The Ghost Network (3 page)

After the premiere of the “Apocalypse Dance” music video, and amidst conflicts with her record label about her delayed second album
Cause Apocalyptic
, Molly Metropolis updated her Twitter account more frequently with pictures of her dance rehearsals and
workout sessions. She retweeted fans and, in true Stars!-They’re-Just-Like-Us fashion, she grumbled about hangovers: “11-11-09, 2:16pm @MollyMetro Stayed up late celebrating the ‘Apocalypse Dance’ video premiere. Too. Much. Red. Wine.” She also Tweeted quotations from her favorite philosopher, Guy Debord, often unattributed: “11-16-09, 5:33 a.m. @MollyMetro I’ve written much less than most people who write; I’ve drunk much more than most people who drink.” Sometimes she altered Debord’s words to meet her own needs, for example, changing, “Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit,” to “11-14-09, 4:25 p.m. @MollyMetro People are told they have a choice between love and a garbage disposal unit. I say fuck love, fuck garbage, EAT POP INSTEAD.” After popular celebrity gossip website
Oh No They Didn’t
posted a story about record execs cutting some of her touring perks after she badmouthed them to Rolling Stone, she tweeted from the first page of De-bord’s
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
: “12-03-09, 10:22 a.m. @MollyMetro I obviously can speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care to not give too much information to just anybody.”

Although most of her fans didn’t identify the real writer of some of her Tweets, savvy readers could’ve picked up some revealing hints about Molly’s inner life from her choice of quotation sources. Gawker.com wrote a short piece titled “Is Molly Metropolis a Secret Guy Debord Fan?” The answer, of course, was yes.

Elle
put Molly on their December 2009 cover. She returned the favor by giving interviewer Eliza L. Pinkett her most revealing interview to that point. She told Pinkett stories from her childhood, teetering on the edge of talking about racism without fully committing to a serious dialogue: “Growing up, I was very theatrical and dramatic and strange, and I had this gigantic mane of wild, really thick hair. Most of my friends were white girls with thin hair, they didn’t know how to help me look good. It was the nineties so everyone was trying to have that really straight Jennifer [Aniston]
look.” She also talked about the difficulties of dating as a superstar, “What I don’t understand are the guys who don’t want to be with a successful woman. It’s so sexist! It’s like, don’t they want to be with the best version of me? The one that sells hundreds of thousands of records and gets to spend every night with thousands of my Pop Eaters? If a guy can’t deal with that, then he’s the one that has a problem, not me.”

Molly couldn’t keep Debord out of the
Elle
interview, explaining fame to Pinkett in Debordian terms: “In the past, being a pop star meant specializing in the ‘seemingly lived,’ superficially representing one personality type or another. Like, one pop star is the pretty virginal one, and one is the wild child, and one is the unlucky-in-love one. But I’m not superficial, I’m not a type, I’m a woman! I don’t want my fans to get some simulation of life from watching me, I want them to listen to my music and feel that it describes, and improves, their own life. I want them to identify with me, but also know that I’m my own person.”
^a

By the time the
Elle
profile was published, on the eve of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis’s following had become increasingly passionate and fervent. The creativity and ferocity she devoted to what would’ve otherwise been standard pop songs caught the attention of “highbrow” critics and thinkers, as well as teenage pop devotees. She insisted on her and her fans’ non-conformity with society, even as she sold millions of records, as music critic Tesfaye Likke wrote in his controversial article “Eulogy for Molly Metropolis—2 Years Later”: “Molly made her ‘Pop Eaters’ out to be more punk than the mall-punks they grew up with, more rebellious than the pseudo–Che Guevara disciples they sat next to in Econ 101, and more revolutionary than all the kids living in filth at Occupy Wall Street. She created a scene where people could claim non-conformity
by listening to music made by the most popular artist in the country. And she made that paradox feel logical. Her inexplicably powerful charisma trumped better judgment. That quality is rare in a musician, and hasn’t been seen since Kurt Cobain took his own life.”
^b

