Sufjan Stevens is Tonya Harding
I really wish I hadn’t listened to Sufjan Stevens “Tonya Harding” before I saw the film adaption Sufjan had written the song for, finally inspired after 20 years of struggling to write about Harding who was one of Sufjan’s teenage heroes. The movie’s director had eventually rejected the two versions of the song Sufjan had offered them, citing that neither fit into the script he’d fought to get greenlit and the story he’d told. Sufjan released both songs anyway, and the rare companion essay (what joy for Sufjanites like me) explaining the song’s history and the woman whose life had inspired him.
Margot Robbie gives the performance of her life in “I,Tonya”. To see her on screen is to see a woman trapped in a deluge of self loathing, clinging to an Alison Janney who is the very incarnation of Satan herself and yet a woman who beaten into the ground by life, uses the only methods she knows to ensure her child doesnt suffer the same fate. Robbie is skittish and angry, teeth constantly bared in a grimace as she slips under the lake that is Harding, skates screeching against sleet as leaps transform into impossible to land triple axles. It is also a funny film, but the kind that aims for defiant humour but fails deliberately because even when Harding is telling the jokes she is still the punchline. But while I went through the motions, and I felt the things I was supposed to, I felt dissatisfied at the end, left on the precipe with no way to come down, because Sufjan had shown me something else, just how much bigger Tonya Harding’s story could have been.
When Sufjan sings about Harding, he does so from the bleachers, the die hard fan who stays back after the game and waits to console the star player. After 20 years of mulling on the song, Sufjan releases two iterations of his ode to Harding, a D Major version lush with layered falsettos and the swelling chorales that have become the signature of his ‘big ballads’; the melancholy thick like layers of sadness, hinting at the violence Harding endured as a child violently beaten by her waitress mother and taunted by competitors for her poverty, judged literally by superficial appearance and found wanting. The second version in Eb Major, plonked gently on a piano, Sufjan lends a gossamer thin web of lightness to her story, stripped of its angst and offered with immutable finality of a fairytale, prettily told to mask a tragic end. He calls Tonya Harding his friend, and he means it. When he sings about her story, and calls her a shining American star, you hear his earnestness, unsullied by 40 years of terrible despair. You want to believe.
In the comments section of “Tonya Harding” on Youtube, so many people while overwhelmed by the beauty of Sufjan’s musicianship, are sorely disappointed in his choice of subject. Eulogizing a serial killer they can understand, but this girl, accused of crippling her friend and co-competitor because of a petty rivalry is unconscionable, how dare he?
But how could he not? Sufjan knew Tonya, in a way you look into a river as see a mirror image of yourself, slightly distorted but familiar enough that you cannot look away. Like Tonya, Sufjan’s mother had grown up in poverty, “a gardener who longed to be a rose”. His mother, schizophrenic and drug addled had abandoned him and his older brother Marzuki in front of a store when he was 1. It is such a traumatic event that it is seared into his infant mind, a scab he picks at on each new album. Tonya’s had beaten her and forced her to skate hours and hours. His mother had gone away, uprooted herself from his life as an admission that motherhood wasn’t something she could succeed at. Tonya’s mother had stayed, and channelled her rage and regret into that rink; sometimes she let it weight down a slap, delivered with the precision of a serpentine tongue flick, other times she let it drip like a faucet, venomous words wearing away at Tonya’s soul. They both proved excellent at an art so removed from the reality of their lives, it felt presumptuous for either of them to even claim skates or a music sheet book for their own. They drew the world’s eye, found its ear, but neither could escape their mothers or the horrible childhoods they had fled as teenagers into the fantastical worlds of figure skating and theatre and music.
Sufjan was 16 years old when Tonya first landed her record breaking triple axel at 21. It would be ten more years before Sufjan would be confident enough in his music to release a solo album, but that day in 1991, she lit something inside him. There was an ecstatic freedom that seemed to envelop Tonya when she skated, a feeling Sufjan replicates in his music, a permission if you will, to feel as deeply and strongly as the situation demands. Sufjan’s ode to her is set to that magical performance in 1991, its sonic peaks and dips composed to match hers, her gracefulness finally set to the music it deserves. He watched the world she had pleased with her triumphs, chew her up and spit her out because they believed she’d desired above her station. “Tonya Harding” exists remind us just how much of a miracle it was that Tonya got to create any magic at all, a miracle that was fought dearly for, and hard won, a miracle that endures no matter what we think of her today.
I enjoyed Margot’s Tonya but Sufjan’s ode, stripped of jokes and gimmick, of artifice reminded me Harding was just like him, just some “Portland white trash” who fought to become something other what the world had decided for them.
Sufjan calls her his friend because he sees her, in many ways he is her.
