Pop star Billie Eilish has supposedly found her true self, so why does she look so miserable? In a Rolling Stone profile to promote her new album, Eilish confirmed that she is into girls and presented herself as a suffering artist, with accompanying photos showing her looking dirty and unhappy.
This echoed another Rolling Stone profile from earlier this year, in which Kristen Stewart portrayed herself as loudly and angrily gay, proclaiming, “I want to do the gayest f-cking thing you’ve ever seen in your life.” The accompanying photos also showed Stewart looking unhappy and almost aggressively unattractive (which takes some doing for her).
These profiles are reminiscent of other female celebrities such as Ellen Page, whose photoshoots after transitioning to “Elliot” tend to be portraits of unhappy androgyny. Instead of showing their rainbow identities as sources of liberation and joy, these women are marketing themselves as angry and even miserable.
And it is marketing. Interviews and photoshoots don’t just happen. They are carefully arranged to promote celebrities and their projects. Thus, it is odd that these women are presenting themselves as wretched. As Eilish puts it, “My whole life, I’ve never been a happy person, really. … I experience joy and laughter and I can find fun in things, but I’m a depressed person. I’ve suffered with a lot of depression my whole life.”
The most remarkable part of these interviews is the apparent consensus that wretchedness will resonate with fans. Misery may love company, but it rarely advertises
