Hunger hurts but starving works meaning

It seems like an impossible feat to write about Fiona Apple’s music because Fiona Apple’s music is writing. It speaks for itself. When I try to quote it, I want to distill the point in a line or two but I find myself copying line after line until I have the whole verse quivering under my cursor, blinking, waiting, “what are you gonna do with all this?” It refuses to be divided up to be conveniently analyzed, instead it’s an artful snarl of prose. I guess you’d call an intentional tangle a braid but it’s something more intricate and definitely uglier than that. She knots herself up to keep herself whole, and I’m impressed, because I keep making myself available to be disassembled and then wondering why people keep walking away with pieces of me.

So I need them all, these whole swaths of words, softly unfolding the way a flower blooms to show you its most vulnerable parts; it’s most beautiful then but also most fragile, taking great risk to perpetuate beauty. I feel more like that fern whose leaves recoil when you touch them and I want to be more like a lily, limply open like soft lolling tongues, brittle stamen exposed and poised to break at any harsh touch. They smell sickeningly sweet sometimes, and I respect that, the ability to make attraction into something overwhelming. Almost like the aching tenor of, “I want him so bad, oh it kills.”

A gifset of her performing “Paper Bag” passed my tumblr dashboard this morning while I ritually and mindlessly scrolled while buried under covers, wondering why I was awake before the sun and trying to stave off suicide fantasies. I felt like my skin had come unzipped and everything came tumbling out of me. Or rather, rattling, because I’m hollow with dried up emotions, clanging some dull clamor against my bones, empty stomach, shrunken and dehydrated from emotional anesthesia in the form of cheap beer. The captions read, Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills / Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up / I got to fold cause these hands are too shaky to hold / Hunger hurts but starving, it works, when it costs too much to love…. And it does. The chorus really is the meat of the song, trembling and resigned “hunger hurts but starving works;” in her deep register it feels like it vibrates right through me. I can tell that’s the end of the song because she ad libs a little, shaking up the structure and adding “and it does.” That’s not in the album version but I like it, that little affirmation at the end. It’s not enough just to describe the pain but really do just plainly tell us that you need it. It does. It costs too much to love. I starve. I’m starving.

This song tells a story and it’s a story about her and it’s a story about me and it’s a story I find unsettling because it describes a very isolating experience, so going through it and then listening to someone else wail about it feels very much like she just crawled into my bed and whispered it in my ear. It’s too close for comfort. How does she know exactly how it went? The answer to that question isn’t one I want to hear because it requires recognizing that these things happen in patterns and that no really, men are the same, it’s not different this time, and it never will be. It is the sort of story you recall bitterly to each other over a gin cocktail sitting on the same side of a table in a dimly lit bar, a kind of solidarity I’m both grateful to have and regretful that my experiences begat it in the first place. I don’t want to be able to commiserate. But I’ll come dragging my feet to play audience to this song — let’s face it, on repeat, all day — with a martini and a grimace. Something about the jazzy lounge vibes call for olives.

The story goes like this.

I was staring at the sky, just looking for a star
To pray on, or wish on, or something like that
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy
Whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had
But then the dove of hope began its downward slope
And I believed for a moment that my chances
Were approaching to be grabbed
But as it came down near, so did a weary tear
I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag

There’s a lot to this but like I said, it abjures to be dismembered and forces me to present it to you whole. Here are the important components: wistfully you attach yourself to the idea of a boy who is unavailable but ideal. This is a safe move, you may tell yourself. You can’t ever have him but you can sate the compulsive need to pine; he is methadone to the black tar of a usual love affair. This keeps you unattached while removing the dangers of returned desire, any actual entanglements, it’s all theoretical. Just a crush placed on someone who you know can’t return your feelings. The problem with this scenario is that it doesn’t account for his feelings and relies on the assumption that he will never guess at or reciprocate yours in spite of the barriers. Because this can happen it does happen, as these things go. The relative safety of the situation crumbles as soon as you get a hint that he is not as unavailable as the situation suggests. “And I believed for a moment that my chances were approaching to be grabbed.” The foundation was rotten from the start because you built someone up on the slippery notion of an absolute — someone’s emotional inaccessibility. There’s no such thing as certainty in matters of love. So when you finally get face-to-face with what that dirty liar hope told you was your daydream come to fruition, it’s just some empty words, some refuse cast aside that you gave imaginary life to. It was always just a paper bag but you wanted to see the bird so badly you let yourself believe it. That’s the other trap you set for yourself, the idea that there was safety in certain boundaries when you were willing all along to leap over that wall the second the opportunity presented itself. Every time I tell myself I don’t want to be in love it’s a lie. I always want to be in love, and my knees are always skinned from it.

Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
’Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up
I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love

This is what I want to unravel the most, even as the verses construct the frame of a story I can fill with my own debris in the space of a heartbeat, turn that bare structure into a cozy home, this hunger that she keeps returning to is the part that really digs under my skin. Fiona is not a stranger to eating disorders and she describes her experience as not anorexia but a desire to exert control and shrink her developing body to inhibit growth of the parts that she refers to as “bait,” to limit the desirability of her body. Always about this resistance of the inevitable, the want to be in control of processes that are ultimately stronger than the most tenacious of wills. It’s easy to wonder if maybe she is attracted more to struggle itself than to the proverbial him.

So the unattainable is safe because it is removed from the realm of immediate engagement, but it is also the makings of something very difficult if you don’t adhere to sterile boundary-toeing. And how can you reasonably expect to hold to some scrupulous standard as a self-described mess? You can’t, you were never gonna. It’s an exercise in self-control, much like intentional starvation, that sets you up to lose. Eventually you have to lose. There is something so helpless about desire and equally helpless about hunger, like flames licking at your feet begging to be fed. Your body will take from you whether you give it what it wants or not; it starts to consume itself if you refuse it outside sustenance. Oh, it kills. Your body is an ouroboros of despair, and gone hungry you grow weak until you give in. I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold. Again and again you prove your own futility to yourself. An eating disorder is a spiraling chain-reaction of failures, all-consuming, feeding on itself and feeding on you. The only way to win is to let it kill you, and that’s not really winning anyway. So you give in, over and over. The only thing you can do is hold fast to the present tense, starving, always starving. Hunger hurts. Starving works. Deny yourself rather than allow them to deny you, and it is almost like you can’t be rejected or abandoned. You’re in control. You’re hurting but you’re in control, and I should highlight that it’s not really a matter of deciding between not-pain and not-control or pain and control, it’s not one or the other, it’s sticky, it’s knotted up, it’s complicated. The pain comes either way; you may as well feel in control.

It’s a lot like when you have a deficit of his attention that you crave so you resolve yourself to not talking to him for your own mental health, and then after some great famine he texts you some mundane remark about a shared interest, and you instinctively answer as if you had not experienced a devastation in the elapsed time between speaking. It’s a lot like when you don’t eat until your body gives up even sending hunger signals anymore, and your friend hands you a burrito. You’re gonna eat the burrito, and you’re gonna feel hungry again. Hunger and desire are cyclical pains, thriving on themselves to exist. When you withhold, when you starve, it works, it’s the only way to feel better, but you always lose, and when the hunger sets in you hurt again. Over and over.

And I went crazy again today, looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope
Baby said he couldn’t stay, wouldn’t put his lips to mine,
And a fail to kiss is a fail to cope
I said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel so good, don’t feel justified
Come on put a little love here in my void,’ he said
‘It’s all in your head,’ and I said, ‘So’s everything’
But he didn’t get it. I thought he was a man
But he was just a little boy

