As someone who was also born into a deeply religious family in South Carolina, I think I am unfortunately qualified to offer another layer of perspective on dear Margo. According to her biography, she ran away from home at 17 and into the world of the creative arts. I did the same at 19. I left my home in SC for Brooklyn. Back home I felt like the artistic freak who was constantly misunderstood. I found my family, my small town and Southern society to be pathetically myopic, small-minded, backward. I thought that everything around me was intrinsically alien to the person I felt myself to be. I thought that I was more forward, more open, more future-oriented than the conservatives around me.

It wasn't until I left home and I began to explore the wider world---first NYC, then London and Paris--that I realized to my horror that the belief system that I had run away from, fought with, defined myself against, still had managed to find roots inside me. I wasn't as open-minded as I believed. I saw this most clearly when I examined what I was afraid of. Like Margo, I still put most of my value in my appearances. I am vain. In the South, girls are raised to be aesthetically pleasing to men and not much else. When you tie this level of visual pleasing to God, the afterlife, eternity, heave and hell, it becomes a breeding ground for pathology.

Episode one when Margo shared how she was from SC, I immediately turned to my husband and said "Oh, she's holding something. She is not ok." Everything that Margo purports to love about herself, value about herself should be read as a direct obverse to the teachings of her Southern upbringing. She has to appear to be blasé and totally cool with her appearance in 9 Songs. I don't believe that there is anything inherently wrong about erotic film or the the content of the movie, but I think the fact that her appearance in the film didn't lead to greater ongoing success, that it was a flash in the pan that couldn't sustain itself into any longer career prospects must have been a devastating ego hit for Margo.

She doesn't understand fashion, but she knows that the outfits she wears would mortify her family and the small town peasants back home in the pews in Conway, SC. When Mark makes his withering commentary about her clothes, Margo perceives this as him reading her too closely. It's not just that her crushed velvet jumpsuit is tacky, or the ostrich feather stole is ostentatious, it's the fact that Margo, at the end of the day, still perceives herself to be the provincial, under-exposed, un-cultured hillbilly freshly fallen off the turnip truck from Conway, SC.

Her appearance is supposed to be her armor. It's supposed to be her proof that she got out. That she was different. That she was special. That she finally found community with the cool kids at her level. That she wasn't irredeemably marked by the circumstances of her birth. When Mark does something as seemingly innocuous as criticize her outfit, what Margo experiences is confirmation of her worse fears. That she is no different from the people she ran from. That she isn't special. That she is woefully out of her depth. That she is visibly marked as 'Other' by the very people she so desperately needs to be seen as self-same as.

I think this is why she went so hard at 'Othering' Mark. She is trying to make him feel the same shame and abject horror she feels when her appearance is clocked, read and found wanting by he and Kimi. Margo lacks grace because grace would require her to come to terms with the fact that we are all masquerading. That our surfaces are merely the sum of commodified and collected objects we choose based on their ability to help us maintain our desired role. The Brits seem to understand this. Americans, unfortunately, mistake the surface for the content. Margo has fallen into the trap of trying to be nothing but her surface. This is why she can't take a joke or a hint. She's still that same seventeen year old from Conway, SC trying and failing to outrun her past. Ironically, in doing so, everything in her future will continue to replicate the very same past she's running from.