The short film is called My Story (Anorexia). It contains a series of still images of a beautiful girl from Kiev in Ukraine, whose ambition to be a model turned into an obsession with losing weight.
“I ate green apples with black coffee for a week and a half,” say the stark captions. “I decided I’d do ANYTHING to get thin ... I was purging 14 times a day ... I was abusing diet pills. I overdosed on them twice. I didn’t care if it killed me. I wanted to die. To disappear.”
What makes the YouTube film so compelling is the combined effect of the pictures with music. As the sad story of 18-year-old “katerynabilyk” unfolds, a soulful female voice with an Irish accent sings about an anorexic girl called Sophie who, to the distress of her family, is “tryin’ to make herself thinner.” Her desire “to be like all the other girls, be just like all the other girls” is driving her toward self-destruction.
The impression is that the song, entitled Sophie, was produced to lend a potent cinematic quality to the film, whose final caption reads: “Anorexia lied when she told me that thin was worth everything ... It’s not worth it.”
But the song was recorded more than 10 years ago by a little-known Irish artist and quickly disappeared. Its creator, singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy, described it as an “obscure track” that was placed far down the playlist of her third album.
Yet, in the era of the Internet, Sophie has been rediscovered and grown into a sleeper hit, an anthem that is touching, inspiring and consoling thousands of anorexic girls around the world.
Dozens have turned to YouTube, the video sharing Web site, as an outlet for self-expression, confiding the anguish of eating disorders as they might to a diary or therapist. Many have made films containing photos of themselves with captions narrating their personal stories.
Some have included magazine pictures of super-thin models or computer animations. They have then added Sophie as the haunting soundtrack to their lives. One girl, user name “LanaxCore,” has filmed herself singing it in her bedroom.
Collectively, the Sophie films have been viewed more than 1.5 million times. Many have attracted comments from YouTube users, asking where they can get the song, expressing support or, in some cases, arguing that anorexia is a positive aspiration. The trend has shown the potential of Web “mashups” — the editing together of images and music — to empower users to create something more arresting than a simple blog.
McEvoy, who lives in County Wexford, based the lyrics on observation of anorexia’s effects rather than personal experience.
“I think all women, or maybe all people nowadays, do have more focus on their appearance than they should have,” she said. “We tend to know what weight we are, which we shouldn’t really if we’re reasonably healthy. It shouldn’t be a big issue to the extent that people are starving themselves.”
McEvoy, 41, drew inspiration from two acquaintances who suffered anorexia. She explained: “With one of them, it really hit her family, and I thought her siblings were neglected a little bit because of it. The second thing that hit me like a hammer was that they felt they were freaks and they wanted to be extra thin just to fit in and be ‘normal.’
“The third thing was that women have had so many constraints put on them and now they’re putting these things on themselves. People say, ‘Oh well, it’s men doing this to women.’ But it’s not men; it’s generally women who make comments about other people’s weight,” she said.
The name “Sophie” was chosen for its sound, and the song emerged well down the playlist of McEvoy’s third album, Snapshots, in 1999. She is more astonished than anyone at its new lease of life.
“It’s a little bizarre because it’s such an old song and was an obscure track on the album. You write hundreds of songs and sometimes you wonder if they touch anybody, but you just keep churning them out,” she said.
Suddenly messages from teenagers began appearing on McEvoy’s Web site and her page on the social networking site MySpace, thanking her for the song that they said had changed or even saved their lives.
One said: “I just wanted to thank you for Sophie. I am about to turn 30. I have struggled with anorexia and bulimia for going on 19 years. I’m struggling tonight and I happened upon your page. It must be a God thing, and I felt the need to thank you for Sophie.”
Another wrote: “I had never heard your song Sophie ... until 10 minutes ago and I am now going to go and get help for my eating disorder instead of continually trying to convince myself and the counsellors I don’t have a problem.”
Another message said: “Hi. My name is Caroline and I can truly relate to your song Sophie.”
And one girl wrote: “My therapist had me listen to your song called Sophie because it relates to my problems. For the past few years I have been struggling with anorexia. I am trying my best to get better, but I feel so weak. I do not have much time and my body is shutting down. It is really hard on me, but more on my family. And my little sisters.”
Girls have come to McEvoy’s gigs and asked her to autograph the lyrics of Sophie. The musician, whose latest album is Love Must Be Tough, has noticed that a minority of the YouTube videos have taken a controversial “pro-anorexia” stand and some of the comments seek to celebrate it. She insists that her song does anything but.
Yet her surprise success does not add up to a moneyspinner. The rights to the album are still owned by Columbia Records in New York, so McEvoy cannot re-release it.
“I’ve been trying to buy it back from the record company for years now,” she said. “They’re not selling it either. I can’t even get a copy of the damn album myself — sometimes you find one on the Web — so it’s intensely frustrating.”
But the emotional impact of the song has its own rewards.
On a recent tour of Poland, McEvoy was invited to a children’s hospital to meet anorexia sufferers in the psychiatric unit.
“When I went in they all said, ‘Thank you so much for the song, it really helped me.’ In Poland! I’ve got some beautiful letters from people who’ve taken strength from the song and said they want to beat anorexia now. It’s lovely to have people thanking me,” she said.
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