When Molly Metropolis vanished during her massive Apocalypse Ball tour, she left 152 dates unperformed, costing her record company upwards of twenty-five million dollars and disappointing thousands of fans who had given her their hearts, souls, and money. At the time of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis had more than forty million Twitter followers, and fan sites by the hundreds. The abrupt end of millions of parasocial relationships became the greatest and most frequently broadcast loss. “She was a part of my actual life!!!” a typical (though with a marginally greater grasp of grammar and spelling) YouTube commenter exclaimed. “I’m going to miss her because I really really felt like she was talking to me—she answered a question from my twitter in an interview once and it was so amazing.”
^c
Molly often Tweeted her exact location, providing a link to a map with a drop-pin, making her physical person even more present in her fans’ realities than all other pop culture phenoms before her.

After Molly disappeared, a few kooks came out of the woodwork to offer elaborate explanations. A popular Illuminati conspiracy theory website called The Vigilant Citizen weighed in with their particular brand of insanity. On August 12, 2009, the website had published a long article called “Molly Metropolis: An Illuminati Puppet,” which claimed Molly was a mind-controlled puppet and that every time she posed for a picture with her hair over her eye (which, admittedly, happened a lot in her early press photos and the
music videos for her
Cause Célèbrety
singles) she was making herself into the All-Seeing Eye. The Vigilant Citizen wrote: “Those who have passed Illuminati Symbolism 101 know that the All-Seeing Eye is probably its most recognizable symbol.”

According to The Vigilant Citizen, Molly Metropolis disappeared because her “Delta” or “killer” programming had been activated and she completed her “final Illuminati operation,” then vanished to hide the evidence of her actions.
^d
With the story, The Vigilant Citizen ran an early publicity photo with Molly dressed in a black T-shirt with a deep V-neck; she holds the back of her hand up to her left eye to reveal the tattoo of an eye inside a triangle that Molly has on her palm. Needless to say, the police never investigated “Delta programming/evil Illuminati mission” as a possible explanation for her disappearance.

Leaving behind the wildest conspiracy theorists, most people argued over whether Molly Metropolis had been kidnapped, killed, or had left of her own volition. Various broadcast news reporters and Internet commentators fought out these three opposing viewpoints until they had nothing new to say.

On January 8, Molly Metropolis was scheduled to play the first of two shows at the United Center, the heart of Chicago’s ice-covered Near West Side. Despite a windchill of ten degrees below freezing and system-wide delays on the L, ticket holders arrived early and in droves. Girls and boys—the most conservative dressed in leather and leotards, the most ostentatious in full costume as Molly Metropolis herself—lined up outside of Will Call, giggling and jostling each other with excitement. The dance floor was crowded by 5 p.m., with sweaty teenagers jockeying for the spots closest to the stage.

Molly performed songs from
Cause Apocalyptic
, at the time still unreleased, as well as all the singles from
Cause Célèbrety
, to a gyrating crowd of three thousand Pop Eaters, as her dedicated fans had christened themselves, riffing off an interview Molly gave to MTV. com: “I want to live in a world where the only thing you need to drink is music and the only thing you need to eat is pop culture.”

The show began with the projected image of a glowing black-and-white skyline, not specific to any city. A “chopped and screwed” version of the opening melody of “Apocalypse Dance” then played, as the projected city started to degrade and crumble. The sound of a pre-recorded intro filled the room: “My Pop Eaters. The ones who eat pop for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You are the city kids. The ones who ran away to the city, the ones who are born there, the ones who dream of it. I’m not talking about L.A. or Chicago or even New York City. My name is Molly Metropolis”—here, the recording pauses for a burst of applause—“and I’m the city where you live. And in my city, we live every night like it’s our last.”

The recorded voice faded and the fallen city turned translucent to reveal Molly Metropolis in a dress of bronze metallic lace sparkling against her light brown skin, her arms reaching toward the sky in a V. The music cut out, and she belted the opening lyrics of “Apocalypse Dance”
a cappella
: “Tonight / might be your last chance / t-t-tonight / to get one last dance.”

