MUSIC BOX NO. 4
xenomorph ballads, cough syrup, and five songs that remind me of films.
ONE. LA PETITE FILLE DE LE MER BY VANGELIS || THE LAST UNICORN (1982) DIR. ARTHUR RANKIN JR. AND JULES BASS.
You’re sitting on your boyfriend’s ancient, overstuffed, faux-suede couch. It’s 3 a.m. All the lights in the house are off. His mother is out working the night shift. His father isn’t in the picture. The grainy beige carpet of the living room smells like cigarettes— you never noticed it until earlier that evening, when you were face down in it as he fucked you from behind. You like to imagine that the scabs from rug burn, compounded over the course of several trysts, have layered over one another like tree rings instead of just digging deeper into the flesh of your knees. You think you love him. You certainly like him, especially in quiet moments like these when you’ve got your head in his lap and he’s got his hands in your hair. It doesn’t matter if he’s trouble. He’s sweet on you, with your head cradled to him like he’s hiding you from the rain outside. You can hear the trickle of water, just as present as the slow drag of air entering his lungs. He must have fallen asleep at some point.
Washed blue from the light of the TV, the living room is underwater in all of its ancient, overstuffed glory. Earlier, he popped a tape into the VCR and gave you a bowl of ice cream like he was compensating you for dealing with him. You like him a little more for it. Faded colors wash over the fuzz of the screen, pressing pixels into the backs of your eyelids. Accompanied by the ambience of quiet guitar— you’ve got the volume turned down even though no one else is home so it’s easier to hear him breathe— you find yourself slipping, pulled gently into sleep by the remnants of the day’s heat. And in your dreams there are unicorns, a whole wave of them, running out of the water for nothing but their own freedom, coming to free the both of you.
This boyfriend is imaginary. Mostly. I’ve been fucked on beige carpet and slept in someone’s lap on an oversized faux-suede couch and fed ice cream and VHS tapes, but all those events occurred separately. This imaginary boyfriend is a fake composite of real memories, five or six people combined into one for the strongest visual and the best conveyance of a sonic landscape. Because this is, in fact, a landscape. This is a road. This is a forest and all your friends are here, but you have to leave because you survived something you shouldn’t have. You were supposed to die. Now you have to find out why you lived when the others didn’t.
I don’t think I watched The Last Unicorn as a kid (certainly not more than once, and likely not when I was old enough to find the story remotely coherent) but I can’t bring myself to regret coming to it in my teens. It seems like it means something different to every member of the cult following it has garnered— that nature triumphs over love, that happiness cannot come at the cost of others’ freedom, the battle between cynicism and innocence. Some people read it as inherently queer, especially in the moments where Amalthea sings about how strange things are “now that [she’s] a woman”. Some people get caught up on the scene with Schmendrick the Magician and the tree, which yeah, fair. Some people stay fans because of Molly Grue, the middle-aged companion to the Unicorn who, upon meeting her, started crying and wondering out loud why the Unicorn had to come when she was old and resigned. For a children’s movie, it’s thematically rich in ways you don’t expect, subverting more commonplace themes of love into something as nuanced and complex as love actually is. Or at least as complex as love seems to be. I don’t think I’d know.
It was less of a thematic journey for me and more of a feeling. Despite the fact that the soundtracking was done by folk-rock band America, The Last Unicorn was distinctly vibraphonic, or maybe like a theremin. Without a doubt, it was arpeggiated— you can tell when movies are arpeggiated because there’s typically a lot of running, journeying, tight corners, and staircases. It twinkled and slid, silky in some places and river-water-running in others, moving like a dancer into the fog. I mention La petite fille de la mer not because it’s thematically relevant, but because it moves in a similar way. It’s the length of Amalthea’s neck. It’s the long, crooked spiral staircase in King Haggard’s castle. It’s the crashing wave of unicorns bursting out of the sea. Everything, the song and the movie, puts you in a trance. Watching and listening becomes an act of drifting.
