Forbidden Fruit FIONA APPLE'S IMAGE: USED OR ABUSED? by Sonja Czarnecki graphic by Scott Herman Pop star Fiona Apple operates in the shadowy region between girl and woman, where self-consciousness and awareness of sexuality collide, sparking that teen wisdom that burns brighter because it is fleeting and ignored. The fact that she was raped when she was twelve has lent something to her power as well. All her photo shoots and videos capitalize on her personal history by displaying her vulnerability to the point of fixation, despite her in-your-face stage presence. Her image is marketed as part of the "new wave" of female presence in popular culture, supposedly a greater and more empowering one than ever before. Apple's music confronts her feelings about her agency in surviving rape while holding on to her sexuality. Her image, however, remains fixed on the appearance of a beautiful, just-abused victim warrants examination, especially when a lot of people are making money off her abuse. Spin ran Fiona Apple's sultry visage -- silent-film-star eyes and cherry-red pout -- on the cover of their November "Girl Issue" with the enticing caption: "She's been a bad, bad girl." In her song "Criminal," that line belongs in the context of the guilt experienced after cheating on a lover. But on the cover of Spin, the quote references her, not just the song. Anyone who's heard anything about Apple knows about her rape, which she is not shy about explaining. So perhaps her crime was looking so mussed and sexy -- like damaged goods to be had at low cost. That's the implication of Esquire's caption, "the sweetness of bruised fruit," which accompanied a photo of her in the shower, the first place many bewildered rape victims go after the trauma. Before young women are told to embrace these representations of sexuality by the magazine industry, it's important to explore why, how, and through whom these images became her persona. It wasn't inevitable. Open the pages of Spin and you find Apple contorted in an awkward fetal position on a red sofa. She's trying to make her body as small as possible as she pushes herself between the thick blood-colored cushions. They envelop her and she disappears, struggling back up the birth canal, perhaps. Her dark blue and red makeup and disheveled hair make her look like a defeated post-trauma victim. Her mouth is agape, and her hair winds around her face and neck. This strangling gesture itself is ambiguous and might be read as either an attempt to asphyxiate herself or struggle to breathe freely. However, in the context of the desire to return to the womb, the choking hair and hand on neck convey the former, corresponding to a desire to suffocate or drown in embryonic fluid. Strange, then, that in her own words Apple has said the opposite about herself and her music. Her manager described the creative process to the Spin interviewer as "the place that artists go." Apple interjected: "Are you talking about me? Because if you're talking about me, then it's not about 'a place you go.' Making music, I mean. It's about a place you get out of. I'm underwater most of the time, and music is like a tube to the surface that I can breathe through. It's my airhole up to the world. If I didn't have the music I'd be underwater, dead." Between text and image, the spoken and the seen, a contradiction exists. If, as Apple has claimed, she approves of these kinds of images of herself because she controls them, her readers and listeners might wonder what she's getting at, or who's really in charge. The photographs in Spin represent only one example of what's problematic about Fiona Apple. More familiar is her "Criminal" video, which further alludes to her abuse. Unnerving and edgy, the video displays her huddling semi-clothed in harsh, Nan Goldin-inspired lighting, looking like one of the self-abusers she documents. Here the interviewer reveals something about Apple's relation to her image-makers, and we learn that she consented to this style not as a literal reflection of her true psychic state, but as an "ironic" statement. Describing her initial reaction to the video script, she told Spin she was surprised at the in-underwear-in-the-back-seat thing because it just wasn't her. Then the director persuaded her that the image was "ironic," and thereby gained her consent. Apple has said these images are okay because now she's "doing the exploiting (her)self." Actually she's a mighty pop star and rape survivor, wryly and self-consciously playing upon the victim/perpetrator power dichotomy. The tables have turned. The exploited becomes the exploiter. Go girl power. According to her own remarks about her image, Apple would like to believe that this reversal works. But since the object of abuse is consistently her own body, no distance or space exists in which irony can occur. Her rape is too much a part of her persona as a musician for there to be a clear, or even subtle, division between persona and person. Her rawness, her honest pain -- not coy artifice -- catapulted her to fame, and not accidentally. In her fatalistic suffering Apple plays a messianic role: "It's impossible for me to be happy; psychologically and chemically impossible ... So I'm going to help some little girl out there ... Please say that I don't have my shit together. I want to give that girl some hope. I want her to know that she doesn't have to have her shit together. She doesn't. It's okay if she doesn't. I'm going to prove that, and then I'm going to die." Apple sees herself as both a sacrificial lamb and the embodiment of some kind of political awareness. But the state of permanent victimhood she offers via the media is rife with psycho-sexual complications created not only by Apple, but by her managers who knew a marketable product when they saw it. Fiona Apple's skyrocketing popularity represents not necessarily the empowerment of a rape victim, but the commodification of abuse. Thrown into the blizzard of images that constitute the "girl" phenomenon Spin is spinning, Fiona Apple's vulnerability becomes one more fragment in a collage wherein difference and individuality rule, but only at the level of appearance. All the more unfortunate, then, that Apple's musical and personal struggles for self-expression don't find representation in an industry that won't let go of her painted, abused body. Most obviously, Apple's bruise-colored eyes and painful positioning conveys the pairing of sex and violence as acceptable and beautiful. But faulting photographers, designers, and editors for their treatment of Apple is ultimately quixotic, for the larger question goes back to "The Girl Issue" and the media trend it harkens. As Laura Miller points out in another article in the same issue, the fundamental message of this new celebration of "girl culture" is that "plain, ugly, or cute (I might add raped), a girl's looks will still speak louder than anything she could ever say." Beneath all the rhetoric and self referentials of "girl" cool, its message couldn't be less ironic or less empowering.

back to Decweb main