Tookie De La Crème is what we in the business call a Forgetta-Girl.
She goes to school, sort of, but she mainly lays down on the cold hallway floor during class, an act known as a SPLD (Silent Protest by Lying Down, pronounced “spilled”). That is, when she is not eating whipped cream straight from the can. Not that anyone notices; she’s on SPLD Number Thirty-Nine, one day short of the world record (what world? According to whom?).
In short? Not Modelland material.
The past several days have seen the queer Internet captivated by anything and everything Modelland, Tyra Banks (and ghostwriter Michael Salort)’s 2011 young-adult dystopian novel. Long out of print, the book faded into general obscurity despite a heavy promotional push from Banks, including a tie-in on ANTM’s seventeenth cycle (more on this later), an ominous trailer, a Google+ page (it was 2011) and a planned theme park. None of which worked, of course, except for the single spark that perversely set Twitter ablaze fifteen years later:
Banks’s theme song for the novel, a modular avant-proto-hyperpop composition, started making the rounds online earlier this week, with the above tweet from user @sourkrowt serving as the inciting incident. (Peculiarly, a different user tweeted a different video of the song three days prior as Tinashe shade, but it failed to catch fire. Don’t come for her.) The central question of its refrain — “can you, can you, can you, can you survive Modelland?” — offered a quandary that stumped even some of the medium’s greatest thinkers. What, exactly, does it take for a person to survive Modelland? What about Modelland, a region the song offers as a foil to “this wasteland,” necessitates a survival mentality? In what ways does our own reality serve as a sort of Modelland?
Naturally, I had to find out. The Los Angeles Public Library has two (2) copies of the text, one housed somewhere on the West Side (speaking of wastelands…) and one in the Central Library downtown, in a section called TeenScape. After speeding over and perusing the shelves both under Banks’s and Salort’s last names to no avail, I was forced to endure one of the most humbling experiences of my ridiculous life thus far. “I saw online that you have a copy of Tyra Banks’s Modelland in this section,” I said to a queeny, unamused librarian, who informed me that it was deep in the library’s basement archives and that I would have to wait five to seven minutes for someone to retrieve it. I didn’t make eye contact with him while I sat and waited, and at long last another librarian presented me with a massive hardcover tome — the book approaches 600 pages — and I was on my merry way. Modelland had already begun to test me.
Let me reiterate: Modelland by Tyra Banks, the young adult dystopian novel about a Forgetta-Girl named Tookie De La Crème, is similar in length to East of Eden.
The experience of reading Modelland is what I imagine waterboarding to feel like. It is an act of confronting one’s own neuroses head-on, an existential undertaking that urges its reader to question the sanctity of the written word. Its warped logic and inanely convoluted world-building are enough to make anyone question their own object permanence. Many, in other words, will not survive Modelland.
Essentially, it’s an amalgamation of all the major players from the literary space it’s so desperately trying to get into, as compiled by someone actively experiencing psychosis. All the things I said earlier about Tookie De La Crème are true, but you should also know that her mother demands that everyone, including her children, call her Creamy. Children, here, referring to Tookie and her younger sister Myrracle, who has a bizarrely specific cognitive impairment that makes her mispronounce certain words, such as pronouncing DNA “dee-nay-nay.” Our story begins in the leadup to the Day of Discovery (T-DOD) in which the clouds above Modelland part (Modelland is a mountain looming over the world, by the way, with an all-seeing green eye over it) and Scouts come down to select girls to become Bellas and undergo schooling in Modelland to hopefully become one of a class of 7Seven Intoxibellas, or else become servants or — worse — actresses. There are also these things called SMIZEs, seven of them, which are sent down from Modelland through the water supply, causing yearly shortages. They appear as yellow bubbles coming out of faucets that then pop into little gold talismans that you put on your forehead and then they give you fierce yellow eyeshadow like that on the cover? That was my understanding, at least. Anyway, they give you a precisely ninety-one percent chance of getting Discovered at T-DOD.
But Tookie isn’t destined for Modelland, she’s a Forgetta-Girl after all, damned to her SPLDs at the Bangle, Bauble and Bead Institute, also known as B3 (she lives in the factory district of Peppertown inside the land of Metopia, which initially seems to be a catchall for the entire world until we’re introduced to around fifteen other regions). She speaks 28 languages, but only to her “T-Mail Jail” journal; she decides which language to write in by the color pen she grabs. She’s hopelessly in love with class president Theophilus Love, on an eternal re-election campaign with buttons that say “VOTE FOR LOVE.” Early in the novel, one of those falls off and somehow gets scratched up enough that it finally reads “T O OKE” (the V becomes a K, don’t ask), and this dumb fucking bitch takes that as a sign…of something. These are the buttons they are holding in the ANTM editorial where each of the girls is forced to say that she is Tookie.
There is also a plotline regarding a superstar Intoxibella named Ci~l (pronounced “see-el” in one of this book’s thousand phonetic spellings), a rare 7Seven-7 possessing all seven possible magical powers an Intoxibella can embody. These include things like Chameeleone, the power of shapeshifting, which an Intoxibella named Evanjalinda currently possesses.
Obviously, Tookie finds a SMIZE and gets Discovered (by a Scout who initially is camouflaged as a car because Transformers was on the moodboard for some goddamn reason) and is thrust into the dark world of Modelland. After a whirlwind journey in which she meets her obligatory plot friends of Dylan (who lives in essentially a Walmart), Shiraz (a Bollywood nepo baby), and Piper (belonging to an ethnic group of genius albinos) and we learn about creatures like the LeGizzârds who eat Colorian sweetbreads, she’s thrust immediately into Modelland where — guess what! — things are not as they seem. Because this is already over a thousand words and I will not let this also reach six hundred pages, here are some of my favorite things we learn about Modelland:
- There is a brother school for male models called Bestosterone.
- If you leave Modelland without permission, you instantly age fifty years.
- They tell time by color, not numbers.
- There is a class called CaraCaraCara, which is “FaceFaceFace” in Gowdee’an.
- On the first day of Modelland class, everyone’s cycles sync up so that they can experience simultaneous cramps and learn how to mask their pain. This is done in CaraCaraCara class, which takes place on a violently rocking boat. Upon conclusion of the exercise, they stop menstruating for life.
- The first building we see is the “M” building, where all the higher-ups are. There is also the “O” building, which stands for… yep, Opera. And then there is the “D” building, which is the Dorms. “E” is for EATZ. I don’t recall finding out about “L,” probably because my brain had atrophied by then.
This all sounds a lot more fun when you talk about it than it actually is to read. I cannot stress enough how much of a gargantuan undertaking Modelland is, and how little one has to show for it on the other side. This is also — believe it or not — a vastly simplified version of events. I have not even touched the question of Tookie’s paternity, or her friend Lizzie who lives in a mattress atop a tree and occasionally experiences demonic possession. Nor have I touched popular girl Zarpessa, Theophilus’ (remember him?) girlfriend, who secretly dumpster-dives for food and clothing, or Creamy’s fixation on baby gherkins either.
I cannot in good faith recommend anyone make the trek to Modelland. It is long, arduous, maddening, futile and entirely an affront to not only the English language but any of the twenty-seven others Tookie speaks. But you may very well have your reasons to run from this wasteland and back to Modelland. Who am I to judge?
And maybe, just maybe, you, too, can survive.
