the left room

Marilyn Manson has a new video out.

Okay: these days, I admit, that’s about as globally newsworthy as my having a new book out. But this particular video is a controversial one, and it has some bearing on what we were talking about briefly below and which we, in the crime fiction community, seem destined to talk about forever, like Prometheus chained to the rock getting his liver pecked out day after day: violence against women. The song is called ‘Running to the edge of the world’. It’s slightly tricky to find the video online at the moment, but at the time of posting … deep breath … Perez Hilton’s site still has it here.

Before you click on it, it’s not very nice. Most of it is just Manson with a curtain wrapped round his face, singing a familiar ‘oh, it hurts when love goes sour, (hack) (cough)’ ballad – which frankly is unpleasant enough. The desperately unpleasant stuff begins at the 4 minute mark, where we get footage of Manson beating a woman in her underwear repeatedly in her bloody face, shots of her naked breasts smeared with blood, and – ultimately – a shot of her dead body in a bathtub.

A few brief and perhaps scarily analytical points about the violence. It’s fairly horrible, although generally shot from behind. Worse are the make-up effects and expression on the face of the woman. But worst of all is the final shot of the body in the bathtub. I’ve looked at some some pretty grim stuff on (honestly) perfectly legal online sites, while researching both The Third Person and Still Bleeding, and the woman’s body in the bathtub is basically indistinguishable from real footage of crime scenes. This snuff-film aesthetic has led some websites to leap the shark. Did Marilyn Manson Beat His Ex-Girlfriend To Death? demands Crave Online. Let me save you the bother of googling “murder, famous actress Evan Rachel Wood”: the answer is no. With marginally more restraint, The L.A. Weekly ponders Did Marilyn Manson Almost Beat a Woman To Death in his New “Snuff” Video? That last article at least has a surprise after the link – an eloquent monologue on the effects of domestic violence by Patrick Stewart – but the headlines in both cases ultimately (and some might say delightedly) buy into the exact same “must look at dreadful thing! must look at dreadful thing!” controversy Manson is courting here and which they’re pretending to condemn.

It goes without saying that the video has become controversial: attacked by different people for different, if connected, reasons. Is it meant to look like Evan Rachel Wood, who Manson is on record as having a difficult and emotional break-up with last year? I genuinely have no idea. Most people seem to say so, but I have no idea how obvious it is, beyond the hair – whereas the girl in Justin Timberlake’s fuck-you video was very clearly styled to look like Britney. Secondly, is Manson condoning or even sexualising violence against women or, more specifically, domestic violence against women? On a related note, the video was released on the same day Rihanna spoke for the first time about her assault by Chris Brown (which was followed, incidentally, by the trending topic of her large forehead on Twitter: I mean, let’s get our fucking priorities straight, shall we, world?). That’s disgraceful timing, at the very least – although it being deliberate, rather than the unfortunate coincidence it may well have been, seems to be being taken as fact.

Anyway – let me nail my flag to the mast here. I think the video is badly misjudged, overly explicit – the smearing blood on breasts element is particularly inexcusable – and that Manson, creatively, is a bit of a spent force. Whereas previously he had stuff to rage against, stuff that was worth being shocking for, he seems aimless and unfocused now: an older man who still needs a target to throw his art at but can’t see anything worthwhile he can hit better than other people already are. His stuff needs an outraged echo in order to reverberate and work. When he started, that was the Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. I guess, albeit simplistically, you could say that Eminem came along and suddenly Manson emerged from the studio wondering where everyone he wanted to offend had gone. This latest video seems like shock for the sake of it. Rather than the politically targeted (if sometimes purloined) and provocative barbs of something like The Fight Song (‘I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist’; ‘the death of one is a tragedy – the death of millions is just a statistic’) or The Love Song (‘Do you love your guns? God? The government?’), he’s aiming low: look – I’m beating a girl to death; isn’t that shocking? It is – of course it fucking is – but there’s no way to join in with that as a listener: to feel as though you’re part of something that’s rebellious in a good way. There’s a phrase people use: speaking truth to power. I wouldn’t necessarily credit Manson with that much, but he always seemed to speak at least offence to power. Whereas this is just speaking offence: thrashing round without anything decent to hit.

Having said that, I don’t think this video is condoning domestic violence. Not remotely. It’s certainly depicting it – an extreme case of it – but that’s not the same thing. If you’ve decided not to watch the video, it’s clearly influenced by Gaspar Noe’s film Irreversible, and is open to two interpretations. In both, although the woman is murdered at the end, the initial portion of the video is Manson singing that familiar ‘love gone sour’ thing, but this is revealed to be taking place chronologically after her death at the end. In one interpretation, he’s already signed a suicide note, taken pills – and then we finally see what he’s done to send him behind the curtains. In the second, her death is a metaphor; he is alone – really – writing an entry in his diary and deciding to move on from hating her, and we finally see the mental state he was in before he left the room – a visualisation of the negative emotions he’s leaving behind.

Accepting that the violence – especially the sexualised element – is unacceptable (and typical ‘look at me on the naughty step, please give me some fucking newspaper space’ Manson) what are we left with? It seems to me there’s only a handful of questions. Is an artist – of whatever calibre we currently rank them – allowed to use violence against a woman as a metaphor for the end of a relationship? Or to present the ’story’ of a man’s last, regretful (and unforgivable) moments after killing a love he’s come to hate? And if an artist presents those things, surely he’s not necessarily condoning them as a life-course, yeah? And other people are smart enough to see that if the rest of us can?

I’m glad people are still asking those questions. But I hope the answer to each one is yes. Christ – I fucking hope it is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 11:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.