Blogging from Beyond

I was both depressed and intrigued when I read about the bizarre double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake last summer. Bitch interviewed Duncan way, way back in Bitch no. 7, when she and Blake had just completed ZeroZero, the third in a series of truly awesome CD-roms for girls following Chop Suey and Smarty. They weren't computer games, exactly—more like cool, meandering choose-your-own-adventure stories, whimsically illustrated by Blake and loaded with winking pop-culture references that made them as fun for adults as for kids. Blake went on to become something of an art star, and Duncan moved away from game development and into filmmaking — you can watch her first effort, a mockumentary created with Blake and artist Karen Kilimnik and titled The History of Glamour, here.

A number of outlets, most notably the L.A. Times and Vanity Fair, have covered the sad and conspiracy-riddled story here. In a nutshell, Duncan and Blake had moved to L.A. in part to get Duncan's directorial debut made, but eventually became convinced that Scientologists were out to get them, one Scientologist in particular. Now, my patience for Scientology is smaller than Tom Cruise's tiny head, so I'm A-ok with that theory, but it also seems possible that Blake and Duncan also had a wee bit of a persecution complex. But whatever she was, Duncan's flair for the dramatic has definitely continued in death — months after her suicide, her blog continues to be updated.