How will we tell the story of Jeffrey Epstein? Reports that the notorious 66-year-old pedophile and millionaire financier committed suicide inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on the morning of August 10, 2019 prompted the most immediate and overwhelming backlash of skepticism that many in my generation—millennials—can remember. Within the course of a wild day online, it became clear that Epstein’s “suicide” had become our moon landing, our Watergate. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes quickly buried the pitiful trickle of official reports that the guards watching him “fell asleep,” and the cameras trained on his cell “malfunctioned” or were “mistakenly” recorded over. The frenzied, furious spread of the people’s narrative of doubt has, incredibly, trumped the official narrative. But it may also have contributed to the slow erasure of the raw nerve of human suffering exposed at the center of the story—Epstein’s victims, who in the wake of his death remain in the same position where they stood during his life—silent, unavenged, and shrinking in the rear view mirror of history.
Yet what else are people supposed to do with the shock, disgust, and righteous indignation stirred from reading about the horrific exploitation Epstein subjected his victims to? Not to mention the psychosis-inducing, decades-long cover-up of it all? And how do we square these “appropriate” feelings with the “inappropriate,” perverted, yet very simple human fascination with the moral rot of other human beings? The desire to poke the carcass just to see if it jerks? To the question of how we can attempt to perceive the whole, unbroken picture of Epstein’s impact on our nation and its psyche—to join the very public conspiracy with the dark, unspeakable, and very private reality of the harm he inflicted on countless voiceless, nameless young girls, Dasha Nekrasova, the writer, director, and co-star of The Scary of Sixty-First, has offered an answer.
The Scary of Sixty-First is the actress, podcaster, and “dirtbag” socialite’s first feature-length film as writer and director. Nekrasova is known mainly for co-hosting the podcast Red Scare with art critic Anna Khachiyan. The two slice and dice the ironies and miserable banalities of American life in late capitalist decline, trading in the corny, thwarted masculinity of most of their contemporaries for a smooth and stylish stream of vocal-fry inflected jokes and takes. Their provocative commentary on topics like feminism, communism, identity politics, and in fact, Epstein (who Nekrasova developed a very public fixation on after his death), have made them both icons in the literal sense of the word—hostile, disbelieving bile and idolatrous hero-worship are regularly projected onto them both in equal measure.
Multiple cancellation attempts haven’t stopped Nekrasova from starring in a handful of urbane, mumble-coreish, micro-budget scene films, like Eugene Kotlyarenko’s 2018 Wobble Palace and Jordan Blady’s Softness of Bodies, from the same year. Nekrasova has always winkingly positioned herself in the archetypal lineage of the “aspiring actress,” embracing both the glamour and the doom associated with its most iconic representatives— Naomi Watts’ Betty/Diane character in Mulholland Drive and Warhol superstar Candy Darling come to mind. But on screen the impact she has is subtler and less distinct—certainly magnetic, but elusive, unguarded in a way so sincere it often reads as stiff and unpracticed, calling to mind Kristen Stewart, another actress who is regarded in some circles as a genius, and in others a talentless hack. Contrast that with the persona generated by her podcast and various shit post-inclined social media accounts, which provide the material for the most dominant public reading of Nekrasova, as a hyper-cultured, sensory-deadened, irony-poisoned, red-pilled, ironic, disaffected, feckless provocateur.
This is all to say that Nekrasova’s cultural position is complex, very fresh, and almost certain to be misread. In a time when well-intentioned, liberal cultural orthodoxy dictates that art should be didactic, morally unambiguous, and non-confrontational, it is very easy to read The Scary of Sixty-First as provocative for the sake of provocation. But Nekrasova is after something much deeper, more essential, and contrary to the surface matter of the film, almost apolitical.
The Scary of Sixty-First is about two friends (Addie, played by Betsey Brown, and Noelle, played by Madeline Quinn, who also co-wrote the screenplay) who move into a weirdly spacious but altogether average railroad apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The realtor is odd, dodging Addie’s questions about why such a spacious unit is so cheap, why the previous tenants left their weird furniture, and why the backmost bedroom has a private entrance back into the building’s stairwell. But the girls sign the lease anyway, happy to have found such a steal in a prime location. Their first night, while getting drunk on White Claws, the doorbell buzzes. Addie steals a look out the window. “It’s just some girl,” Addie says. In fact it’s Nekrasova, whose strange, nameless character gets simple billing as “The Girl”—perhaps another callback to Mulholland Drive. Noelle and Addie playfully freak out and Addie starts to duck, but not before she and the Girl make eye contact—the beginnings of a bond that will leave one of them dead and the other psychotic by the film’s end.
