WARNING: This articles features content of an explicit nature.
It is hard to imagine a subtitle less apt for Marilyn Manson’s new autobiography than “The long hard road out of hell.” Out of hell? To open any page of this book is to take a trip into the fervid and sick world of a horny snot-nosed kid who never outgrows his perverse adolescent fantasies—and makes millions in the process.
Marilyn Manson, if you are fortunate enough not to know, is the stage name of Ohio native Brian Warner, lead singer for one of the hottest acts in rock ‘n’ roll. As one critic summarizes his shtick, “He sings about scabs, sodomy, and urine. He enjoys ripping his skin with broken bottles, and compares his music to an act of murder. Any authorities who don’t like it, he says, “should kill themselves.”
And that’s just the beginning. Manson is a walking grotesquerie, a stick-thin figure dressed in women’s under-wear and uncomfortable-looking braces and corsets, his face painted white and his eyes two shockingly different colors, red and black lipstick smeared on his mouth, his very appearance a monument to pain and ugliness and mutilation and self-hatred.
Manson is a lot of things: a symbol of the relentless downward slide of popular culture; a stinging indictment of rock, which so often rewards no-talents and bogus “revolts”; and a personification (if an extreme one) of the kind of nihilism pushed by the cultural left, by the feminists, the deconstructionists, and all the others who want to deny and degrade human nature and eliminate any sense of the transcendent.
But before we get too worked up about Manson we should realize what he is most fundamentally: a loser. Manson’s story is that of so many rock Horatio Algers, who go from despised untouchable in high school to stars bent on wielding their power to avenge their years of adolescent agony. The essential clue to Manson’s geekdom—besides the makeup and women’s underwear—is the fact that he won’t let anyone traveling with him on the road talk about sports. In his heart, he’d still rather be indulging his taste for fantasy role-playing games like “Dungeons & Dragons.”
To flip through the pictures in Manson’s autobiography is to realize he perfected his formula for success early. There he is, maybe eleven or twelve years old, sitting on his front steps in ’70s era KISS face paint—he is already onto makeup! There he is giving the camera the finger—he is already onto vulgarity!! There he is posing in a heavy metal T-shirt, black fingerless gloves, with sunglasses and a bandanna tied around his leg—he is already perfecting The Look!!! The kid may be a goofball, but he has the makings of a star.
Indeed, the whole Manson act is so juvenile—its audience mostly twelve years old, judging by one recent concert—it is almost a mistake to consider it anything but a joke. Manson clearly benefits when his critics take him too seriously. Manson is quite open about how the PR from attacks against the band helps his cause, although it wouldn’t want to go so far as to be banned in too many places (that would hurt sales). It says something that critical quotes from Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, Pat Robertson, and Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Ct.) are played like endorsements inside the book cover.
But Manson is more than a joke. Not merely because he’s popular: his records since 1996 have gone platinum, an Internet search reveals hundreds of Manson fan sites, and school systems around the nation have had to pass regulations prohibiting boys from wearing Mansonesque dresses and makeup to school. And certainly not because of his ridiculous criticisms of Christianity as an oppressive tool of the establishment, or his laughable attempts to sound profound. Here, explaining why he took a combination of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson for his stage name, is an example of his adolescent version of cultural criticism: “I started realizing the extreme positive and negative that I was trying to outline with these two names. There was a lot of beauty to be found in Manson. There was a lot of ugliness to be found in Monroe. The lines crossed. I resided in that gray area; that what I was doing transcended morality and sexuality.”
No, what’s more important is the imagery of his act. Manson is big on scars. He cuts himself during his shows, then gladly displays the pink raised, jagged marks for his audiences and for the cameras. “Marilyn Manson has more than 450 scars, not counting emotional ones,” reads his bio on the cover. The one for his coauthor, Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss, notes that “he has one scar and Manson gave it to him.” Two of Manson’s fans featured in his book are a pair of poor groupie girls, one of whom freshly carves “Marilyn” in her chest before every show, the other “Manson.”