And I was, in fact, drifting on the softness of that ugly fucking couch, sitting pretty on the precipice between the real world and some distant, foggy land. In the midst of the conglomerate of memories I previously sandwiched together, the core memory of that moment was laying on someone’s lap and watching The Last Unicorn for the first time, coming in and out of the world. That’s it. Everything was warm and sweet and some sort of melancholy. I’ve never been too good at finding the difference between reality and unreality. Being on the edge of sleep doesn’t help that. I couldn’t tell you shit about what happened earlier that day or how I got there or even if the parts I attributed to other memories were actually part of this one. You know what I’m sure about?
The sound of rain and combined breathing, the blue TV screen light, and this unbearable, wordless, cynical sort of hope that one day, even if I was old and disillusioned, my unicorn would come and save me. All I had to do was keep my eyes open for it. It would save me, wrench me from the reach of Hell, and finally everything would be okay.
And then I fell asleep.
TWO. PAGAN POETRY BY BJÖRK || ALIEN (1979) DIR. RIPLEY SCOTT.
When it comes to movies, one of my deepest regrets is that I spilled tea on the couch while watching Alien for the first time. My parents were out for the night. In an attempt to pretend like it didn’t happen, I spent over half the film sitting on a different part of the couch, holding a hairdryer to the wet spot and praying that it would dry faster so I could actually hear what was going on. Subtitles didn’t cut it. Turning up the volume didn’t do shit— I must have had the TV loud enough that people walking by the house could hear it, but the dialogue was still barely audible. It was infuriating. I briefly considered thumping my head against the kitchen counter until I didn’t have enough brain cells to be annoyed anymore.
Yeah, not the ideal watching experience, especially because my divided attention meant that I slightly singed the fabric of the cushion by having the heat up too high (which no one has called me on yet, thank God). But there were some unexpected benefits.
Film scoring holds a much more important place in the emotionality of a scene than most people realize, mostly because it tends to go unnoticed. Unless you’re listening for it or, like me, are blessed/cursed to notice every sound in earshot, the brain tends to write it off as diegetic1 sound instead of something separate from the scene. By blending in, it subtly directs you to the emotion that is supposed to be felt without you realizing where you’re getting the emotional cues from, further enhancing the impact of the visual. Movies like Jaws (1975), although scary, would not be nearly as effective without the scoring. Even in smaller films with less iconic scores, sound can change the entire emotion of a scene without the viewer even realizing it.
Alien is optical in ways that so many movies aren’t. It is an artistic experience. Obviously, visuals play a massive part in all films, but if you put something you’re watching on mute, it’s shocking how many films don’t hold up without sound. It’s not even about aesthetics; it’s about cinematic weight and impact. Something with a lovely aesthetic still might not hold up without sound if there’s nothing that inspires fascination onscreen. Alien, on the other hand, is nothing but onscreen fascination. I love Jerry Goldsmith’s score and the constant drone behind every scene on the Nostromo, but cutting out effectively every sound was akin to an experience with religion. Not a religious experience, mind you— instead of finding God, seeing the inside of the derelict Xenomorph spacecraft without sound was like walking into a massive church for a practice you’re not part of. Everything was new and strange and fascinating. Structural support curves endlessly into the sky, forming a metallic ribcage; veiny piping leads to massive phallic structures jutting out of the floor. The aliens and their technology, designed by self-described “biomechanical” artist H.R. Giger, straddles the line between industrialism and sexuality so efficiently that actress Veronica Cartwright said being on his sets were “like you’re going inside some sort of womb”2.
Also straddling the industrialism-sexuality line is Björk, who created an entire career out of technonaturalist belief and aesthetic. Her 2001 album Verspertine (adjective: of, relating to, or occurring in the evening) leans heavily into eroticism and closeness. Many of the percussive sounds throughout the record are commonplace noises, like ice cracking or cards being shuffled, that were mixed into intimate “microbeats”. Where her previous albums were focused on natural sounds with electronic interjections, Vespertine is mainly electronic with occasional choral or harp parts. If we’re using the rationale that every single piece of music has a proximity to the inner ear— older records in worse shape tend to sound further away from the brain, where newer and better produced songs typically sound closer— then Vespertine is probably the deepest inside an album can go.
One of her most overtly sexual works to date, the music videos for Cocoon and Pagan Poetry were both banned from MTV for being too explicit. Pagan Poetry, in particular, is a standout video. Reportedly about “a woman preparing herself for marriage and for her lover”3, it is a combination of a highly-edited sex tape, videos of pearls being sewn onto human flesh, and Björk lip syncing to the song in a topless Alexander McQueen dress.