A huge component of love for me is completely losing my mind, and I hate it because when it’s bad it’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt, and when it’s good I’m still crazy. There’s this level of intrusive thought — not regular intrusive thoughts, like, I’m walking across a bridge right now what if I just threw myself off of it, I’m holding a spoon what if I just scoop my eyeballs out right here right now onto the table in the breakroom at work — but like object-specific intrusive thought. It’s like this — any interaction with them is like walking by a burr bush and you collect all this fucking shit all over yourself, and for the next few hours you’re picking seed pods off of every inch of your body. Just when you feel like you’ve gotten all of them and the annoyance leaves your mind for some requisite peace a prickle against your thigh reminds you of the entire ordeal all over again. You may be fortunate enough to get all of them off at some point, but this burr bush is like outside your front door so as soon as you go try and get some shit done you’re deep in it again. Neverending. The only way not to feel shitty is to not think about them at all, and that’s the issue in itself. There’s no point at which you can think of them and be okay. The only “okay” is not thinking about them at all, because none of these thoughts feel healthy or good.

The other thing about these thoughts is you’re analyzing everything they ever do or say as it relates to you. Lookin for a strand to climb, lookin for a little hope. No matter how many times you say you’re not you’re still watching the skies for that dove, you can’t help but look up every time some flitter of movement catches your eye. Fiona makes it poetic, but the tragic minutiae of a real-life manifestation of the feeling she describes is more like that jolt in your belly when they heart a selfie you posted on instagram. There’s nothing that feels more to me like licking breadcrumbs off the floor than checking to see if someone opened my snapchat, cataloging the bare minimum of interaction and filing it away for obsessive analysis. Is there some algorithm to returned affection? If I make a chart detailing [x] number of social media “likes” against [y] amount of passing time, can I give life to the conviction that I am loved? Of course not, and not only is that basely unrealistic, it’s pathetic. And it’s definitely definitely “all in my head,” like everything.

The best thing you can do is point-blank ask for the emotional validation that you need, because that’s the adult thing to do. You say, “Come on put a little love here in my void,” or maybe you don’t, because that straddles some crossed lines of melodramatic, horrifying, and too literal for comfort. But you ask. The thing about adequately communicating your emotional needs is that men don’t generally respond well to it. I have a distaste for describing what I think ideologically separates men from boys, but in the interest of expounding on Fiona’s chosen words, I will try. Boys, like all children, are inherently selfish. They are very good at communicating, “this is what I need,” whether it comes in the form of a request or a temper tantrum or a letter to Santa or just the tell-tale signs that he needs a nap. They have not yet formed a clear understanding of how to accommodate other people’s needs, or why they should even do so other than because they’ve been told to. Men, like all adults, should have at some point developed an understanding of other people’s emotional needs and a desire to find a way to assuage their discomfort or sadness or — whatever. I believe this is called empathy but on a larger scale than that, or maybe it’s not, maybe I am so jaded by my interactions with baby-men that I think asking them to exercise basic empathy is an enormous chore. So you set up expectations based around the fact that you’re having an adult interaction, and when someone falls short of being able to reciprocate basic human emotional support, that realization kicks in — I thought he was a man, but he was just a little boy.

“A fail to kiss is a fail to cope,” is easy to overlook where it is, even as venomously as she spits the line, but I think it distills the point of the song. It’s a song about coping and a song about cyclical failure, and not one about self-care or self-love or any healthy way of handling irrational emotions. It’s a song about a specific way of coping that is awful and inevitable, self-destructive and painful. Seeking validation from the withholding is a sick game you play to lose. As much as I love a pop anthem about walking away from people who hurt you with your head held high, the reality is that I spend a lot of time playing doormat to their desires, relishing being stepped on because at least it’s contact. I don’t know how to break free of that pattern. I know I deserve better. Fiona Apple damn sure knows she deserves better. But intentional starvation is a disease, a compulsion rooted deep in you attached to some taut wire that is very, very easy to trip over. I don’t think it’s a hopeless case. There are others. It is possible to want what you can have; just sometimes, you don’t. One day the dove will come and it will instead be a carrier pigeon sent with the message I crave above all else — “you are loved.” I know that. But in the meantime I make myself sick over nothing, because starving works.

What film is paper bag in Fiona Apple?

Where was Fiona Apple Paper Bag filmed?

Where was paper bag filmed?