Nekrasova’s “Girl” comes back the next day, and after that never really leaves. As she insinuates herself into Noelle and Addie’s lives, the film’s narrative logic and formal coherence begin to disintegrate, mirroring the spiritual and psychic descent its dynamic trio take into a hell of paranoia, conspiracy, and demonic projection. The Girl is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, and believes the apartment on 61st was one of his exploitation chambers. She carries around a little briefcase filled with Epstein ephemera—clippings, printouts, bits of mail from his 71st St. mansion, and lots of amphetamines. Noelle bonds to The Girl immediately, partly out of erotic curiosity, partly to spite Addie, who used to live comfortably on her rich daddy’s (code for pedophile, according to Noelle) dime, but mostly, and this is where Scary is strongest, out of an inexplicable, irresistible compulsion toward degeneration. They get high on Vyvanse, print out loads of conspiratorial message board scrawlings, watch drone videos of Epstein’s “pedophile island,” and hyperventilate about Prince Andrew, the CIA, the Clinton Crime family, and so on.
Nekrasova marks the Girl and Noelle’s manic devolution into conspiratorial insanity as specifically millennial—overexerted but underperforming, goaded by a proximity to wealth, and always mediated by technology. But meanwhile, Addie is undergoing a transformation of her own: one that transcends time, culture, and irony. From the first night Addie spends in the apartment on 61st she feels changed. She hears voices, has dark dreams, loses her appetite, and begins blacking out for longer and longer periods. As the Girl and Noelle reach for the essential truth behind the Epstein conspiracy, dosing themselves with whatever mind-modifiers will help them see more clearly (drugs, sex, smartphones), the reality behind the Epstein conspiracy—the legion of little girls he raped, abused, and drove out of their minds—reaches out for Addie. Scary posits that the intellectual, analytical approach will never comprehend something as fundamentally psychotic, ancient, and unbearable as pedophilia. It is in fact psychosis itself, a sensual derangement, that perceives the truth, often to the permanent detriment of the perceiver.
Addie at first wants nothing to do with Noelle and the Girl’s Epstein obsession. But that hardly matters. The residual traumatic memory of the crimes committed in the apartment on 61st—in Addie’s own bedroom—burrows deep like seeds into the loose soil of her open mind. Where Noelle and the Girl are cerebral internet dwellers, Addie is an actress—all physicality and spirituality. She is guileless, an open vessel. She doesn’t begin to be interested in the Epstein case, she becomes the Epstein case. Those seeds sprout into childish regressions. She begins sucking her thumb, wearing uncomfortably adolescent outfits, and talking in googoo-gaga babble. Addie unwittingly channels what Noelle and the Girl are too cynical to see—Epstein’s victims, summoned forth from the very site of their victimization but still too undeveloped to understand it as such. In one scene, Addie, smeared in her own menstrual blood and squatted on top of a mess of Prince Andrew paraphernalia, pets a likeness of the royal pervert and his ex-wife Fergie, before suddenly becoming seized with the confused, wrathful resistance of the child victim. She punches, scratches, pierces the photo, jumps up and down on it. It is a scene of such raw power, performed with such pathetic vulnerability, that it actually made me weep in a way I still struggle to understand.
All of us who live under the grinding, extractive, soul-curdling sign of neoliberalism find ways to protect ourselves from its influence. Cloaking ourselves in layers of irony and doomerism is the approach du jour of millennials. One can hardly blame us for resorting to glib, I’ve-seen-it-all detachment, when the alternative is to become like Addie. Like a mortal instantly burnt to a crisp when they behold the body of the godly Zeus, Addie is driven to psychosis the moment she perceives the true totality of the Epstein case—a case that might be called “unbelievable” if its very incomprehensibility weren’t so representatively contemporary. The Scary of Sixty-First tells us a dark, important story about our present moment. But will we listen?