A few updates on the death of Theresa Duncan/disappearance of Jeremy Blake: The L.A. Times is reporting that a fisherman has found a partially-decomposed body off the coast of Sea Grit, NJ; the Asbury Park Press says police believe it might be Blake, but they’re trying to track down the artist’s dental records to confirm.

Also of note: in this L.A. Times story from yesterday, Chris Lee probes Duncan’s assertion that she and Blake had been stalked/harassed by Scientologists ever since Blake worked on Beck’s Sea Change record in 2004. Blogger John Stodder takes issue with Lee’s story: “This is a hit piece, disguised by the language of compassion. The Times’ speculative implications are completely meritless. The fact is, we don’t know their mental state, and because the police say they aren’t looking into the Scientology/harassment angle, we can assume they didn’t see evidence to justify a connection. Keep in mind the police have seen both suicide notes.”

Stodder also links to a few posts by Ron Rosenbaum about all this. Rosenbaum was apparently a dedicated reader of Duncan’s blog, and in a post dated July 21, he explains that he’s not content to let the matter lie with the New York Times:

I was always fascinated by Theresa Duncan’s choice of “The Wit of the Staircase’ as the name of her blog [and] especially by the mysterious spin she put on the phrase in the definition she put at the top of her blog…”the pattern you cannot complete til afterwards it suddenly comes to you when it is too late.” Too late. The pattern doesn’t come to you til too late? What does that mean. Too late to save her life. But are there clues on her blog, or in her life to the mystery of her death? I am going to do some research and perhaps a series of posts, including close reading of her last month of posts to see if they offer any clues.

Calling Duncan’s death specifically a “web-based mystery,” Rosenbaum goes on to float various conspiracy theories, as if desperate to prove that this is not what it looks like. In one post, Rosenbaum speculates that Blake could have faked his disappearance in order to hook up with an ex-girlfriend; in another, he notes that the NYPD has not yet conclusively ruled Duncan’s death a suicide. Rosenbaum has not blogged since stories regarding the body found in New Jersey began appearing earlier today.

Like Ron Rosenbaum, I’m interested in the discrepancies in the reports, and I’ve tried to do some of my own digging and “close reading.” I do think there is reason speculate that at the time of her death, Duncan was not working on any of the film projects that she’s been previously linked to. Although she ostensibly had a two-pic deal with Fox Searchlight as recently as 2006, Duncan has no IMDb profile, which is odd for someone who was in business with a major studio’s indie arm. Her Hollywood.com profile says she was attached to two films, Alice Underground and Dangerous Angels. According to IMDBPro, Searchlight does not currently have either film in development or production. It’s quite possible that Duncan was working on a film, but to me it seems probable that it wasn’t for Fox Searchlight.

Although some reports have implied that Blake and Duncan were in New York *because* of Duncan’s film, Lee’s LA Times story says they moved here in February so that Blake could take a job at Rockstar Games (AKA The House That Grand Theft Auto Built). This would seem to be supported by a post from Duncan’s blog, dated February 13, which seems to be the first written from New York. From that post up to her last, dated July 10 (the day Blake found her body), there is just one mention (that I could find) of a Duncan film in progress: on July 8, Duncan wrote that she was “visiting the Eastern Seaboard on Important Film Business….And taking in some of the lovely scenery along the way….”

What happened on that trip? Who knows. But after spending the two hours combing through The Wit of the Staircase, falling in love with various turns of phrase, I’m ready to leave this “mystery” to the Ron Rosenbaums for the time being. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Duncan’s lengthy review of Grindhouse. She loved it.

The French Freudian Jacques Lacan invented the concept of The Real to signify that which cannot be represented by a linguistic sign, like death, or the act of sex. Frederic Jameson, the Marxist lit-crit magus, further equated Lacan’s concept of The Real with the Marxist notion of History. History, and therefore The Real, he explained, “is what hurts.” [...] Grindhouse is not a perfect ride by any means, but like the infinitely honest cinematic crap it’s based on, the film is most utterly brilliant when its impulses are most base. Whether or not each member of this duo is firing on all cinematic cylinders during Grindhouse isn’t the issue. This critic is still happy to bestow the best compliment on their film that she can think of at this historical juncture: Gentlemen, it’s been Real.