Yesterday, an obituary for Jeremy Blake (see previous coverage here and here) appeared in the New York Times, alerting many to the story of his disappearance and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s death for the first time. Coming right on the tail of the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, some suggested that the death-in-threes cliche was now complete.

On a comment on a post at The House Next Door, I wrote that I thought that Blake’s actual death occurred “too long ago to fit into this trifecta.” But then again … it might just be that no other moving image artist has died yet this week, but on further reflection I do feel as though Blake, though obviously not as accomplished or as well-known as the late European vanguards, can comfortably be spoken of in the same breath. At the very least, as someone known for producing a kind of moving painting (see his video for Beck’s “Round the Bend” above), he’s definitely got a kinship with Antonioni, a filmmaker who thought of himself as a painter and who literally painted props and locations in order to get his desired color effects.

I’ve rounded up a few odds and ends relating to all three deaths:

• Kate Coe has a long, investigative report on Duncan in the LA Weekly. The tenor of the piece can be gleaned pretty accurately from the subtitle: “A writer–game designer and her boyfriend commit suicide, and a façade falls away.” Duncan’s alleged first feature-in-progress was apparently part of the façade. Many, many additional details at the link.
• The Bergman Obit Master List has been updated to include comments from Woody Allen and Roger Ebert. If you know of a Bergman tribute that I’ve missed, please paste a link in the comments to that post.
• The Playlist offers an, um, playlist of songs from Antonioni movies.
• Jon Swift takes the opportunity of Bergman and Antonioni’s passings to coin the name of a new movement in critical theory: Derrièrism, inspired by Jack Warner’s habit of judging pictures “by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them.” Says Swift: “The deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have given Derrièrism is a shot in the arm, or a shot somewhere anyway.”
• Roger Ebert has compiled a number of celebrity tributes to Bergman, including testimonials from Studs Terkel, Guy Maddin and Richard Linklater. Says Maddin: “I subconsciously thought that guy would live for ever. Even though he’s dead now he must still be perceptibly animated somehow by his unkillable Swedish lust and dread.”

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:

…Read more

I *really* didn’t want to do back-to-back Lindsay Lohan posts, but I just can’t pass up an opportunity to talk about A Star is Born. Blame Jeff Wells.

Okay: back in June, I wrote a column for the Huffington Post, in which I placed Ms. Lohan’s downward spiral in a trajectory of wrecked childstars that possibly began with Judy Garland. I wrote:

Lindsay and Judy have an awful lot in common. Both were child stars, raised by stage mothers far more interested in their daughter’s fame than in their actual well-being. Judy’s life-long drug addiction began when her mother (in cahoots with Louis B. Meyer) put her on uppers to lose weight; if Lindsay’s mom isn’t actually doing drugs with her daughter, she’s at the very least accompanying Lindsay to clubs and turning a blind eye on her daughter’s substance abuse…[W]hen that letter from the producer of Georgia Rule leaked, all I could think of was Garland’s famous suspension at MGM in the late 40s, which inevitably led to the end of her career in movies. The drugs that kept [Judy] slim and energetic in musicals as a teen and 20-something had taken their toll by her 30s, and through a combination of her declining looks and her inability to show up on time, she became virtually unemployable. She lived out the last decade of her life broke, semi-homeless, and all but forgotten by the producers who made millions off of her as a teenager.

Four years after Judy Garland was dropped from her MGM contract, she famously tried to make a comeback by producing and starring in a musical remake of A Star is Born. In that film, Garland played an up-and-coming singer/actress whose rise to the top of the Hollywood ladder parallels her alcoholic actor husband’s fall. At the end of the film (spoiler alert!), the husband, whose stage name is Norman Maine, gets arrested for drunk driving and, in an attempt to spare his wife further embarrassment and bother, walks into the ocean. Seen today, with Garland’s drug-fueled demise far in the rearview, A Star is Born plays like a failed attempt on the part of the former childstar to publicly exorcise her crippling demons. Needless to say, that didn’t work; Star also didn’t do much to revitalize her film career.

As news of Lohan’s latest arrest spread across the web this afternoon, various self-appointed experts have rushed to diagnose the damage done by this incident to Lohan’s career. E! Online speculates that Lohan will almost surely lose a role currently on her slate, and Perez Hilton says (caps, of course, his), “NO ONE is going to want to work with her now. And IF they do hire her, Lohan will most likely be forced to pay for her own insurance on films, which will be VERY COSTLY.” Jeffrey Wells puts it like this (again, emphasis his):

She can’t be an “actress” any more because there’s no accepting her as anyone other than herself — the dumbest and most arrogant meltdown case in Hollywood history…It goes without saying that she’s become the industry’s youngest-ever Norman Maine. If this was a movie, the classy sad solution would be to walk into the Pacific…and stay there.

This, just a week after Jeremy Blake, in response to the suicide of girlfriend Theresa Duncan, allegedly did the same thing with a different ocean. Nobody seemed to think Blake’s walk into the Atlantic was “classy”–in fact, a friend of Blake and Duncan told the New York Post that he thought it was “cliche” and “calculated.” But I guess Blake wasn’t famous/famously messed up enough for his walk into the sea to qualify as a career “solution.”

In other news, Lindsay has a movie coming out this weekend!

UPDATE: A story published in Saturday’s print edition of the New York Times has some additional information on Jeremy Blake’s disappearance and Theresa Duncan’s death. The story says a note referring to Duncan was found with Blake’s passport on Rockaway Beach. NYPD scuba teams have searched for but have not yet found a body.

Rumors are swirling that artist Jeremy Blake has gone missing, a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker/blogger Theresa Duncan, committed suicide. Kate Coe alerted me to the news, which she’s rounded up from several sources at FishbowlLA.

Duncan, a former videogame creator, was known in the blogosphere for her sometimes eccentric but often fascinating ruminations on art, imagery, culture and perfume. Her blog The Wit of the Staircase had its second anniversary on July 4th; she last updated July 10. She was apparently in New York, directing an adaptation of a Francesca Lia Block novel for Fox Searchlight. There is no IMDB entry for the film, or for Duncan; I don’t know how far along production had progressed, but it was her first feature film and it she had apparently hit a bump in the road.

The news of Duncan’s suicide and Blake’s disappearance stems from this perfume message board, which was then picked up by L.A. Observed. Blake, in apparent reaction to Duncan’s death, disappeared earlier this week. According to a posting on this modern art blog, Blake’s passport and clothes were found on Rockaway Beach here in New York shortly after a 911 call was placed reporting a sighting of a man swimming out to sea.

Again, I can’t confirm that this is how it all went down (no mainstream non-blog* outlet has yet reported on either Duncan’s death or Blake’s disappearance), but if it turns out to be true … man, what a sad story. Fans of Punch Drunk Love will know Blake’s work: he designed the film’s psychedelic transitions. He and Duncan also collaborated on a short called The History of Glamour, which L.A. Observer describes as “animated mockumentary about an art scene similar to Andy Warhol’s Factory.” Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on YouTube but another of their collaborations, an animated short made for the Oxygen channel, is:

**Wording changed after learning via an email from Tyler Green that he and Modern Art Notes are “as mainstream as it gets.”