state of emptiness.
Last I heard from Jane was one long block text rambling email, followed by a sequence of nineteen rambling block text DMs. It was a pouring out of every sharp slight and a wish for me to be someone I’m not. Suddenly any reservations I had about her were met with triple exclamations of pain proclaiming how much I hurt her. It made me wonder about a lot of things. I could tell some form of substance was involved. But I couldn’t tell what. My guess was that it was a nasty combination of elements both prescribed and unprescribed. She became someone I didn’t recognize - someone who needed attention. And I shut down. Blocking comes naturally to me - as does running away.
I don’t know that I would call my cross-country excursion running away. But it did seem I was seeking oblivion, in a way. Having deleted every social account. Having told no one about my adventure. Having quit my job, sold my things and just gotten into a car heading north. Having left my camera. All I have is this phone. But let me say. As much as I love the act of diving into the abyss of nowhere, I do cling to the random tidbits of celebrity gossip and American news. They remind me of home. They make me feel safe and give me the hysterical illusion that I am connected.
As I drive through the night woods of central Alaska, I think about how remote it is - how lost I feel. There’s nothing here. And there’s a whole world happening out there. The branches seem like jagged scratches against the sky, nature’s wooden lightning. I feel homeless and wonder where I’m going in life. It’s so easy for me to judge. And yet I’m more lost than anyone.
Plate 09: June 26th. It’s a video of her painting. She’s out on her veranda, perched on a stool, a long brush in her hand, an easel before her. The camera starts from farther away, then moves closer. If you didn’t know this was Perfekt Syte, then you might think that what is on the canvas might be good, but you can’t see what is coming. Five flowers are spaced across the canvas. I get a feeling like when you see young girls write with a certain type of handwriting - as if it’s a form of development arrested at age nine. What is fascinating is her commitment to mediocrity. Even more fascinating is the thousands of comments below the post - tens of thousands of likes. The more stupid, the better. The more it exists in cavalier irony, the better. But that’s not Perfekt Syte. And then I get very sad. Because I’m looking at someone who is trapped, in a way. Someone who was never given a chance to get out. Someone who lives bound in the realm of cuteness - and who is rewarded immensely for staying there.
Someone eternally stuck in age twelve is easier to control, will live an easier life - but it’s sad, in a way: the person who they ought to become is dead. They are like a living ghost. This is what I want to tell Jane. This is what I want her to know. One last fiery argument was about Perfekt Syte. “Just let her be whoever she wants! She doesn’t need to be a role model for you!” We were in a car driving South to visit her folks. “I’m not saying she needs to be anyone. I’m saying she’s trapped in a culture where she needs to be constantly liked.” Jane didn’t speak and I didn’t speak. In my head I told her what was really on my mind, but no I didn’t speak. I told her that in twenty years I bet they’ll find out those meds had Swiss cheese effects on the brain. “Well, what do you want then?” She glared. “Do you just want people to kill themselves or suffer or die?! Is that what you fucking want?” Jane had some spittle at the corner of her mouth. Did I speak or did I not speak? I couldn’t remember. It occured to me there was a bunch of things I said which I now couldn’t recall…only seconds later. It occurred to me that somehow I was doomed. When I looked over at her she looked like someone else entirely. With bloodshot eyes and a raging heart throbbing against her chest, shoulders clenched, every nerve tensed. I took a breath. It wasn’t who she was…it was something creature inside my eye that was making her into something else. I resigned, hoping not to say anything more.
“Just stop up here at this gas station, please.” She said. At the gas station she went inside and called an Uber. She didn’t take her suitcase or anything. She went back to our place, took what she needed and made arrangements. That was the last time I saw her.
I’m at some town on the rural west coast of Alaska. I got to thinking at one point about just driving off the cliff edge in the distance. It’s hard for me to accept the news about Jane. I think about every word I said - how I might have been more sympathetic, if it would have mattered. And then I think I’m blaming myself for something I had no control over. And then other times I’ll think of her medications and what role our crazy over-connected delusional world played in it all. Mostly I feel rage at the world. I feel like her soul was stolen. I feel like she became someone she thought she was supposed to be. But then I know I don’t know who I’ve become either, as if a parasite had taken me over somehow, and bit by bit there was less and less of me left.
Down below I see a glint on the water - something shining in the distance. It’s dusk, though, and I can’t make out the details too well. When I squint I think I see arms flailing. It looks like a car is sinking. But I’m not sure. It looks like a man flailing his arms and crying for help. But I’m not sure. The radio is on. I’m just sitting there listening to NPR, stunned. I’m not sure if it’s a man or a buoy, a car or a rock, a fish or a bird. I see the cliff above - I see there are other cars to help him. Are they all empty? Is someone calling for help? He seems to be sinking, drowning or gasping for air? The water must be frigid and deadly, as cold as ice. It won’t be long. And then I hear the garbled message of the announcer, going in and out, as if to remind me, “Perfekt Syte, 39, pop icon - found dead today.”