Watching Alien immediately reminded me of Pagan Poetry’s high-tech fetishist undertones. The song itself sits somewhere between a lullaby and a nightmare, with a menagerie of music boxes eerily tangling over a deep, droning bassline and Bjork’s growled vocals. Giger’s design of the aliens is inherently erotic— aside from the deliberate genitalic implications of their appearance, their interactions with the Nostromos crew hit all the marks for the body horror of psychosexuality. People were penetrated, impregnated, hunted down. Several critics have commented on the face-hugger and chest-burster scenes being representative of the patriarchal fear of penetration and the horror of non-consensual reproduction. The final scene of Ridley in her underwear only emphasizes the sexual vulnerability of being chased by the Xenomorph. The expression of eroticism in Pagan Poetry is equally metaphorical, with totally ripe, swirling black lilies and the eponymous mentions of Paganism being a vehicle for yonic imagery. Listening to it with Alien in mind, a love song about pleasure and potential commitment becomes the Xenomorphic desire to kill anything that stops it from breeding and ensuring the survival of its species.
You know what? I think that, even though the canon of the universe says a Xenomorph is only capable of the desires to kill and breed, the Xenomorph of Alien (1979) experiences being in love. Of course, the amount of love the Xenomorph can feel is likely not much, but that’s not the point. It loves the chase. It loves the kill. It loves the danger it puts itself in by trying to narrow down and selectively impregnate a crew member. They make it want to hand itself over— its life, its eggs. The Xenomorph loves Ridley to its fullest ability, and when it loves you, you’re doomed. If anything is Pagan poetry, it’s that degree of perversion.
THREE. YOU’RE SO COOL BY NICOLE DOLLANGANGER || WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995) DIR. TODD SOLONDZ.
Going to school and wishing you didn’t, going home and wishing you didn’t, going out and wishing you didn’t, trying to go somewhere where there’s people and ending up feeling more alone, trying to go to somewhere else to be alone properly this time, trying to feel less alone and failing miserably, wanting to be wanted by anyone, wanting your family to die or be nicer or to love you in a way that feels like being loved, wanting to be swept off your feet by a knight in shining armor, getting swept off your feet and hating it, getting swept off your feet again and thinking that maybe the first guy wasn’t so bad, getting touched for the first time and hating it and then feeling nothing at all, having your hair pulled, having the boys you sit next to in Homeroom joke about raping you, having a teacher send you to the guidance counselor because the story you wrote was “deeply concerning”, hoping that you’re concerning enough to get sent somewhere where you don’t have to hide the fact that you’re concerning, hoping that nothing ever changes because you’re terrified, hoping a million things and keeping them all to yourself until all your desire practically lights you on fire from the inside out. And none of it ever, ever comes true. You just sit there and burn.
All the while, you’re feeling like you’re the smallest and ugliest and most pathetic thing in the world, or like you’re not getting the punchline to a joke that everyone else already knows, or like you’re the first person in the history of the entire world to be this hungry, this alone, this empty, this evil, this downright fucking terrible. You might be in love but you’re not sure, because it’s only nice sometimes, and “sometimes” is few and far in between. You want forever, even though you know that it’s not going to happen. You just want things to be nice. You just want to be nice, and if you can’t be nice, you just want to be like everyone else. Everyone has a better life than you, everyone is happier than you are, everyone is more beautiful than you are, and everyone is more loved than you are. You want that. You’ll burn about that, too.
It took me over a week to finish watching Welcome to the Dollhouse. I don’t like feeling desperate and tiny, and I fucking hate being reminded that at one point in my life, I was very, very desperate and very, very tiny.
