Flawlessness Is Essential

by Alexandra Molotkow

Beyoncé is not interviewed for Margo Jefferson’s September Vogue cover story. That sort of thing never happens! Except with Beyoncé, all the time. “At some imperceptible point around 2013 to 2014, she appears to have stopped giving face-to-face interviews,” Matthew Schneier writes in the Times. “A member of her team told a reporter in May that despite numerous appearances, she had not answered a direct question in more than a year.”

She may have concluded that face-to-face interviews are not in her interest. (She keeps an archive of all of her media mentions and all photos of herself.) She occasionally comes off daffy, as when she told GQ in 2013, “I’m more powerful than my mind can even digest and understand.”

Jefferson said: “She has to be studying how effective her interviews have been so far. She may have decided that they do not contribute as dazzlingly to the portrait of Beyoncé as the other stuff. It’s a perfectly reasonable decision.”

First of all, that quotation is not at all daffy — how could a person, a person together enough to hold down a marriage and project as much togetherness as Beyoncé does, digest that much power? Your head would explode. It strikes me as a very “human” statement, but there you go, that’s the point, why should she have to get all mere-mortal if that’s not what her and her audience have agreed on?

I’ve been thinking a lot about these lines from Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City:

One’s own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one’s friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign is such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities — the fear, the anger, the humiliation — that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another’s company. Coleridge and Wordsworth dreaded such self-exposure; we adore it. What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

This attitude goes for celebrity as well as friendship, and Beyoncé’s public presence is a powerful rejoinder. It’s not just that she’s perfect; it’s that being perfect, or pursuing perfection, is an explicit part of her act. Messiness was fashionable for a long, long time, and public people were encouraged to lay their vulnerabilities bare. I think the fashion now has more to do with total optimization. Vulnerability gets tiresome, and in all things, it’s usually the least vulnerable who receive the most praise for showing their vulnerability.

It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are. Yes! Best Self is as much Self as Sloppy, Undercooked, Here-You-Do-Something-with-This Self. Make no mistake, there is value in imperfection and a certain amount of mess, but only when it’s interesting and compellingly presented. The audience is never your therapist. And you could say that, by hiding in plain sight, Beyoncé takes care of hers.