A WONDERFUL CARICATURE(of intimacy)

Panic! at the Disco is known for many things—Brendon Urie’s angelic voice, the stylistic mash of rock and alternative pop, but perhaps their most well-known nuance is their tendency to name their songs things which never appear within the lyrics. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, their first album, is rife with this—I Write Sins Not Tragedies, Nails For Breakfast, Tacks For Snack, and Build God, Then We’ll Talk are all prime examples of this. The latter, the surreal exposition of a story regarding a “virgin” (insert your own quotation marks, if you will) who meets up with men in a seedy motel—“any practiced Catholic would cross themselves upon entering”—to further herself in life, has a phrase that pervades throughout the entire song: “What a wonderful caricature of intimacy”, a line that Urie sings with a desperate passion. It fits the story told quite well, but in a larger sense, it can sum people up.

I recently discovered the writer Oscar Wilde, an English playwright (and sometimes novelist). One of his famous quotes—and there are certainly many—goes as follows: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Our society is media-based, our brains a massed conglomeration of all the shit we’ve seen and processed and absorbed. It’s nearly impossible for our minds to create anything original, whether that be artwork or music or even simple reactions to life around us. Our movies and television shows have demonstrated to us what the “proper” way is to react to things. Our responses are exaggerated and melodramatic, purported by the histrionic hunger we have, deep in our hearts. The emotions we feel are dictated by what has come before us. Romanticism is rooted in the lessons of Dear John, war in G.I. Joe. Life presents us with brand new situations every day, private joys and triumphs, individual woes and tragedies. The possibilities to cause something new, to break out of the caricatures, are manifold, but we stick to the script in that ever-faithful human blindness. Looking at my own life, my own experiences, I know this is true. I pride myself, egotistically, on being an individual. I pave my path in more than one way in our suburban bubble, but plop me in the middle of a city—New York, Los Angeles—and I’ll slip into an ever-growing crowd of wanna-be “individuals” (insert your own quotation marks, if you will) who actually have processed the originals who came before them into a pulp so incorrigible that they can’t even recognize it for what it was themselves. My sadness is felt—and truly, is felt—perhaps not because of what I experience but because something in me knows that I should be sad because of it. Rationally, I’m a strong person. I solve my own problems, but media tells me I should be upset about my parents’ divorce—so I am. In my first serious relationship, I flirted not in the way that perhaps was my true heart, but in a language corroborated from hundreds of thousands of books and songs and movies. When it ended, I rationally wasn’t upset—and yet I was upset. Part of it is simply that losing someone is shitty, no way around it, and another piece was that the lack of a clear answer as to why he dumped me sent me spiraling into a beautiful depression centered around my inability to like myself. I hadn’t been in love with him—I had been in love with the thought of having a boyfriend, the idea of having a boyfriend. It didn’t

matter, as horrible as it sounds, that it was him—so long as it was somebody. If that’s not a caricature of intimacy, I don’t know what is. Media tells me that to be happy, to find confidence in myself and my actions, I should have a handsome and heroic boyfriend to save my hidden—yet absolutely existing—inner damsel in distress. In reality do I need that? The opposite, in fact. I’ll quote RENT: “You’ll never share in love until you love yourself.”

Even this essay, in fact, is a caricature—of sorts. The way I write is inherently poetic, failing in what good writing always needs to do—strike at emotion. I wrap how I feel in layers of eloquent wording so as to, even while pretending to spill my heart, hide whatever real emotion is left under the crushing mass of media that resides in all of our chests.