Dawn Wiener is the 12 year old to end all 12 year olds. When it comes to the big, embarrassing, ugly feelings that characterized so much of my early adolescence, she’s got them in spades, so tangible that it leaks off the screen to find its way into the part of your heart that you’re ashamed to have. It’s like watching a car crash. You can’t help but glue your eyes, horrified, to her clumsiness, her painful enthusiasm, her family’s caustic attitude towards her, the way things only get worse when she tries to be helpful. I could only watch ten minutes or so at a time without wanting to curl up and hide, because although I was alone in the room, I didn’t feel alone. It was almost unbearable. The camera was on me. The camera was on me and I was Dawn Wiener and I was also the spectator to Dawn Wiener, being shamed for spectating the way I was. Shame on me for thinking, although Welcome to the Dollhouse is a comedy, that any of this could be funny. Shame on me for having been part of the “everybody else” that Dawn rightfully hates, so wrapped up in my own pain that you can hardly realize if I hurt others. Shame on me for ever being like Dawn, who is also so wrapped up in her own pain that she can hardly realize if she’s hurting others.
Unlike most of the bildungsroman-esque movies I’ve seen, Welcome to the Dollhouse isn’t trying to moralize middle school. This isn’t bully vs. underdog, an after school special, or some sweet, innocent preteen romance. Nobody is the good guy. Everyone is doing everything wrong all of the time. Where other movies that center around bullying end up portraying the bully as some Goliath-type or try to make you sympathize with the bully because they’ve got a shitty home life— which consistently falls flat and, to be honest, is pretty fucking tacky— Dollhouse never absolves the characters of their individual transgressions. It’s not trying to make some grand statement on how everyone sucks or how everyone is secretly good or on who had it worse. You could definitely try and apply those things to the story, but you’d be missing the point.
The point is that these are twelve year olds. The grand statement is hey, remember being twelve? Remember how much that fucking sucked? It’s not inspirational, it’s not beautiful, it’s not rousing. Go somewhere else if you want a call to action. If anything, Dollhouse is a portrait of the kids you went to school with. You know these people. You’re one of them. You’re all of them.
You’re So Cool might be the closest a song can get to being the loneliest love song in the world without veering into heartbreak territory. I would even go so far as to say that it’s multipurpose— you can sympathize with it in almost any state, whether you’ve been in a relationship for several years or you’re watching someone you’re never talked to walk past you on the sidewalk. It’s infatuation. It’s true romance. Originally written for a boyfriend in prison, You’re So Cool depicts an outcasted anti-hero type from the perspective of the girl in love with him. He’s got guns and a rough past and a bad rep. He’s very good when he’s being good, but he’s better when he’s bad. In all honesty, the song doesn’t have much of a connection to Welcome to the Dollhouse4— the love interest could be read as Dawn’s bully-turned-boyfriend, Brandon, or even the garage band lead singer that she spends most the movie lusting after, Steve Rodgers, but that’s not why I listened to it for an hour after I finally finished the movie.
I was thirteen, only one year older than Dawn Wiener. After finally having got an iPod Touch to listen to non-cassette music on, I made good use of it by logging onto Tumblr and using all 25 minutes of my lunch period scrolling. I didn’t have people I sat with at lunch and I didn’t give a shit about my homework, so it wasn’t like I had anything better to do— my little back corner of the school library was away from everyone else, tucked in an alcove so no one would see me and I wouldn’t have to see them. With my headphones in, I lost myself in my own little world, which is where I encountered You’re So Cool for the first time.
It rattled my bones. It felt like driving fast in a big car at night. Dollanganger’s voice is ultra-sweet and girlish, but the tinges of despondency and desperation resonated with me. I listened to it for the whole period, stoically staring down my soggy sandwich, ignoring the desire to cry. The rest of my school day proceeded as usual. I popped two of the benzodiazepines I wasn’t supposed to have, spaced my way through my math teacher’s advances, and then spent an extra minute taking the long way from one classroom to the other on the off chance I could see my long-term fixation. I can’t rightfully call him a crush— we were in the fifth grade together but hadn’t talked at all since then, and he was really just a body double I was using to copy and paste fantasies onto. He wasn’t even that cute. I just liked him because he was sort of angry and I was sort of angry, too.
In my mind, we were Alabama and Clarence from True Romance (1993), driving down the highway to Mexico post-shootout, his bleeding head resting on my shoulder while I monologued in the voiceover. In reality, I was a child in hand-me-down clothes taking hand-me-down Xanax, trying to make eye contact with some kid as we shuffled past each other in the hallway. I was so little. My hair hadn’t even darkened yet. Watching Dawn watch Steve eat fish fingers like he was God sitting on her sofa was an aggressive reminder that I had once changed some of the only things I had control over just to potentially see some boy I didn’t give a shit about so I could continue a fantasy.
