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About two months ago, I decided to kill myself. The reasons for this uncharacteristic moment of self-destructiveness are unimportant; all that matters, for the purposes of our story, is that I needed to decide on a method. Despite my lifelong admiration for Hunter Thompson, I ruled out guns immediately-- too painful, too messy, too much of a chance of not getting it right. Similarly, hanging and jumping off a rooftop involved too much potential for failure and subsequent long-lasting physical trauma. So it would have to be medication. I just happened to have a bottle of Tylenol PM sitting on the kitchen counter; my mother bought it on the recommendation of her doctor, but was too scared of the possible side effects to actually use it. But I wasn’t so irrational as to swallow the stuff without thinking first, and I went to Google to see what I could find out about its possible utility.

I quickly realized, after glancing at a few of the search results, that using any acetaminophen-based product to off yourself is a very bad idea. It’s evidently a very painful way to go. (For some reason, I’m unable to reproduce the results of my original search. Googling the words “Tylenol PM suicide” now turns up only five results, all of them links to ads for shady pharmaceutical firms.) But in the process, I also came across an article about the suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, and I became so fascinated with their story that any thoughts of doing harm to myself quickly disappeared. I read at least five articles about them that evening, along with most of Duncan’s blog. I have a feeling I probably wouldn’t have killed myself anyway-- my last genuinely suicidal period was back in high school, and even then when I stepped back and thought about things I always realized I had plenty to live for-- but finding myself absorbed in this complicated saga of paranoia and conspiracy theories certainly helped lift me out of the doldrums a lot faster.

I was prompted to reconsider all of this again today when I saw an article about Duncan and Blake in the new issue of Vanity Fair. It didn’t really add a whole lot to what I knew about their story already, though it did give greater weight to their friendship with Frank Morales, a New York pastor and conspiracy theorist. (This is most likely because the article’s author, Nancy Jo Sales, was married to Morales for two years.) But it did start me thinking about the media’s treatment of the couple, and the way they’d been almost uniformly portrayed as ranting nutcases in journalists’ attempts to figure out why they killed themselves. Sales’s treatment of the story is a little more sympathetic, but as with all the others I’ve read, it’s fairly quick to dismiss the heart of the matter-- that perhaps the seemingly paranoid fears that led Duncan and Blake to alienate their friends and business associates and ultimately end their own lives weren’t entirely unjustified.

A brief summary: Theresa Duncan was an artist and writer responsible for a number of CD-ROM games aimed at girls in the mid-90’s; she also had Hollywood aspirations, and had spent several years trying to get her screenplay Alice Underground filmed at the time of her suicide. Jeremy Blake was a pioneer in the world of digital artwork, and had worked on a variety of film and video game projects (he began and ended his career with Rockstar Games, the Grand Theft Auto people) and had numerous solo shows of his works at major art galleries. They met in Washington, D.C. in 1994, became a couple after both moved to New York the following year, and collaborated on each others’ projects. From all accounts, they had an extremely close and affectionate relationship, and all seemed well until they moved to L.A., and Blake worked on the art for Beck’s Sea Change. This is where the story begins to get murky, as Beck denies ever having a close friendship with the couple, but both Duncan and Blake claimed otherwise, and also maintained that he had talked to them about wanting to leave Scientology. (Beck dismisses this as “bullshit” in the VF article, but I doubt he’d admit it even if he really said it, given Scientology’s reputation for persecuting anyone who tries to get away.)

Duncan and Blake became convinced that Scientologists were harassing them-- they began receiving strange late-night phone calls, noticed suspicious people following their car and standing outside their apartment building, and became extremely paranoid about everyone and everything as a result. They began demanding that friends sign “loyalty oaths” and subjected everyone around them to lengthy harangues (both in person and via e-mail) about the conspiracy. Blake prepared a 27-page document he planned to use in a lawsuit against the church; it apparently accused Tom Cruise of sabotaging Duncan’s development deal at Paramount, though even her own agent doesn’t buy into that particular accusation (the budget was evidently too much for the studio execs). Eventually, they were evicted from their L.A. apartment, and they moved back to New York and an apartment in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church. Their lives seemed to become more stable, though there were a few outbursts of anger and paranoia late in the game; so everyone was surprised when Duncan killed herself with an overdose of Tylenol PM and Benadryl (washed down with champagne) on July 10. Blake never recovered from the shock, and a week later he walked off Rockaway Beach into the water, never to return.

Certainly, much of Duncan and Blake’s behavior seems bizarre, and perhaps borderline deranged. The way they turned on friends, colleagues, and neighbors, accusing them of being part of the Scientology conspiracy, is inexcusable. But what I find peculiar is that almost all the articles I’ve read treat the very idea of such a conspiracy as absurd (Sales at least recognizes the tradition of vengefulness derived from the church’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, and is a little more open to the idea that the couple may have been on to something). While they obviously took their paranoia way too far, it’s entirely possible that Duncan and Blake were right, and their descent into apparent madness may well have been exactly what the Scientologists wanted in the first place. In other words, they were intelligent enough to recognize the danger, but not savvy enough to respond to it in any sort of coherent fashion-- instead, they lashed out and alienated everyone around them, to the point where they felt trapped with no possible escape. Article after article speculates as to why two beautiful, successful people would choose such a grim end; but the answer is so obvious that analysis is entirely unnecessary. She saw the ruination of her hopes and dreams and couldn’t bear it; he couldn’t live without her. What other reason could possibly be required?

That’s not to say I’m condoning Duncan’s and Blake’s actions by any stretch of the imagination. After all, it was reading about their story that pulled me back from the brink, and I’m glad it did, because ending my life would have been a useless and stupid thing to do. But I can’t help but think they deserve better than the way they’ve been portrayed. The media seems to want them to be a traditional cautionary story-- the golden couple destroyed by Hollywood ambitions and torn apart by irrational fears, just another example of the entertainment industry’s corrupting powers. But the story’s a lot more complicated than that, and it’s unfortunate that all the post-mortems spend so much time trying to fit the tale into this comfortable narrative framework, instead of giving us any genuine insight into what Duncan and Blake were like as human beings or any understanding of their art. In their rush to get a meaty sensationalistic story, the media have obscured the more important point-- two talented, creative people ended their own lives, and the world is a poorer place for it. Maybe that’s a less compelling angle than madness and inscrutable paranoia, but it seems to me it’s the most important part of the story.

References/Related Links:

The Wit Of The Staircase (Theresa Duncan's Blog)

Jeremy Blake obituary from The Minneapolis Review with YouTube clips

"The Golden Suicides" by Nancy Jo Sales (Vanity Fair, Jan. 200 cool

"Conspiracy Of Two" by David Amsden (New York Magazine, Aug. 2007, and a good example of the media's emphasis on the couple's paranoia)