August 1, 2007

A Mysterious Double Suicide and Talk of Scientologists

Because I'm supposed to be writing--I mean, because I AM writing--a book this summer, I don't have on my bedstand the stack of mysteries I usually plow through this time of year. Which must explain why I'm totally engrossed in the recent double suicide of the art world's "It" couple, Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan.

Have you been following this story? Wild, tragic stuff: She was a 40-year-old game designer, filmmaker, and blogger obsessed with Kate Moss, perfume, and Kafka; he was a 35-year-old rising art star, his work having been collected at museums from L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art to New York's MoMA and the Whitney to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. He worked on the abstract film sequences for movie director Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love," and he created an amazing video for musician Beck's "Round the Bend."

Blake and Duncan were, the LA Times reported, "an impossibly good-looking, intellectually vigorous and socially popular pair of soul mates who moved gracefully among a set of likewise brainy, moneyed people who occupy the intersection of art and technology on both coasts."

Then, on July 10, Duncan committed suicide in the couple's East Village apartment. She left an exit note, and the last entry at her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, was a Reynolds Price quote: "A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

Seven days later, Blake drowned himself out of despair, police believe, at New York's Far Rockaway beach. Witnesses saw a man resembling Blake walk into the ocean stripped to his briefs, leaving behind his clothes, wallet, and a suicide note. Five days later, fishermen found what was believed to be Blake's body four and a half miles off the coast of New Jersey. Yesterday, the NYPD announced that dental records confirmed the report.

Blake and Duncan were extremely close, but many of their friends were surprised, as one put it, "that Jeremy would sacrifice what he had worked so hard to achieve and had been so excited about." In February he'd accepted a sweet gig as an in-house graphic designer at Rockstar Games. An employee of the video game manufacturer told the Times that Blake "looked like a rock star. He wore sunglasses indoors. Sometimes he sipped whiskey at work."

All this is sad and strange enough, but here's the weird twist. On July 25, the LA Times reported that the couple had been acting strangely in their final months, telling friends they were being stalked and harassed by...Scientologists.

Christine Nichols, a friend of Blake's, said the couple's "paranoia" went back to 2004, two years after Blake completed an album cover for Beck--a practicing Scientologist.   

"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols told the Times. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that.

"But it got to be something that was huge to them--a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."

Beck's spokesperson said the artist and the singer hadn't seen each other since they collaborated three years ago, and that their relationship had been "extremely cordial." A Church of Scientology spokesperson denied Blake and Duncan's allegations: "Never heard of these people. This is completely untrue."

With all the makings of a Hollywood script, the story of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan doesn't seem over yet.

Again. It's weird. Tragic. Oddly compelling. Where will this story turn next? Where, if anywhere, might these Scientology allegations lead?

Irrelevant but interesting: I did a double take when I read Theresa Duncan's funeral annoucement. Her services were held at Lynch & Sons in Lapeer, Michigan. Fans of Thomas Lynch, the acclaimed poet and author ("The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade") will recognize the name. Lynch & Sons is one of the nation's last family owned and operated funeral businesses--an inspiration, based on Lynch's critically acclaimed bestseller, for HBO's "Six Feet Under."

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