Chapter 53
I’ll be honest with you. Until Hannah Cortland shaved her head, I didn’t know much about her, other than bits and pieces picked up from internet perusing.
I knew she was a singer, that her style was puerile Goth meets beach blond—like the cheerleader in high school who paints her nails black to signify her inner anguish—and that young people cried over her on TikTok.
In other words, Cortland was the celebrity equivalent of fast food: light on substance, high on salt.
But when she shaved her head, she became interesting to me.
It’s rare to see celebrities undercut their good looks, given that those looks are part of the package that makes them money.
When Cort-land emerged from NYC’s Cathédrale restaurant, captured in those now-infamous photographs, half of her head shaved and middle finger raised, she essentially rejected a society that wanted to photograph her, look at her, control her.
That wanted her to be beautiful, that wanted her to cater to them.
It was rebellion, and for the first time, she had this art critic’s attention.
And now we get to behold her glorious public meltdown, which unfolded yesterday, caught on so many cameras, from so many angles, that you’d be forgiven for thinking Cortland orchestrated the coverage herself. It is, in short, the most interesting performance the young singer has given to date.
If her head-shaving was a degradation of the flesh, her beach meltdown was a Grand Guignol performance—a sensational drama, tinged with horror, hard to look away from.
Fighting against a rip current that wanted to pull her out to sea: What better metaphor could she have constructed for drowning in her label’s control, in the public’s mercurial favor, in her own infamously unstable emotions?
For a woman whose sadness many have questioned, what better way to prove what real grief and substance abuse look like, stripped of their romanticizing?
Cortland’s beach performance, while occasionally maudlin—particularly the clichéd rescue attempt by her former manager—nevertheless makes a strong statement: if you won’t remove me from public scrutiny, I will remove myself.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
Will Cortland end up ODing like Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, or Amy Winehouse?
Will she suffer an accidental death like Whitney Houston?
Be subject to a conservatorship like Britney Spears?
There is another option, of course: that she will rise from the ashes of a life she seems intent on torching, and emerge, phoenix-like, to take back control.
This critic hopes, for the sake of continued art, that Cortland chooses the latter.