As the
Chicago Tribune
’s music critic Bran Hollis Brooks pointed out in his review of the show, when a concertgoer is used to the pop shows of artists like Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Christina Aguilera, seeing Molly Metropolis perform is an aurally surreal experience. At the time, most other pop stars lip-synced to album cuts of their hit songs while devoting their stage energy to dancing—but Molly actually sang while she performed. The airbrushed, autotuned album might be more conventionally beautiful, but nothing makes a concert feel more like a concert than hearing someone sing
live. In the years since Molly Metropolis debuted, most new pop stars have followed her model.

As with all of his Molly Metropolis coverage, Brooks spent a good portion of his review (published before her disappearance became public knowledge) re-examining the “phenomenon of Molly Metropolis” and attempting to draw some satisfying conclusion about the nature of her appeal, though obviously flummoxed by his own appreciation of her. Like a dog staring confusedly at his own reflection, Burns wrote, “Perhaps, in a long year of job loss and economic decline, America needs an oddity to gawk at like Depression-era Americans visiting freak shows. Molly Metropolis is no Bearded Lady, but she scratches the same cultural itch.”
^e

After the concert, Molly Metropolis held an after-party at the Peninsula Hotel on the Miracle Mile with a small group of dancers and friends, including Nicolas Berliner. They kept the hotel bar open until 3 a.m., two hours past the usual closing time, after which Molly retired alone to her private suite.

On January 9, Molly woke just after 9 a.m. and ordered a breakfast of fruit, yogurt, granola, orange juice, coffee, and the Peninsula’s signature Truffled Popcorn. At 11 a.m., her driver took her to the concert venue for a brief rehearsal with her choreographer. That afternoon, Molly decided to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), again with a group of dancers and friends that included Nicolas Berliner, as well as her assistant Regina Nix and several other members of her close-knit group of creative collaborators. Although the museum was less than half a mile from the hotel, Molly insisted on driving herself there in the sporty convertible she had rented for her thirty-six hour stay in Chicago. She asked Berliner to ride shotgun. According to Berliner, Molly initiated an emotional, personal conversation in the car. She told her friend that
she treasured the few minutes they were able to have together, apart from the rest of the crew, and that she wished they were able to spend more time alone. She even asked after Berliner’s imprisoned girlfriend, Marie-Hélène Kraus, a subject Molly often avoided. She proposed a “weekend getaway” for Berliner and herself after the tour was over.

At the MCA, Molly had the opportunity to view pieces by Jeff Koons (including “Pink Panther,” “Rabbit,” and “Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank”), as well as “The Unicorn Tapestries,” on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She also signed autographs for fans and art lovers. While they walked through the galleries of the MCA, Molly convinced her bodyguards that she would be fine driving from the museum to the venue by herself. She craved “space to think.” Apparently Metro, as all her bodyguards called her, left her security team behind as often as she could, whenever she felt safe, especially in cities like Chicago where the paparazzi was considerably less present than in New York and Los Angeles. Molly left the museum alone at about 2:15 p.m. That was the last anyone saw of her.

By 3:15 p.m., Molly’s tour manager, Florence Tse, began to get worried. Molly had a phone interview scheduled for 3:20 p.m. and they couldn’t find her. By 5:30 p.m., when Molly was late for her call time at the venue, her staff and colleagues were on high alert. Despite her flashy, indulgent persona, Molly was a punctual person, and when she didn’t show up on time, she called ahead. According to Tse, Molly “never arrived for anything more than five minutes after she said she would be there.”

Tse called Molly’s cell phone multiple times. Several of her dancers called or sent text messages; no one received a reply. Nix was also M.I.A. and didn’t pick up her cell phone or Molly’s. An hour and a half before Molly’s set was scheduled to begin, the doors opened and the audience quickly filled the theater. Minutes before the Scissor Sisters’ opening set was scheduled to start, Nix arrived at the
venue, breathless from exertion, emotionally overwhelmed, and in possession of Molly’s cell phone. Nix had conducted an exhaustive search of the hotel grounds and nearby boutiques, working herself into an anxious fit before hurrying to the theater. Nix had left both her phone and Molly’s on silent, and in her rush to find Molly she had forgotten to check her missed calls and messages.
^f