You’re so cool. I took the long way to classes. You’re so cool. I changed what door I came out of the school from, changed where I walked the dog, changed the clothes I wore to look more like the girls he dated. You’re so cool. I’m small and miserable and I’m burning alive, and out of all the voices in the choir, I can only hear my own. You’re so cool, you’re so cool. I’m yours forever. I’m yours forever.
FOUR. BIRD GERHL BY ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS || LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1960) DIR. GEORGES FRANJU.
How much do your parents love you? What lengths would they go to for your happiness? What lengths would they go to for your health? Can monetary value be ascribed to their love? Can scientific discovery be attributed to their love? Would they die for you? Would they kill for you? Would they disfigure living girls, surgically removing parts of their body, if it meant that you could have something you lost back? Would they stop at nothing to see you doing well?
More importantly, do you and your parents agree on what happiness and health looks like? Does their vision for what your life should be overrule any vision of yours? Do they love you so much that they don’t care about you?
It’s not about you and me, though. It’s about Edith Scob’s portrayal of Christiane Génessier, the taxidermy girl of Les Yeux Sans Visage. Trapped in the backwoods mansion of her scientist father after being disfigured in a car accident he caused, Christiane splits her time between her bed and wandering the house’s never-ending hallways, moving up and down infinite staircases to the dog kennels, the dining room, and then back to her room. Her only deviation from haunting her own home is when her father kidnaps another girl and peels her skin off, intending to Frankenstein Christiane’s face back together. She’s frozen in time, dead and undying.
It’s a terrible way to live. In fact, it’s made a ghost out of Christiane. Dressed in white gowns and an eerie, doll-like mask, she moves through the film like an apparition of longing, floating in and out until she floats away forever. Her father doesn’t care. Well, maybe he cares too much, but only about the wrong things. Professeur Génessier is the leading expert in heterography, a revolutionary skin grafting technique. He is not a madman or a lunatic— Franju refused to give into the mad scientist trope, likely because of German censors— but a deeply analytical man with the means to a cure who, due to his increasing desperation, doesn’t realize his moral deviance or the horror he is subjecting his daughter to.
Although he is mainly performing these grafts on Christiane, saying that she’s the benefactor of the surgeries wouldn’t be the right word. Even when I watched Les Yeux for the first time, one of the things that stuck out to me the most was the feminist themes, as unintentional as they might be. Génessier overrules Christiane’s wishes to not be operated on and just “let [her] be dead for good” because he simply does not view her opinion on the course of her own life as a valid one. He has complete power over her— as her father, as her financial and housing support, as a societally well-respected man, as one of the only people who knows she’s still alive, as a doctor— and therefore she is nothing more than a dearly beloved pet to him. Any input on a course of action or commentary on how miserable living by his rules makes her is met with a fond smile, a pat on the hand, and a reminder that she should only take off her mask to sleep. He simply doesn’t view her as a human being. Why would he? She’s not a person; she’s his daughter.
The real horror of Les Yeux isn’t the gore or the murderous intent of Génessier and his assistant Louise, but that a young woman had been stripped of her identity and then had a separate and new identity forced onto her. If Génessier’s surgeries were successful, she would literally be wearing another girl’s face. In his unchecked desire to return her to her former self, he doesn’t realize that she’s changed into someone else, her former self having died in the accident. The person she has become is deemed unacceptable by Génessier in both a societal and personal sense— beauty, a fluid concept enforced by systemic oppression, is deemed essential to his world order and he sees no issue with weaponizing it against Christiane until she’s practically been driven insane. His attempts to restore her beauty are not as liberating for her as they are for him. Instead of blooming into his idea of her, she retreats further into herself until she’s a shell of a person.
