Truly, Madly, Deeply

In 2002, Blake’s career began to blossom. Fascinated with the boundaries between painting, photography and computer art, he pioneered a genre that he called “moving paintings,” a series of digital animations played on plasma-screen televisions. One curator dubbed it “painting with pixels.” Not long after, the singer-songwriter Beck asked Blake to design the cover art and a music video for the musician’s album “Sea Change.” That same year, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson hired him to create a hallucinogenic dream sequence for “Punch-Drunk Love,” starring Adam Sandler.

But as Blake’s celebrity and creative confidence grew, Duncan’s professional luck withered. The CD-ROM market tanked, and she struggled to get projects off the ground in other media. Hoped-for ventures with the Oxygen Network, MTV, Paramount Pictures, Fox Searchlight Pictures and the publishing house HarperCollins all fizzled. Frustrated and bewildered, she began to suspect that the Church of Scientology was deliberately thwarting her progress. In a disjointed 2006 e-mail to an art-world friend, Duncan claimed that Beck, a second-generation Scientologist, had told her about his plans to leave the church. This knowledge, she wrote, would make her“priority No. 1 for their paranoid and dangerous security wing.”(A spokesperson for Beck denied to NEWSWEEK that the exchange ever occurred, and a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology called Duncan’s allegations “absurd.”)

Thwarted elsewhere, Duncan turned to the Internet, launching a blog called The Wit of the Staircase that cataloged far-flung interests such as cinema, perfume and the history of electricity. But the blog also served as a base for Duncan to mount a case against Scientologists and others who she believed had a vendetta against her. In May 2007, she posted a sprawling entry that claimed a host of people—including Hollywood executives, Republican media owners, the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security—were conducting a “smear campaign” against the couple. Duncan’s assault reads like a multimedia performance piece, with hyperlinks and pictures incorporating information from the dregs of the Internet.

Ever supportive, Blake defended Duncan, no matter how outrageous her claims. More than a soulmate, he said that the two shared a “creed”: a lifelong pledge of love and protection. In e-mails to friends, he railed against an organized campaign to stall Duncan’s career. At one point in 2006, he accused Schlei’s girlfriend of being part of the conspiracy. “She has an unfortunate interest in smearing Theresa because her masters told her to,” Blake wrote to Schlei in an e-mail obtained by NEWSWEEK. “Seriously?” Schlei replied. “You’ve got to know that this sounds absolutely insane my friend.” But Blake was unbowed. “If you want me to get a lawyer and sue her for defaming Theresa,” he wrote, “that will be fun.”

This past February Blake took a consulting job at Rockstar videogames, and Duncan searched for traction on a new project. The night before she killed herself, they met with “Scream” producer Cary Woods to outline a noir film—a dream project for some, but it was perhaps too much for Duncan. Her friends speculate that she chose to end her life rather than risk losing another film to forces outside her control. Theresa herself wrote in an e-mail, “The CoS is going to have to kill us before we will give up ANY of our free will or any of our constitutional rights to do and say what we please.” Instead, Blake’s final work, “Sodium Fox,” is an abstract short film that he called a “self-portrait by proxy.” It ends with the image of a ghostly smear of color over the ocean. There are waves crashing on the beach, but the only sound is a crackling radio voice from some mysterious signal, then an eerily prophetic voice-over: “This will take four or five years to describe.” Perhaps, though as a self-portrait of a quietly tragic end, its meaning seems all too clear.

© 2007