Jesus Fucking Christ

You’d be amazed how many times a girl can come back from the dead if she’s pretty. Doing it once is impressive, sure, but I’ve been doing it since I was eleven, maybe ten. I’ve been doing it a lot, especially, since I turned sixteen, because that’s when they all noticed me for real; that’s when I started to pick up all of my followers, or I guess you could call them my disciples. Most of them adore me, and they want to be just like me, but a few of them want me to die, to really die, and to stay dead. Well, too bad, assholes. (Or fuk u, which is what I got my manicurist to paint on my middle fingernail when I appeared in court, because I knew there would be—as there always are—pictures.) The crown that I’m wearing on the cover is actually a necklace; it cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and I’m pretty sure it came from Belgium. The whole time we were shooting, it pricked at my forehead, and all I could think about were needles. I don’t know what that’s like yet, but let’s be completely real—I will. I’ll have to. Frankly, it just made me wonder if the necklace or my face was worth more money; whether if it drew my blood, they’d wash it off, or if the blood would make it special and they’d sell it like a relic. 

I turned 24 this year, and that’s like being 33 in actress years. When you’re literally 33, and you’re a star who is a girl, you might as well get in the tomb and let them roll the stone across. No-one ever says whether Jesus looked the same when he came back, but I personally know a ton of people in their thirties who quietly disappeared for a while, and they all came back looking new—new eyes, new mouths, new chins, new tits, all of that. They were women, obviously. You can come back different in another way in Hollywood, of course, and I’ve already tried that myself: I played a stripper, this drug-addled, nymphomaniac stripper, and the film was kind of bad, but honestly, I wasn’t. It made everyone forget that I used to be all cute and Mickey Mouse-y, at least, even if they said some unkind things as well. What I’d hoped was that they’d see that I was capable of being truly real, but I don’t think they want reality at all; they want stardust, diamonds, powder on the edges of your nostrils when they photograph you leaving a bar. I have no idea how much being a messiah is like being an A-list actress, but I’m guessing either way, you have to draw a crowd. You need pizazz. What I mean to say is: I read once that dying is, like, an art, and I don’t want to say that I’m an artist, but perhaps you should ask Meryl Streep what she thinks. Perhaps you should ask Jane Fonda. Perhaps you should ask my Mom. 

When I saw the magazine for the first time, my first thought was just how good I look in white. I didn’t used to, with my freckles and my pale skin, but now somebody comes to my room at the Chateau once a week and sprays me darker, nearly orange, until I start to resemble a more expensive person—sunny, healthy, free from sin. Like somebody who sleeps eight hours every night. Although Olivier did this crazy text to go with the shoot, and he said that I “live for the nightlife,” in a “realm of darkness [and] light,” which still sounds sinful to me. He put something weird about my dad’s “enticements” in it, too, but whatever—so French, right? I wanted to say to him: You know who else was famous from when they were a kid, and had a weird relationship with their big, mean dad? Ha ha ha. A few other things Olivier wrote about me, good and bad: that I’m like Marilyn Monroe, which is good because she’s basically my idol, and bad because she really died, without ever coming back; that I “live in two worlds,” which is, in a sense, true, although I can’t tell if he’s being nice or not; that I am “maybe the sex icon of [my] generation,” which is funny, because I don’t have as much sex as everyone assumes.

I was raised Roman Catholic, anyway, so all this Jesus stuff is old news to me. It’s also kind of sexy if you squint: all the kneeling and the whipping, and Him not wearing a shirt in any of the famous paintings, looking just like Jared with those abs. Maybe I’m just saying that because I know that TMZ will end up covering it, and I’m kind of bored. Aren’t you bored? Don’t you feel like we’re resurrecting all of the same stories over and over and over again: drugs, fat ass, DUI, bullshit, clavicles, breakup, blah blah blah? I could yawn about it. This one time, I fell asleep in a hotel room, and nobody could wake me up for hours and hours. I was in this other place, a secret place where I felt cool all over; it was as if I’d been suffering from a fever for as long as I could possibly remember, and now somebody was holding a compress to the whole of me—to the actual inside of me, my heart and lungs and guts—and the sudden change in temperature felt so fucking good that I forgot how to open my eyes. Every scene I had ever appeared in danced across my eyelids like a private projection: me, split into two, speaking in two different voices; my red hair and my teenage face in a high school cafeteria; my rage, another fake father figure; all those crocodile tears. It was like I didn’t have a body at all, like all of it was nothing but a movie, and you know what? I deserved an Oscar for it. Then when I did finally wake up, it was into all the same old shit again: tabloids, desperate publicists, run-ins with the law. I wanted to say to everyone, you should have seen what I saw in there—you should see how good I am when I don’t have to be me, when I’m nothing but talent and air. No father, no sun—no San Tropez in a spray-can, even—just my holy ghost. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, even when the crown is actually a necklace. That, you can print verbatim. 

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist, based in Norfolk. Her first full-length essay collection It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me—which centres around various famous women, including Lindsay Lohan—will be published by Virago in July.