Ultimately, the film ends ambiguously, with Christiane drifting alone into the night, surrounded by her pet doves. In my opinion, it’s one of the most haunting visuals in the history of film, aesthetically and thematically (and I promise I’m not being biased just because Les Yeux might be my all-time favorite film). Honestly, it’s not a very hopeful kind of ambiguity. This is her first time outdoors in God knows how long— even if she returned to the mansion, food would run out eventually, and I’m not sure if she would have the mental capacity for driving almost an hour into the city for more supplies. When trying to think about what could’ve happened to Christiane after the credits start rolling, the most obvious answer is that she’s going to finally make good on the suicidal intent she’s had for the whole film. The viewer gets the distinct feeling that freedom won’t save her.
But you know what? I don’t give a shit. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find Christiane’s character somewhat relatable— the themes of filial autonomy, isolation, and disability run parallel to my own life and experiences. I don’t want to believe that Christiane killed herself or died early in some other way because believing that feels a little too close to a self-prophecy, one that I don’t want fulfilled. I will not supersede the potential tragedy of the ending, though, and deny her autonomy the way her father did. Fuck that. Maybe Christiane leaves the mansion and never has to go back, living in the French countryside with her doves like she’s Snow White until she dies old and happy. Maybe she does kill herself. Anything she does in a declaration of autonomy is worth it, because it’ll be worth it for me when it’s my time.
There were a lot of potential song choices for Les Yeux, but with my hope for a kinder ending in mind, Bird Gerhl felt obvious. The finale to Antony and the Johnsons’ 2005 Mercury Prize-winning album I Am A Bird Now, which I can only describe as an epic on human life and the transgender experience, Bird Gerhl (spelled on Spotify as “Bird Guhl”) is a joyous, airborne epiphany. I’m not someone who cries easily, but listening to the whole album all the way through and ending on the euphoria of Bird Gerhl is enough to make me start bawling my eyes out. Even without the context of the rest of the album or the knowledge that lead singer Anohni is transgender, it remains a song about freedom— finally, finally being free, finding your wings and taking flight, being reborn into the sky.
The bird imagery is especially potent due to Christiane’s doves serving as a metaphor for herself, trapped in a cage she doesn’t want to be in. When the doves got free, so did she. And she might’ve been walking to her certain death, but who cares? Anything that’s her choice is okay, because she’s a bird girl and bird girls can fly. She’ll go to Heaven because bird girls go to Heaven. It’s that simple.
I can only hope that taking flight, having her feet lift off the ground, felt real good for her. Like release. Like going home. I hope she finally feels good up in the sky. God, I really do.
FIVE. BLACK-EYED DOG BY NICK DRAKE || THE PLAGUE DOGS (1982) DIR. MARTIN ROSEN.
My days are nothing. My nights, glued together by a pseudo-nocturnal sort of illness, are spent floating around my bedroom whilst high on cough syrup. (It's excusable because I have a cold right now— I'll only take a mile if I'm given an inch first, you know, and I keep the dose low, so everything is just dandy). Pockmarked by intervals of expansive euphoria, I drift from the mirror to the mattress on the floor to the desk, doing nothing in particular. Sometimes I go for walks, only coming home once I can't stop checking behind me to see if I'm being followed. Sometimes I play dress up— which isn't much fun alone, but I have enough dolls and stuffed animals that I can fake a montage— just to feel texture on my body, for lack of anything better to do.
Mostly I watch movies, though. Often animated movies, especially the surreal, strange ones, because I feel surreal and strange. I wanted the creation of my world, my little island of sickness, to be validated. Yes, this is okay— yes, it’s pardonable and understandable that you’re staying here, trapped in freeze mode. What is there to do? I slammed another 60 milliliters of DayQuil and queued up The Plague Dogs.
Before I watched it, all I had heard about it was that it was sad, which left me caught off guard when I actually saw it. I was under the impression that it was a feel-bad movie type of sad, which is kind of like a feel-good movie if it ended in death or something other unsatisfactory thing— you know, big tear-jerking moments, dramatic proclamations of love, epic fantasy with a clear villain, big showdowns, noble decisions. The quietness of The Plague Dogs entirely disarmed me. This is not a children’s movie. These are adult characters, drowned and tortured and operated on, who took their chance to escape and found themselves in a world that offers no clarity or relief besides the relief of not being in the lab anymore. Author Richard Adams (the same guy who wrote Watership Down, unsurprisingly) has some strong words about animal welfare and the state of governmental bureaucracy, but I get the sense that political opinions were much stronger in the book than in the movie. Humanity is only heard in snatches through news reports or faceless conversations between people at a gas station, out of the dogs’ earshot and often in a completely different location than the dogs— instead of focusing on the human force behind the story, the film redirects us to the relationship between the dogs and what they’re feeling amidst all the human complication.
