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| Different images of NIN's music video |
In 1997, American industrial band Nine Inch Nails (NIN)
released their track ‘‘The Perfect Drug’’ for the soundtrack of David Lynch’s
film Lost Highway. Despite the fact
that lead frontman Trent Reznor stated that ‘‘I think what came out of it (the
song), married with a bloated, over-budget video, feels like ... the least
thing that I would play to somebody if they said play me, y'know, the top
hundred songs you've written’’ (Patterson), the truth is that both the song and
the videoclip are among the most famous ones by the group.
This blogpost will analyse the music video Mark
Romanek created for the single. The filmmaker, who also directed the video for
NIN’s ‘‘Closer’’ (1994), has participated with musicians such as Johnny Cash and
Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Romanek produces an Edwardian setting on this occasion
to narrate the unbearable suffering of the protagonist surrounded by an intense
Gothic atmosphere.The powerful imagery of the storyline echoes two American
authors who will be studied: writer and artist Edward Gorey (1925-2000) whose ‘‘The
Hapless Child’’ (1961) and his abecedarian books ‘‘The Gashlycrumb Tinies’’ (1963) and ‘‘The Chinese Obelisks:
Fourth Alphabet’’ (1970) will be considered, and central figure of
Gothic literature Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). The latter will be examined not
only as a literary influence through some of his works which employ the death
of a beautiful woman as the their main plot, such as ‘‘Annabel Lee’’ (1849), ‘‘The Raven’’ (1845), ‘‘Berenice’’
(1835), ‘‘Ligeia’’ (1838), ‘‘Morella’’ (1835) and, ‘‘The Fall of the House of
Usher’’(1839), but also as the heavy absinthe drinker he was alleged to be. For
this last point, Poe’s ‘‘The Imp of the Perverse’’ (1845) and ‘‘The Tell-Tale
Heart’’ (1843) will be analysed in comparison to the music video.
In order to introduce the reader to the story which
will be researched, the music video can be seen here: NIN's ''The Perfect Drug''
Edward Gorey and his Macabre Deaths
Edward Gorey was an author who framed most of his
narratives in a nineteeth-century setting. Throughout the variety of genres he
penned (he wrote detective fiction, stage plays and horror stories among other styles),
children were common characters in his tales. Neo-Victorianism can be
considered not as ‘‘a substitute for the nineteenth century but as a mediator
into the experience of reading the ‘real’ thing; after all neo-Victorian texts
are, in the main, processes of writing that act out the results of reading the
Victorians and their literary productions’’ (Llewellyn 168). Nevertheless,
Gorey did not set his stories in the Victorian era, but also in the Edwardian
one. Consequently, this could be the reason why he is not frequently analysed
as a Neo-Victorian writer, although Dickensian features are prominent in his writings.
Nine Inch Nails’ music video illustrates a deep
Goreyesque aesthetic. Romanek explains how different sources were employed in
the video, since there is a collection of details from Gorey’s illustrations.
The costumes of the characters (the mourning dresses of the Asian women as well
as the musicians’ suits) and the enormous body parts the artist employed in
several of his works are displayed.
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| ''Ashes in Urn'', by Edward Gorey |
Nevertheless, this section will focus on three
different narratives to depict the characters present in it. The first two, ‘‘The
Hapless Child’’ and ‘‘The Ghaslycrumb Tinies’’, will serve to examine the
girl’s role in the storyline, whilst ‘’The Chinese Obelisks: Fourth Alphabet’’
echoes the singer’s condition.
Gorey depicted scenarios where the stories do not correspond
with the morality readers may expect to find at their ending. In ‘‘The Hapless
Child’’, the orphaned Charlotte Sophia
suffers a cruel end after being treated pitilessly by schoolmates and ruffians.
When her parents die, she is taken to a boarding school by the family’s lawyer.
After the meanness she suffers there, she escapes only to be firstly robbed by
a man and then kidnapped by another who sells her to a brute for whom she has
to work ‘‘making artificial flowers’’ (Gorey). When she finally flees from her
new imprisonment, she is struck down by a car driven by his father, who was not
dead. She is not rewarded with bliss after all her anguish.
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| Cover of ''The Hapless Child'' |
The audience of the music video sees the house of a
well-off family at the beginning of Gorey’s ruthless tale. Furthermore, the
cover of Gorey’s narration is analogous to the portrait of the deceased
youngster in the video. Nevertheless, the reason for the girl’s passing in
Romanek’s narration remains untold, as the filmmaker explains: ‘‘You don’t know
whether he killed this little girl or he loved her this little girl or whether
the girl was a relation, so there’s an innocence to it or something more
perverse’’ (Seufert, minute 2:05-2:15).
