I can’t seem to get my mind off of it, so I figure I might as well write about it. Lonelygirl15 is quite possibly the most intense and emotionally wrenching coming-of-age story I have ever experienced. I use the word ‘experienced’ because one does not just watch lonelygirl15. Not only did I sit for 12 full hours, mesmerized, allowing the entire first season to unfold, it is a drama/sci-fi (in a strange turn of events) that plays out entirely on YouTube in the form of various video blogs recorded by the main characters, which includes mysteries requiring the viewers’ input and “comments” to carry on the plot. The blogs begin in various bedrooms of suburban California but, along the course of the story, are often recorded on the run or in hiding from the elusive and ever-mysterious Order, across the entire country.
Bree is the main protagonist, and also the focus of this study. She is a convincingly normal sixteen-year-old girl who clearly yearns for adventure in the same way that all youth do: without the understanding that adventure is most often a synonym for disaster and danger. Without the understanding that once you’re in, there’s no getting out.
It’s hard to say why I find her such a compelling character. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s female, as most protagonists are males who I definitely hold as role-models but ultimately end up having little in common with, save the genitalia and sex-drive. Whereas females I have always shared a certain emotional connection with. This could be perhaps because I am slight of frame – I certainly don’t have the look of a classic hero – and tend to steer toward the more analytical side of action. I’m a planner, not a killer; a sympathizer, not an assassin.
There is much more though, I think, that draws me to Bree’s character. She is homeschooled but also has experience with the public school system, and in her short time there was ultimately shunned as a bookish outcast who just seemed to be out of tune with the rest of the world. She is being raised by religious fundamentalists who never really provide a firm grounding for their blind belief in an almost frightening system. She is heavily sheltered from the outside world, mostly spending time in her room, with her books, and only a sea of strangers to communicate with, which can only be accomplished clandestinely by dictating her thoughts on the internet. And lastly, she has that special something that she did not ask for, that she did not seek out or train for. She is no super-heroine, but she was born gifted, and there’s nothing she can do about it. There is no way she can escape from it.
These are all traits I see in myself, and painfully close calls to my own past. Thus, I think that what I’m experiencing in this feeling of closeness with this character is that her story is my story. Even the title itself speaks to me: I could have easily been, given the right time-frame, lonelyboy15 (before all the science-fiction enters the plot, admittedly). She is the first real hero(-ine) that I can see myself actually reflected in.
And then, there is the fact of her innocence – which is something in my own adventures and mishaps and pitfalls that I miss and wish to return constantly. I have some strange abhorrence for the undeserving youth’s loss of it. It pains me to watch it. Never before lonelygirl15 have I seen it so truthfully, so brutally portrayed. We watch, over a period of just over a year, as Bree’s childish spirit falls from its lofty heights in an excruciatingly happy – yet, for her, “boring” – sky to a harsh, violent and shattered earth which has laid its designs for her bare and plain. We watch as her soul rebounds again and again, retaining some of its former glory and shimmer, just to have its hopes dashed, loves chided, its dreams lost.
Eventually, we see her stagger; we see her begin to lose hope. And finally we see the Order threaten her with the one pain she cannot endure: the theft of another’s innocence in exchange for her own freedom. Knowing as well as she does that she can never reclaim the naivety of her former life, we watch her give in, not without designs of her own, but at the cost of her soul. They do not just take her life; we watch the Order take her friends, her family, her very expectations of a future guaranteed in her sixteen-year-old mind. We watch a whole world hatch and then burn, unmercifully.
Bree is the most successful hero(-ine) I have ever seen depicted. She chooses to sacrifice herself for the sake of all the others like her. She knowingly goes to her death in order to guarantee life, forsaking all sense of memory and reputation. In all literature, heroes face this choice. But how often do they ever have to actually pay the price? Nearly every time, the hero survives because that’s what we want; even though we know that it could never actually happen. But in one of the most shocking and rapid climaxes of any adventure story, we watch an unconscious Bree’s heart give out, as the last of her blessed blood is drained from her body, in order to stay the life of an elder of the Order.
“The innocent die, so that the guilty can live.”
This may all read as terribly cliché, but you just have to experience it for yourself.
See, she seems so definitely real to us as viewers because for the first several episodes, Bree is just a “dorky,” quirky-but-cute homeschooled girl whose only friend is a neighbor who has a crush on her. For the first hours of her story all we see is her playing and laughing, joking about everything in a world so full of promise, without even so much as a shadow of the doom that awaits her.
And the most incredible part is that it was all thought to be real. In 2006, Bree, the eponymous lonleygirl15, portrayed by New Zealand-raised actress Jessica Lee Rose, was perceived as just another video blogger in a million. Everybody believed in her authenticity until her story spiraled so wildly out of control that it caused us to question: Is this really happening? As an unsuspecting audience, we believed in her until her world made us afraid.
Goddamn. If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.
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