They want to survive, mostly. All animals have the drive to stay alive, and our protagonists are no exception. They find their way through the English countryside in watercolor, killing sheep for food and trying to evade being recaptured by the scientists that abused them. After being repeatedly drowned and resuscitated, Rowf has a fear of water and a cynical attitude towards life. Snitter, who was operated on with the intent of “confusing the subjective and objective in the animal’s mind”, suffers from hallucinations and a distressing noise that only he can hear, but remains more optimistic. The bleakness of the film shines through the details in the animation— the silver on Rowf’s muzzle and the ribs showing through their coats do more heavy lifting for despair than a voiceover could dream of.
Both of them know the way they’re living isn’t sustainable. Both of them know that slowing down means certain death. In fact, both of them seem painfully aware of their mortality from the very beginning, the metaphorical black dog that nips at their heels.
One of the last songs Nick Drake recorded before his death, Black-Eyed Dog is one of the most mysterious and haunting tracks in his discography. It’s difficult to tell exactly what it’s about— while many fans posit that the titular black-eyed dog is a metaphor for Drake’s depression, citing Winston Churchill’s “black dog” of dark moods, the addition of being “black-eyed” leads some to believe the dog represents losing a fight and laying down to lick your bruises. I’m not sure which camp I fall into. I don’t think it matters that much, honestly. At the time of recording, Drake was shaking so badly that the guitar and vocals had to be recorded separately, something he had never done before. He spent his life battling depression and fatally overdosed on antidepressants at age 26, years before his music would gain the cult status it has today. You can hear the pain.
When I first heard Black-Eyed Dog, I wasn’t listening for symbolism. I was listening to the reedy cry of his voice in the chorus— growing old and I want to go home, growing old and I don’t want to know. Whatever the black-eyed dog is, it’s at his door, calling his name and calling for more. It’s here for him. The lyrics are just simple enough to be painfully youthful, like the fear of death made a child out of him. It makes children out of all of us, though, doesn’t it?
Drake’s desperation and sparse instrumentation are uncannily similar to the desolation Rowf and Snitter face while being pursued by the government. The dialogue is just simple enough to be brutally effective, plaintive and melancholy. They’re hungry. They’re cold. Maybe if they die, the sky will fall down and kill all the bad men. They’re terrified of the future. They think they can see an island, way out there in the sea, a place where they’ll finally be safe. They’re getting old. They just want to go home.
Survival only hurts because we want to live. All the while, the flies in our heads are getting louder and louder. Eventually, they’ll drown us right out. They’ll drown us all out. Just give it time.
BONUS TRACK. WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT - LIVE BY NIRVANA || TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) DIR. DAVID LYNCH.
Laura Palmer, Laura Palmer. What can you say about Laura Palmer? She’s undeniably one of the most complex, three-dimensional female characters that television has to offer. She volunteered for the Meals On Wheels program. She was an addict. She wasn’t buried deep enough. She was the perfect, homecoming queen. She was a victim of incestual abuse. She saved the world from the evil of men. She was a sex worker. She wanted to be good so desperately that it’s almost painful for the viewer to watch. She cheated on her boyfriend. She was loved and it didn’t save her. Most importantly, she’s been dead since the beginning— she’s been dead since before the show even started. She’s been dead since before she was born. Laura Palmer has become synonymous with the term “haunting the narrative”, a saint to the abused, a symbol of grief, and also someone Father John Misty would have done tons of cocaine with and kept alive forever5.
My first introduction to the world of Twin Peaks, aside from posts on social media, was Fire Walk With Me. As a prequel to the TV show, it requires some knowledge about Twin Peaks that I simply didn’t have at the time. There are certainly better places to enter the world from and I would’ve known that if I spent five seconds looking up where to start, but in my defense, I was sick and therefore (you guessed it) flying the friendly skies with Dextromethorphan Airlines. Good ideas were not my forte at that moment. So yeah, why not watch Fire Walk With Me while I’m melting into the couch?