While Gorey’s stories end with the deaths of their
protagonists, the music video emphasises the child in the rooms of the
household, yet the audience never learns whether what they are observing are
the memories of the tormented artist or the ghostly appearances which disturb
his mind. All the characters of the video are depicted as phantoms from his
pysche, and their movements simulate the tableaux-style characteristic in Gorey.
This brings to the fore French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of the ‘‘hauntology’’,
which he developed in his Spectres de
Marx (1993) and which, apart from the political concerns expressed by the
philosopher , ‘‘supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of
being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither
present nor absent, neither dead nor alive’’ (Davis). These spectres emerge surrounding
the singer, yet the audience cannot discern which characters may be still alive
and which are the illusions of his traumatised mind.
Nonetheless, the music video firmly recalls one of
Gorey’s most notable works: his ‘‘Gashlycrumb Tinies’’. This alphabet book depicts
the far-fetched deaths of 26 children
with their corresponding illustrations. The so-called
‘‘Goreyesque’’ style does not present any pedagogical role in his children’s
literature, therefore the author illustrates Gothic horror without creating any
feeling of dread or anxiety in his readers; his approach originates humour. The
abovementioned abecedarian book is echoed in
several scenes of the musical film:
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| Illustration from ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'', by Edward Gorey |
This figure is presented in the video with the girl
dressed in a boyish Edwardian costume and a Klimt-like painting in the
background. The contrast of bright light in the shot and the fact that the
picture might echo ‘‘The Kiss’’ serves to introduce the idea of love between
the child and her protector. Other drawings by Gorey in his alphabet book such
as ‘‘B is for Basil assaulted by bears’’ and ‘‘N is for Neville who died of
ennui’’ might represent the artist of the video as a predator against the child
since he sings over a stuffed bear, and the child at the window haunting the
musician as an apparition at the end of Romanek’s visual work echoes the boy
staring outside his windowpane.
If the artist may be swiftly represented by the bears,
Gorey’s ‘‘The Chinese Obelisks: Fourth Alphabet’’ may refer to the figure of
the performer more profoundly. In addition to the appearance of Asian women in
the video and a broken obelisk in certain images, the video gives the
impression of following the author and his fatal ending Gorey depicted in his
character set. References such as ‘‘C was a canvas encrusted with dirt’’ as the
singer in the video is encircled by pictures, ‘‘D was a dog who appeared to be
hurt’’ (a dog accompanies the artist in some scenes), and ‘‘I was an infant who
clung to his sleeve’’ recalling the burden the artist suffers after the loss of
the child, lead to the comparison between the two pieces of art. Yet while
Gorey depicts how his artist enters an unknown area in which he finally dies,
the downfall of Reznor does not clearly depict his death, it is an event still
to occur. The video materialises a darker atmosphere than Gorey’s tales since
the psychological details of the protagonist are depicted. This echoes Edgar
Allan Poe’s narratives and the following section will analyse several poems and
tales by the nineteenth-century author.
Echoing
Edgar Allan Poe and his Beautiful Dead Women
In Nine Inch Nails’ video both the landscape and the
furnishing of the house serve to depict the the narrator’s brooding melancholy.
The images echo his state of mind, and, thus, illustrate his attempt to forget
a possible deed the viewer is unaware of. This is a characteristic feature of Poe’s
narratives:
‘‘It’s not until the 1830s and ‘40s, with Edgar Allan Poe, that the Gothic
begins to shift the emphasis away from all this gloomy hardware and becomes
increasingly fascinated with the psyche of the gothic personality… With Poe the
Gothic turns inward, and starts rigorously to explore extreme states of
psychological disturbance’’ (McGrath xi).
This section will analyse the singer’s breakdown in
relation to his loss of the girl, since, as Poe explains in ‘‘The Philosophy of
Composition’’(1846), ‘‘the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the
most poetical topic in the world- and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are
those of a bereaved lover’’(Poe). While the youngster of the music video can be
considered the mourner’s daughter, the truth is that both the young lady as
well as the singer embody characters portrayed in Poe’s narratives[i], and the
storyline focuses on the male’s account , while the child’s tale is untold.
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| Gustave Doré's illustration for ''The Raven'', 1883 |
Nonetheless, some of Poe’s innocent maidens are not
the only ones introduced in NIN’s narrative. Poe’s so-called ‘‘Dark Ladies’’,
that is, Berenice, Ligeia, Morella and Madeline Usher from ‘‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’’ are depicted, as it will be explained. All these women are
beautiful, dead and haunt the narrators. Their behaviours are analogous, and
some of their physical descriptions are strikingly similar. ‘‘The narrators who
wait for the forever beautiful, always elusive, and emotionally charged women
who have been buried prematurely or who return as lady revenants share a
‘‘specific relation of domination, where the speaker who has defined himself as
possessor is in turn defined by his possession’’’’ (Dayan in Magistrale 180). Poe’s ‘‘Dark
Ladies’’ not only dominate their raconteurs; they are also intellectual women,
as is the girl from the music video represented in the studio with the
musician, observing a painting, and holding a book.
