Red Flag Days
It's prime time for the chaos agents
(Note: if you’re seeing this via email, click on the headline—Red Flag Days—and it will link you to a better-looking format.)
I’ve gravitated in the last couple of years to stories about the poor souls who get taken in by people who have Cluster B personality disorders, and the mental and emotional chaos it brings to their lives. The excavation of these tales is trending. The perpetrators of the damage are the kind of predators who lean into their pathology, and the people they hurt often live in a state of “death by a thousand cuts,” though really it’s more like someone planted a dirty bomb inside of them that keeps going off, sometimes years after contact has ended.
The abuse is not in the least gendered: men are damaged by manipulative women, too. It’s not limited to romance. Cluster Bs corrode every sphere of our lives: business, politics, friendship, family.
(I attempted to explain Cluster B here, and how traits we associate with it seem to have metastasized into the wider culture, Animal Farm-style. Here’s a pretty clean page of simplistic descriptions. I can’t diagnose any of the people I write about, of course, so this is all armchair stuff. This post is opinion. But I mean, if it barks like a dog… ).
In the last few years, we’ve heard from FKA Twigs about Shia LaBeouf; from a number of woman going public about Armie Hammer; and another considerable list of women who had harrowing experiences with Marilyn Manson. There’s more: Brittany Murphy (RIP) under the thumb of her odious husband. Standup comic Iliza Shlesinger got taken in. I’m not settled on Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (she’s not coming out of this looking as innocent as I thought her to be; a new defamation trial starts today). In a minute I’ll get to Anthony Bourdain’s suicide following his relationship with Asia Argento.
These kinds of tales have special power right now, I think, for a couple of reasons: 1) the world’s current splintering feels a lot like a series of cons run by hustlers on every side, and, 2) in our more isolated, screen-heavy lives, we’re losing our in-person whisper networks that tip us off to who the real and hidden vampires are. Like people who watch a lot of true crime, one instinct driving this interest is about gathering more information in an act of self-preservation. We hope it helps us spot red flags. These stories are validating, too. They help those who’ve been screwed over feel less naive, stupid, or crazy. I mean, the excellent FKA Twigs was and is none of these things. Yet she got really hijacked. She’s talking about it because it helps other people.
Cluster Bs are probably somewhere between 1 and 5% of the population. Usually they’re just irritating and high-maintenance. They drum up a lot of drama. We manage them. But the smarter, pressurized ones are like landmines, and the longer you live, the more likely you are to deal with one of them directly and intimately.
I used to think some people (or communities, or entire nations) were completely immune to being manipulated by malign opportunists, but now I know in my bones that anyone can be conned: the chinks in our armor stem from vulnerable parts that are fundamental to human nature: vanity and ego (business cons operate on these points of entry), a desire to be “seen” by someone who “understands”, a desire to have someone guide us, or, in turn, we decide to help out an intriguing person who responds especially to us. We enter these dynamics, these traps, in good faith, with rationalizations and often willed blind spots, that make sense in the moment. Carnage follows.
The whole cottage industry that’s cropped up around illuminating narcissistic abuse, gaslighting, love-bombing, and freaky con jobs—deception is a connecting theme—includes prestige dramas and documentaries about Elizabeth Holmes and Anna “Delvay” Sorokin; shows like Succession tap into our fascination with the immorality of purely transactional relationships, a hallmark of personality disorders. We’re still following the Jeffrey Epstein story. There are ongoing dissections of Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby. There are countless youtube videos made by mental health professionals who reach massive audiences by scratching the self-help itch of those who are looking around at the world, or their own relationships, and wondering what the heck is happening, why things feel so upside-down and confusing and boundary-destroying. Some probably started watching them as soon as Trump was elected. (He’s textbook, but most Cluster Bs don’t announce themselves quite as brazenly as he does.)
I’ve been writing another piece about artists’ relationship to their influences, and I watched the new documentary about Evan Rachel Wood’s history with Marilyn Manson, Phoenix Rising, with that in the back of my head, in the sense that I never found Manson convincing as a rock star, and I personally don’t know anyone else who does, either. That’s because when he arrived on the scene, we were already adults. His attention-starved schtick was aimed at gullible, disaffected kids (Wood was in fact still a teenager when she started up with him), because they were the ones who would not have spotted how forced and artificial his reference points were. Cluster B agendas are often undone by moments of sloppiness or incoherence. He didn’t register with us cynical professional critics because his tactics were stale, and the music wasn’t any good.