It was the single greatest and most terrifying cinematic experience of my life. When I try to recall that first viewing, I can’t— I have no idea how I reacted to certain scenes, what my thoughts were upon seeing the townspeople for the first time, or my theories on what place everyone had in the main story. Those weren’t even factors in my viewing experience. In some cough syrup slipstream, or perhaps an act of God, I was hot-wired into Laura’s emotions. I wasn’t reacting emotionally to Sheryl Lee’s incredible performance; I was feeling Laura Palmer’s feelings, as if I had become her. It was psychic level ultra-empathy. It fucking sucked. Logically, I know that’s not what really went down, if only because Laura is a fictional character played by an actress, albeit an extremely talented one. It was likely me projecting my own emotions, which are typically locked in a metaphorical chest at the bottom of a metaphorical ocean, onto her. There are a hundred different psychological explanations for why I got possessed by her plastic-wrapped spirit for two hours, but none of that changes how immensely real it felt. Even though I knew nothing about Laura, I knew everything about her.
Returning to the world of Twin Peaks— properly, this time— over a year later was fascinating. The show was a lot funnier than I thought it would be, thanks to the frantic grief of FWWM. Its surrealist transparency, characters, familiar setting, and ruby-red stylization quickly catapulted it into being one of my favorite shows, because at the end of the day, I’m a sucker for things that were filmed in the area I grew up. Twin Peaks is undeniably one of Washington State’s most significant pop culture moments.
A slightly better-known product of Washington is grunge, the genre that took the world by storm in the early 90s. Spearheaded by bands like Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, the anti-consumerist and often cynical offerings resonated with people across the globe, skyrocketing a select few local Seattle-area bands into an international spotlight. At the forefront of that wave was Nirvana. Renowned for their progressive ideology and heavy riffs, they found almost overnight stardom after the release of their 1991 sophomore album, Nevermind, and the smash hit single Smells Like Teen Spirit. About two years later in 1993, Nirvana found themselves filming a single-take set for MTV Unplugged. It would later become one of the most acclaimed concert recordings in rock history. When asked about decoration, singer Kurt Cobain apparently requested that the stage be covered in black candles and stargazer lilies “like a funeral”6— an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy. Originally broadcasted in December of that year, the set was also repeatedly broadcast after Cobain’s suicide in April of 1994.
At risk of dishonoring Cobain’s memory, he and Laura Palmer are intertwined in my mind. There’s some obvious differences— most importantly, that Laura is a fictional character and Cobain is a real person— but they walk on common ground. Both of them were from small logging towns in Washington, battling depression and addiction, feeling immense amounts of pain, trying to do their best by their respective communities, and ultimately, both of their deaths unfairly overshadowed their lives. You want to know who killed Kurt Cobain? We did. We all did.
Fire Walk With Me captures Laura Palmer at her most tragic, seven days before her death. Similarly, the final song of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set, a cover of the folk song In The Pines (specifically Lead Belly’s version of it), is Cobain at his most pained. Halfway through the song, he goes up an octave, screaming out the lonesome lyrics like they’re being tortured out of him. His voice breaks on the final line, rattling out the last shiver— as he pauses, seeming to collect himself, he looks up for the first time in the song’s duration. There’s so much raw anguish in his eyes that it’s almost painful to look at. Closing them again, he finishes the song out and politely refuses to do an encore, saying that he couldn’t possibly top it.
Then, just like that, he was gone. So was Laura. If only our postmortem veneration could have saved them; if we think it could have, we’re missing the point. The point is that love is not enough. Sure, it matters, but it’s not enough.
And now there’s two bodies wrapped in plastic, sitting in the pines, just out of the sun’s reach.
Diegetic sound is sound that originates from the world that the media takes place in; in comparison, non-diegetic sound is sound that’s dubbed into the scene in post-production.
The Beast Within: The Making of ‘Alien’ (2003)
Although the song doesn’t, Dollanganger’s discography certainly does— her 2013 album Ode to Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs is named after Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener.
Cross, Charles (2001). Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. Hyperion. ISBN 0-7868-8402-9.
This has made me wanna get off my ass and work on something. Thank you! Awesome as always.
i love the second person at the start, so visceral.....gorgeous