Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Quietly, with a few of his closest friends (all male), he began planning the construction of New Babylon. They found a location and developed strategies for how to actualize, how to “manifest,” Constant’s fictional city. Debord simultaneously began planning his final film Guy Debord: son art et son temps , that is, Guy Debord: His Art and His Times (which, despite the title, isn’t a biopic) as a cover story, to keep his acquaintances and wife, Alice Becker-Ho, in the dark about the New Babylon project.

Over the next decade, Debord supervised the building of the city from afar. In 1994, the city was inhabitable enough to accommodate even an aging man like Debord. To remove himself from the Society of the Spectacle and become a full citizen of the Situationist city, Debord faked his own death by suicide on December 1, 1994. Molly wouldn’t tell me the methods he used to fake shooting himself through the heart (perhaps he paid off the cops, coroner, etc.?) and maybe he never told. His two co-conspirators, publisher Gérard Voitey and writer Roger Stéphane, followed him on December 3 and December 4. Their deaths were called “copycat” suicides.

Debord, Voitey, and Stéphane, all old men in 1994, didn’t build and inhabit the Situationist city alone.

“Lots of young French men and women, people in their twenties, psychogeographists, went missing in 1994 as well.”

I must’ve looked startled.

Molly laughed. “I didn’t mean to make that sound so nefarious! Nothing untoward happened. I merely meant to imply …” She paused again, laughed again, exuding such warmth and vivacity, was so familiarly herself, so much the woman I remembered from MTV and the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” music video, that I shuddered.

She said, “My aim was to soften the blow of explaining that Guy and many of his contemporaries, while geniuses, can’t do the heavy lifting. At the time they were doing a lot of building. We are still doing a lot of building. Our building will never end.”

Molly held her arm above the table and flexed her bicep.

“You see how strong my arms are getting. We have a number of manufacturers but there is still some heavy lifting to do. I’m speaking both metaphorically and literally.”

“So you are designing and building, both.”

“Yes!”

“Can you explain the city to me?” I asked. I realized, the moment after I asked the question, that I was interested not out of journalistic impulse, but because I wanted to picture where she and Cait were living.

“It’s not hard to explain. In the early days of the Situationist International, especially then, they were basically declaring that architecture would revolutionize all lives, everyone’s everyday lives. People could be released from ordinary activities — wake up, drink coffee, go to work, drink wine, fuck somebody, sleep — and become citizens of a city in a world of experiment and play. Possibly this would mean some kind of anarchy, but most likely not, order comes out of chaos, that’s what happens. It happens inevitably, I think. Several millions of years ago, we were hunting bison with our hands and teeth and now there are magazines that are designed only to report on the music business — how many peoples’ lives are supported by just one of those magazines, even now, when print media is falling apart? I’m not sure Guy would agree with me on this point, but he chose not to visit with you.

“So they promised this new way of living to the whole world, but when you promise something to the world, the first person you promise it to is yourself.”

She put her hands on her heart, and continued speaking while holding that pose:

“And the second and third people that you promise it to are your comrades, the ones who are helping you make that promise. The Situationists failed the world but mostly they failed themselves. They wanted to keep their promises, even belatedly, to as many people as they could.”

“It’s a compromise,” I said.

“No.”

“They said — I researched this — they said they didn’t want to create, what did they call it? ‘Holiday Resorts.’ ”

“New Babylon is not a Holiday Resort.”

“No this — this is a Holiday Resort that you’re describing. You’re selling me a timeshare in New Babylon.”

“No. For one thing, you don’t get to go and come back to your ‘regular life.’ A Holiday Resort is something you can visit on the weekend, and when the season is over, you can leave. And when the resort becomes unfashionable, you can move on to the next one. But not for us. It’s either old world or New Babylon. The only reason I disappeared rather than fake my own death was because we were aware my body would be more highly scrutinized than the average citizen of New Babylon. To live there, you must renounce your citizenship of this ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ to quote Guy.”

“Some people would say that, by becoming a famous pop star, you were actively upholding the Society of the Spectacle.”

“I was trying to change what pop culture was, what it meant—”

“You did that.”

“—until I discovered I didn’t have to. We have large plans. We won’t stay a secret place for very much longer.”

“That’s why you let Cyrus give me his work? And why you came to talk to me?”

“Guy and everybody didn’t want me to come,” she said, running her fingers through her thick mane of messy blondish hair, so long that the ends still retain some of the blue dye I recognized from her “Apocalypse Dance” music video. “But I thought it would make a good end to the book.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it will make a very good reveal, I think.”

“Cyrus showed me his draft and I thought it lacked narrative symmetry and I realized that I was the only one who would be able to provide it. So I made a decision, even though there are people who won’t believe that this is actually happening. They will dismiss you.” She spoke slowly and firmly, enunciating every word — her style from a life of giving interviews.

“You’ll let me take your picture?”

“Sure. That will make some people believe it. Some people will always think you faked it. I hope the right people believe you.”

I must’ve looked deflated. She was right, of course. Before visiting the train station, I had begun to face the reality that putting my name on this book would be the end of something for me, but it was disconcerting to hear it so assuredly confirmed.

“I understand that it might be a bit frightening, but we all have to put a bullet through our hearts. Even you, in your own way. You’ll be killing your credibility , which is a version of yourself. Your death will be as metaphoric as Caitlin Taer’s.”

I told her I agreed, even though she sounded a little insane to me. I also refrained from mentioning how much she liked to talk about metaphors.

“Don’t worry about what they will think of you,” Molly coached. “We should always try to be our best selves. And our best selves are always moving forward.” Then she slipped into her pop star pout, and threw half her hair in front of one eye as she had in so many red carpet pictures. “Haters gonna hate,” she said.

“ ‘Don’t worry what they think of you,’ ” I repeated. “So that’s why you’re letting this book happen? To come out of the closet, so to speak.”

“That will happen with or without the book. Debord has been negotiating politically for years, we will be an independent nation eventually.”

“Then why did Cyrus have to fake his death? If I wanted to come, would I still have to ‘die’?”

“Yes, you would have to fake your own death. And the reason you would have to is the same reason as why Cyrus had to. We require complete commitment.”