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Summary
Chapter 9: “NIXON!”
This chapter switches from a third-person narrator to the voice of a magazine article-cum-diary entry with several footnotes, written by Stephanie Salazar’s brother, Jules Jones. The article discusses a lunch meeting during which Jules interviews Kitty. Jules begins the article by describing Kitty’s freckled beauty and snarkily noting that she stays on the phone for a full five minutes after he sits down. The overexuberant way she apologizes, in Jules’s opinion, means she’s one of the "nice celebrities" who act relatable to make reporters write favorable things. Jules finds this dull and insincere, and prefers mean celebrities for the material they provide. He notices all the people in the restaurant turning to Kitty as if she puts out a magnetic field; in the first footnote, he explains how the concept of particle entanglement in physics might explain this reaction. When Jules asks Kitty if she enjoys the force she seems to exert, she responds modestly, that she doesn’t understand or deserve it. Jules compliments her older movies to her face, but dismisses her new work for the article’s reader. He then uses a sandwich analogy to describe how people—including Kitty and their waiter—suppress their real responses under a layer of appropriateness. Jules waits until he thinks it’s an appropriate time and then asks her if she’s sleeping with Tom Cruise, her new movie’s costar. She denies it.
Jules watches Kitty eating, describing how she sucks the dressing off her finger from her Cobb salad. The next footnote is composed of Jules wondering why he ever thought this small motion meant she might be coming onto him, especially given that he is in his fifties and she’s 19. This footnote also reveals that Jules is writing the article from Rikers Island Correctional Facility, a prison. Jules asks Kitty about her career plans, prompting her to express a series of curated-sounding desires for true love and children. Jules explains to the reader that he’s inserting himself so much into the story because he wants them to understand what happened and how Kitty behaved. The interview isn’t going anywhere, and Jules suggests they go for a walk; he makes sure to leave a gap behind Kitty so he can watch her legs move. They walk to central park and Jules rhapsodizes about Kitty’s youthful skin. They sit on a grassy slope, and Kitty talks about her new movie. Jules feels like she’s reading an ad and suggests they change the topic to horses. Kitty shows Jules a photo she carries of her own horse, Nixon. Jules shoves her back in the grass, wanting to rape and then kill her so he can fully penetrate her being and touch the center of her. Before he can, Kitty maces him and then stabs him in the leg with a penknife. Jules is arrested and convicted on several felony charges.
Jules can’t help but note that his trial begins on the same day as Kitty’s newest film opens. He angrily writes that the newspapers wrote endless fawning stories about Kitty after the incident, and that she’s successfully made herself a martyr without having to die. She only adds to his fury by writing Jules a letter while he’s in jail, apologizing for stabbing him and for her role in the incident. In the final footnote, Jules writes to the editor of the magazine and pitches putting up checkpoints to measure people’s success before allowing them into Central Park. He also requests that these “rank infamy equally with fame” so that he and Kitty can be judged equally.
Analysis
This is another chapter written in an unusual format, as it’s presented as a combination of magazine article and journal entry. The first-person narrator is Jules Jones, whose voice grows less attached to reality and more delusional as the writing goes in. Because he loses track of her personhood in his obsessive observation of her beauty, Jules completely dehumanizes Kitty and sexually assaults her. This chapter provides a critical examination of the cult of personality surrounding celebrities, and the serious harm that idolizing someone can cause.
It's important to remember that the “profile” Jules gives of Kitty isn’t actually what it seems. It’s not just an interview, it’s a cross-examination of the things Jules believes Kitty did to entice him. Kitty’s the actor, but this article is a performance in itself, designed to reveal certain aspects of her character while concealing others. From the outset, Jules is acutely aware of the performative nature of his task. He’s writing from jail, where he’s still locked up for the crime the article describes. He notes the serious discrepancy between Kitty's public persona and her private self, a gap that he aims to exploit for his article. He tries to convince the reader that Kitty’s public face and her private one are very different, though both are beautiful. In order to make himself sound credible, he incorporates elements of academic writing into the piece, using footnotes to expand on ideas. The writing itself is, as such, a highly constructed and unique document, which Jules puts together to try and be understood. This idiosyncratic approach points to the constructed nature of celebrity identities, the very thing he’s trying to argue his audience into understanding.
Jules is clearly mentally unwell and an unreliable narrator. His instability is difficult to immediately distinguish, however, as the article begins in the sort of measured, sardonic tone a reader might be used to in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Jules wants to make sure the reader understands that he sees through Kitty’s pretense of niceness. She prefers to communicate with the public via the internet and her phone, which immediately throws Jules off. His obsession with revealing something authentic about the events of that day is part of his desire to re-establish his own identity and sense of self-knowledge. In an effort to break Kitty’s composure, he uses aggressive, often inappropriate interview tactics. He’s desperate to find a way in, to communicate authentically with Kitty
Jules's perception of Kitty is heavily influenced by his views on gender and power. Because she’s a celebrity, in a sense she isn’t a real person to him. Instead of being a human, Jules sees Kitty as an object to be dissected and understood. He notes that he feels this way during their interview, noticing that her skin is perfect, that nothing “hangs or sags or snaps or wrinkles or ripples or bunches.” At the time of writing, he examines these feelings in detail, taking on an almost scientific tone as he remembers her “smooth, plump, sweet, slightly fragrant sac.” Jules has reduced her to a series of textures and assumes that he’s the superior intellect in this situation. This is a failure of self-knowledge in itself, as Kitty navigates these interactions with a mix of pleasant resistance and partial compliance.
The power dynamics between Jules and Kitty are further complicated by Jules's own insecurities about his masculinity. His violent fantasies about Kitty are spurred by his feelings of inadequacy. Having already effectively dehumanized her, as he does all women, he feels able to treat her with no humanity whatsoever. Rather than trying to communicate with her and penetrate her shell of celebrity glamor, he attempts to penetrate her sexually. He literally wants to tear her apart in order to separate the public Kitty from the private, “break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her.” For Kitty, the media is a double-edged sword in the aftermath of this. Jules attempted to rape her for reasons having to do with her fame. She diligently handles the publicity following the assault to further her own career, knowing that publicly forgiving a figure like Jules would practically sanctify her in the eyes of the public. Jules, conversely, uses the media to try and explain himself to the public, even though the same news organizations and celebrity rags are the cause of his downfall.