Along with scars, Manson’s iconography of pain includes prosthetics, which he loves, presumably for their eerie sense of disfigurement and discomfort (Kurt Cobain loved them, too). This is all about, obviously, desecrating the temple of the body, maintaining in dramatic fashion that we have no obligation to our body, that it was not given to us for any reason other than for our pleasure and—really to hammer the point home—our pain.
This view underlies Manson’s strange fascination with meat, preferably spoiled and putrid. He has thrown it out into the crowds at his shows. One chapter of the book is titled, “Meating the Fans/Meat and Greet”; it describes how Manson’s band sexually abuses a deaf groupie girl with all sorts of meat products in a scene that could be taken from a sicko’s version of In the Company of Men.
Meat also makes an appearance in Oliver Stone’s paean to late 20th century nihilism, Natural Born Killers. When killer Mickey first meets killer Mallory in her home where she is sexually abused by her father, he is a meat delivery guy, lugging a bloody, disgusting side of beef. The subliminal message of all this is that we too are sides of beef, meaningless hunks of meat to be ground away for whatever purpose, like the woman on the infamous meat grinder cover of Hustler.
In keeping with this degraded view of the body, Manson regales us with all the grosser bodily functions, the ones that emphasize our animal nature: defecating, urinating, vomiting, and spilling his vital seed. This last figures prominently because sex is central to Manson’s project (such as it is). His book is soaked with sex and so are his shows, but not sex that is in any way appealing (let alone loving).
Instead, it’s an adolescent’s frantic meaningless sex in a field or a closet somewhere; sex in a filthy public restroom as his girlfriend waits outside; mock oral sex with another man on stage; sex as entertainment, diversion, and competition with the other guys; sex as another gross bodily function, utterly removed from any purpose.
One of the best renderings of the Manson vision was actually in the movie Crash, in which scars and braces from car accidents are fetishized into sex organs of a sort—barren, all about pain and ultimately death. Sex is so important because it goes fundamentally to what we are—if sex is meaningless, so are we. Manson’s attitude toward sex obliterates all moral norms, all restraints, and behind it stalks death, murder, and torture.
Manson, in his twisted way, seems to realize this:
The world doesn’t revolve around the sun, it revolves around a giant c—. This is what the world is about: it’s about sex. Anybody who doesn’t want to realize this is fooling themselves. People are bored because they’ve done everything they can do. So now the fear of death is the only thing that gets them excited. That’s why some people have made me into some type of sex symbol. I’m death on wheels the way I look.
The murderous implications of Manson’s celebration of death are everywhere on display. There’s his boosterism on behalf of Charles Manson, and his statements like, “If you’re gonna kill someone just for the thrill of it, just don’t get caught.” And, finally, his girlfriend’s abortion. Manson—who enjoys these things—describes the procedure frankly: “The doctors put a rod the size of a match stick, with two tiny threadlike strands jutting from the top, up into Missi’s cervix, causing it to dilate before tearing out the brain of our child with a pair of forceps.”
Inevitably, it is the weak—like that fetus—who pay the price for transgression. “I don’t really have a place in my heart for stupid or weak people,” Manson says. So it is that Manson—supposedly revolting against inhumane Christianity, supposedly championing losers like himself—describes torturing hapless groupies backstage at his shows. They are stripped, strapped into a sadomasochistic device that threatens to choke them, and forced to make wrenching confessions about their sex lives.
Marilyn Manson, the man, is not all that important: A horrible musician, an asinine social commentator, and above all a self-centered, self-serving teenager still playing out his high school hurt, Manson will be forgotten once his publicity wave crashes. What is disturbing is the way Manson’s imagery strikes a chord not just with children—who will always enjoy dressing up in scary clothes and worrying their parents—but with the larger culture. He is the stark (and ridiculous) embodiment of all those cultural signals that help prompt adolescents to throw their babies in trash dumpsters: the only value in life is your convenience, your whims, your desires no matter how perverse. Given what we are, the Culture of Convenience very quickly becomes the Culture of Death and Cruelty. As the line from his hit version of the Eurythmic’s song “Sweet Dreams” puts it, “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.” Marilyn Manson falls in that second category.