The Millennial Condition

A maxim of millennial dating says, "Never treat someone as a priority if they treat you as an option." This is the ethos that informs Bottled, the debut graphic novel by Australian artist Chris Gooch. It's about the dissolution of bonds that once kept a young Australian in place.

Bottled depicts the ability to be unfaithful as both privilege and leverage. The protagonist, Jane, is a young woman living with her mother without any discernible career prospects after college. Jane can't afford to rent a leaking, unheated room which she tours—but she can scrape up enough earnest-money to prevent another person from moving into "her" room. By the end of the plot Jane can afford the room, but only after leveraging one backstabbing cheater against another. And, in moving out, Jane abandons her mother in a crumbling, potentially abusive relationship. As befits a post-recession plot about housing, each character becomes adept at maximizing their own portfolio of options: To be committed is to be inevitably betrayed.

The inciting incident for Bottled is the return of Jane's friend Natalie, who is a glamorous international model, from a lonely work-trip to Japan. Their relationship is largely mediated by their cell phones. Natalie's life is one of constant surveillance and scrutiny—not only from her phone, but also a panopticon of cameras and video cameras. Gooch shorthands this motif as an ominous black rectangle. In a scene when Natalie is extremely intoxicated, her romantic interest slides a cell phone into her bathroom stall. This is somehow not the most violating intrusion of a camera into her life. Through much of the plot, Natalie is terrorized in this panopticon by an unseen spectator: She is subjected to a stream of disembodied threats from an unknown number. Her phone hurls an increasing crescendo of abuse at her:

What? You think you're too good for me?You think you're great?I know what you really are.You don't want to fuck with me. You're reallygoing to regret this.

This would be a chilling reflection of the contemporary treatment of women in popular culture, except that Natalie discovers a means to escape from it. At the climax of the plot, Natalie is able to buy out her blackmailer before uncovering his identity and his own pathetic desperation. Ultimately, Natalie is a speculator rather than a fetish object: She is able to buy back some of her own dignity, albeit in a deal that ends her last meaningful friendships.

The men of Bottled tend to be cheaters: Jane's father and her partner Ben both cheat. Cheating is, of course, a kind of optionality for these men: it is liquidity, both relationally and visually. The telltale sign in Bottled comes when the cheating men visibly melt in one scene or another, typically in the heat of intercourse. Instead of droplets of perspiration, their hands, hair, faces all decompose into sagging tendrils. When Jane's stepfather, Steve, is in bed with an unknown woman, his face oozes such that his eyebrows are hard to discern from the sweat. Here is Gooch's vision of the masculine: something sensual, petty, and pestilential. Ben is most grotesque after his double-crossing has been revealed and his mask is quite literally peeled aside. That mask had a smooth, alien, rigidity that betrayed the contorted, Hyde-like monster underneath. And when Jane succeeds in her plot to play the cheaters against each other, she is finally able to move into that leaking room with two male roommates: She may not have become as liquid as the men in her life, but she is able to buy her way into that position.

The exception to the cheating, the optionality, the melting, and the contortion is Jane's mother. If others are option-traders, Jane's mother is Fort Knox. She abides by her vows to hold her daughter back from more interpersonal debt. In a way, this financial stance helps her keep Jane in a household that...