Childhood’s End
By: Significant Void, Sv
Tags: Brandon Clark, Murder, Bianca Devins, 4chan, Social Media

It is clear that young women subject themselves to many humiliations and discomforts in their long journey to identify suitable partners. No niggling laws are broken by simply jousting with the opposite sex, a game as old as the hills. It’s the stuff of life. Especially when you’re a teen.

In the great turbine of the teenage girl’s mind, attention is everything and arguably more so in Bianca as she was deeply committed to several spirited online communities like Instagram, 4Chan and Border, all with varying degrees of reputation as hot spots for this and that. It’s almost like she wrote for all the newspapers.

However, she only filled small cracks. She wasn’t there for political confrontations or to talk about ‘High Art’. She was simply an attention seeking teen and playing with boys was her game of choice, trying to be someone’s ‘Cat or E-Girl’ with self admitted mental health issues. So far, so normal. She is the hallmark of the millennium generation.

Bianca was highly sociable in this way but with an unpredictable brand of sexuality and temper, a singular character on these spaces for sure, but basically in every one of her guises she was a pretty, self styled, manga-loving princess in the tower who had managed to enrapture many young male minds who ‘orbited’ her. If anything, she proved the gullibility of young men who fell for her ‘field of dreams’ approach.

In NYC it is illegal to ride your bike with your feet off the pedals, but when you’re a teen, living in a suburb or county seat, you can’t even get away with the cheap joy of breaking that law. The Internet is your only place for natural teenage misdemeanors.

At the time of her death, Bianca was on a course of self-improvement and according to her teachers, her therapy sessions were working. She had started at the bottom of a big mountain, diagnosed with depression, anxiety and a mild form of bi-polarism. She committed fitfully to all the treatments available in an attempt to bring herself some calm.

These disorders were however, an ideal emotional cocktail, if you wished to becomes the beau ideal of platforms like ‘Border’ and ‘4Chan.’ And of course young women felt she was writing for them too. Her friend Mae Scialdone was a fierce and loyal friend who defends Bianca whenever a camera seeks to tell her story.

Young men on these platforms often felt they possessed Bianca and lived in denial about the social nature of the platform, viewing every interaction as a closed relationship between just two people. Her murderer Brandon Clark, certainly thought so. And consistent with this male blind spot, men also assumed that they knew her. So far so normal. On the evening when Bianca and Brandon met for the Dollanganger concert, she was in her mind grateful for having a night out and being away from a household full of infant siblings.

He on the other hand, felt like he was escorting a movie star, his movie star. In case anyone doubted, her model shots, which she peppered her admirers with, would prove his point. Some have been too quick to shout ‘prostitute’ when what we are seeing is just typical boy versus girl ‘game in play.’

Bianca had a pantheon of public support at her funeral. Clearly not limited to people who knew her. All protective and wondering how such a flower could have been so wantonly cut down. Hundreds may have lived on the virtual fringes of her life, numbers don’t really matter here, but she had only a few friends in her inner circle.

She wasn’t an internet sensation, as has been reported, hardly a qualification in itself, but it should be noted with smaller numbers you tend to be more intimate and with bigger numbers, you are really suggesting that you prefer distance.

Bianca had a short life arc but her fate was elevated by the cruelty of having her murdered body cascaded across several social media platforms that were slow to respond and apologize. To those who didn’t know her, Bianca is largely remembered through a catalogue of modelling shots she’d amassed, images that do nothing to reveal her true character.

The cruelty of Bianca’s death is matched by the softness of the lens from her modelling shots. The only image that is free of the photographer’s sentimentality is the image of her dead body, which thanks to the Internet is perhaps the single enduring image that most people have. The second being the same picture broadcast on news channels with heavily pixelated portions.

I can’t help but look at the model shots of Bianca Devins and see the dark shadow that throws itself across them. A young life that has either missed the chance to stack shelves or chat with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show. She could have gone in any direction. Commentators draw attention to the fact that she makes common references in her strings to BDSM and self-harm, as if they’re making a point.

The point is, she was a teenage girl who listened to the music of Nicole Dollangagner and it’s hard to separate the idea that Bianca was often just re-voicing the lyrics of her favorite role model artist. A feint that gained Nicole Dollanganger plenty of attention, why shouldn’t it get her attention too?