But being savvy and even smug about being able to spot from a distance one kind of Cluster B, the Marilyn Manson kind, doesn’t confer protection against all of them. These lizards take a lot of shapes, and their methods vary. A person raised by one can still fall into another’s web as an adult. A person who ended a friendship with a Cluster B at school can find themselves seduced by another one at their new job.
(I want to write about how people on the autism spectrum are especially vulnerable to Cluster Bs, who indeed target them, and how they’re often deputized to do the dirty work. The results of this unholy alliance saturate Silicon Valley, politics, activism, and other spheres and institutions, and frankly, it’s pretty much wrecked public discourse.)
The catharsis in taking in these narratives is considerable, and follows a similar path to watching horror movies: those red flags start popping up and we roll ourselves into the fetal position to watch what we already know will happen, and it’s always bad. We must appreciate feeling like we’re outside or ahead of it this time. But there are no happy endings with this genre.
I was as shocked as anyone when Anthony Bourdain killed himself. A documentary about his life, called Roadrunner, debuted last year; I watched it, and while I knew he’d been dating Asia Argento before he died, I was not at all prepared for what happened toward the end the documentary, when it gets to that coupling. You can tell the filmmakers and Bourdain’s friends and family have no idea how to address what went down once she entered the picture. Plausible deniability is a feature of Cluster B behavior. I remember back when he was with her, I was rooting for them. But in Roadrunner, the red flags are subtle, yet so unmistakeable and dread-inducing that we find ourselves back in that old horror narrative: he’d been had. She got into his head. She roped him into her manipulative, attention-seeking drama, and was in the process of laundering her image through him, and he was the perfect mark: trusting, magnanimous, intensely engaged yet too busy to stop and think… and introverted and lonely. He had a tough-guy persona, but over the years we got to know him and learned he was as soft as butter. A rare soul. And now he’s dead.
We’ve lost others. But we still, thankfully, have Evan Rachel Wood (what talent, my gosh), and Eliza, and FKA, and they’re talking, and maybe one day Johnny Depp can sober up enough to shine a light on why there’s only one woman in his whole history of relationships with famous women—only one—who got a version of him no one recognizes. I don’t know. I don’t hate this trend of excavation. Manipulative people are piling into the vacuums created by the pandemic, by the culture wars, by the tech revolution. Social media, with all its passive-aggression, moving goalposts, and smokescreens, favors a Cluster B bent. It’s degrading, slippery, disconcerting. It makes us doubt our instincts and our better selves. We should keep talking and thinking about these things.
The grandiose narcissists are easy to spot. However, the quiet narcissists go about their business undetected, and they are often the more dangerous ones. Years go by before the others in their lives realise they've been targeted. Your assessment of the phenomenon is quite accurate. I think the most toxic thing about so-called "vulnerable narcissists" is their lack of self awareness and their proclivity to blame problems in their relationships on everyone else. It is rare for these people to seek help. Many professionals categorically refuse to see them clinically because they don't change. People close to them often stay, thinking "if I only try harder to get through to X, he/she will finally get it", but that's a fool's errand.
Just came across this today, from a link in Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish. I was married for 20 years to a borderline, so understand this issue from that perspective. It is a nightmare, slowly unfolding. The honeymoon period is real -- ours lasted a year or so (until we were married, naturally, and I was legally hooked), and became the subject of many, many arguments: “You weren’t always like this. You changed.” “No, *you* changed, you were the one who never ...” fill in the blank with whatever I had done to cause her upset at that particular moment. The gaslighting is real. And it absolutely blows my mind that Donald Trump, an obvious narcissist (I’ll armchair diagnose right along with you), has gaslighted tens of millions of Americans into believing he was wronged and an election was stolen. What makes his claims of victim hood worse (and this is the case with these crafty crazies) is that so much of the media coverage of him that the called a witch hunt actually was bullshit (see: Russiagate). I hope and pray enough folks have lost their blinders and he won’t get re-elected in 2024, but there’s no doubt he could handily win the GOP nomination. Crazy times. Like you, I worry about the Republic withstanding such madness.