Bianca was the first of a clutch of children in her family and with only a single mother in attendance became isolated, retreating to her room and becoming brittle in her solitude. Internet encounters can be exhausting and regular users will always tilt away from some people to others. If nothing else, to relieve the boredom. There’s an inherent cruelty in this but it’s not surprising.

Commentators about Bianca’s state of mind point to her as a kind of ‘worm in the bud’ with the incidence of selling nude photos through her social media channels. Bianca was fifteen when this first started happening. She dumped men on the Internet and traded sporadically in this way but of course, this happens in the real world as well with equal cruelty.

There is a second pointed finger here which extends this accusation further with the idea of material gain. That there was an element of prostitution on Bianca’s part, as she would trade her nude images for drugs that men like Brandon would readily offer.

I think the world calls this ‘bartering’ so there’s a new reflection here emerging of someone who was also hustling. The whole of human life and interaction is based on some kind of hustle and I remark on this because she was precociously young to be engaging in such activities. She was in short, smarter than her punters.

At best, her relationship with Brandon was immature. The point surely is that he missed the shorthand signals of her physical disinterest in him. It seems clear they were never lovers, let alone in any kind of deeper relationship commitment. On the fateful night of the music event, his spying of the illicit kiss in his car clearly set off a bomb in Brandon’s head.

Bar wearing a badge that read, ‘I’m not interested in you in that way,’ she couldn’t have made the message any clearer.

He was immature, and the fact that he failed to translate the signal into an ‘Oh well!’ is a mark against him, rather than a downgrade of Bianca’s actions being a kind of low level prostitution. As a young man and a young woman in the middle of ‘the game,’ you can develop a sense of elitism about the uniqueness of your personal worth. It’s what drives older people crazy when they see that attitude in the young. Elders look embarrassed at these scenes and might whisper to no one in particular, ‘God, I can’t believe that I was like that!’

Overall, the story is a miserable one. Brandon is now an on-going poster boy for male violence and misogyny. Bianca is posthumously having her own daemons aired by the press. Her father is conspicuously absent here, not even raising a protective arm around her memory. In fact, whilst we’re on the subject, the personality of Bianca’s father has yet to be established. That’s key because he is the dark malevolence that lies at the centre of this story.

However, that needle moves back to the lighter side or the more ‘normal’ when you see her striking portfolio of art that is both mature and concisely executed. Very painterly. Work that was undoubtedly supported and encouraged by her psychiatrists. Indeed, she shared her own medical diagnosis freely to her ‘orbitors.’ Something that she never failed to hide. The point was always there, somewhere near the top of the conversation string, if not in her profile. This can be read as a ‘warning’ as much as a ‘come on.’ Not many young girls in the middle of a chat session would confess to suffering from, “…Stockholm Syndrome…” let alone knowing what that meant.

Tilting more to the violent aspects of this, I believe we have to stop pretending that the end was painless. This young man’s thrashing at the neck should be a warning to all to watch their tempers. It’s hard not to get side tracked in the circus of public commentary here. Sometimes, when you think a book is bad, it’s not the book’s fault, but the reader’s.

The subject of Bianca’s psychological state has not been hidden beneath a bushel. Bianca’s mother has committed to tape about the difficult place her daughter found herself in and categorized quite succinctly the help that she thought was required and indeed was fitfully provided. Bianca suffered from a form of hypomania, a milder form of mood elevation, that alternated periodically with severe depression. It was something that the family was battling with.

In silent gratitude for all the professional help she received, Bianca had signed up to study Psychology at college which if nothing else, proves she was committed to further self-analysis. A healthy sign in anyone. Indeed she may have later shared her own troubled experiences of hypomania with other teenage girls and been quite a useful professional. After all, she had the right to say, ‘I understand, I have been there.’

And anyway, psychology aside, young men and women need to develop their antennae for screw-ball partners. If Brandon saw some faults in Bianca, then why feed her the drugs? Why tantalize? Some men might say ‘Bro’ I wouldn’t go near a girl like that!’ In the same way that a woman in a friendship group might say, ‘That boyfriend of yours? He’s trouble!’

Bianca’s young penchants were not on the extreme fringes of any deviant sexual behavior, her discredit only reaches the level of saying that the young woman was ‘dark’ and had ‘Daddy issues,’ which was true. It’s not a statement to attract anyone’s attention. Throw a stick at America and you’ll hit 100,000 women with that confession. The subject says more about errant fathers than a psychological fault line in the female sex.