The first tale to consider is ‘‘Berenice’’. She seems
a weak character according to her cousin Egaeus, the narrator of the tale. She
is depicted as a ‘‘gorgeous yet fantastic beauty’’ ‘‘roaming carelessly through
life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the
raven-winged hours’’ (Poe 14). She is compared to a Naiad and a sylph, that is,
to a water nymph and an air spirit, respectively. Nevertheless, as Berenice’s
disease progresses, the speaker focuses on her teeth, ‘‘long, narrow and
excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them’’(Poe 18). This
vampiric description, which also emphasises the ill girl’s lifeless eyes, is
afterwards linked to ideas: ‘‘Des idées!...Des idées!’’ (Poe 18). Therefore, it
can be understood that in his disturbed mind when the narrator extracts her
teeth while she is alive, he desires to liberate her from her thinking, and
reduce her to an object. Berenice is perceived as ‘‘a dream- not as a being of
the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being’’ (Poe 17). In the
video the youngster dressing in masculine clothes may depict an intellectual
interest. This echoes Poe’s Berenice and Madeline Usher, who ‘‘appear at
dramatic moments, confronting their lovers at reading-room or library door, as
though threatening entrance into a traditionally male sphere of intellectual
advancement’’(Johanyak 69).
In another tale by Poe, ‘‘Morella’’, the eponymous
woman is also a well-educated one; as her ‘‘erudition was profound’’,‘‘her
powers of mind were gigantic’’ (Poe 21), and the reader learns that her favoured subjects are ‘‘those mystical
writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German
literature’’ (Poe 21). The unnamed narrator, who sees himself as ‘‘her pupil’’
(21), is echoed in NIN’s lyrics. Nevertheless, in the music video, the authority
the girl has over the musician is not clearly illustrated as an intellectual
one. The aforementioned influence may refer to the absinthe the performer
drinks. Therefore, the ambiguity of who or what the perfect drug is emerges:
‘‘My blood
wants to say hello to you
My fears want to get inside of you
My soul is so afraid to realize
(How very little there is left of me)’’ (NIN)
My fears want to get inside of you
My soul is so afraid to realize
(How very little there is left of me)’’ (NIN)
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| 1919 illustration for ''Morella'' by Harry Clarke |
Nevertheless, in Poe’s narration the male protagonist denies
Morella’s uniqueness. He is not in love with her and, once she dies and their
daughter is born, he acknowledges the child’s extraordinary resemblance to
Morella with terror. His deceased wife is resurrected in the body of their
descendant, only to die when he names her years later. This is an interesting
connection since the youngster of the video may represent both: the highbrow
departed wife and the child at the same time.
Nonetheless, the visual storyline simulates Poe’s
‘‘Ligeia’’more clearly. Ligeia’s physical description is the most extended one,
yet her standing as a knowledgeable lady is emphasised too: her ‘‘rare learning,
her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling
eloquence of her low musical language’’ (Poe 26). The narrator describes Ligeia
as ‘‘the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion’’
(29). There are two relevant impressions in this tale though: first, how the
narrator recalls the late woman when he claims ‘‘I bring before mine eyes in
fancy the image of her who is no more’’ (26), and, secondly, how the influence
of opium distorts his perception of reality. The speaker claims: ‘‘I had become
a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken
a coloring from my dreams’’ (33). This characteristic is echoed in the video
with the drinking of absinthe.
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| Illustration for ''Ligeia'' by Harry Clarke, 1919 |
The first point brings forth the narrator’s idealized view
of Ligeia and how she ‘‘became the partner’’ in their studying. Fascinated by
her, the speaker recalls how her knowledge ‘‘was such as I have never known in
woman’’ (Poe 29-30). His phantom-like depiction of his lover is influenced by
his addiction: her attractiveness is ‘‘the radiance of an opium-dream – an airy
and spirit-lifting vision’’(27), ‘‘the beauty of beings either above or apart
from the earth’’ (28). Therefore, the writer, as he does with Berenice, depicts
an immaterial woman. He compares them to creatures outside this world, revenants
who come back to haunt their ancient lovers/relatives. Ligeia’s description as
a ghost illustrates the abovementioned concept of ‘‘hauntology’’ by Derrida:
‘‘For Derrida,
the ghost's secret is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness
or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet
formulated possibilities of the future. The secret is not unspeakable because
it is taboo, but because it cannot (yet) be articulated in the languages
available to us’’ (Davis).
In Nine Inch Nails’ music video, the child torments
the speaker of the tale, and she emerges at the window as an apparition, yet the
impression the viewer has is more that of witnessing the memories of a wasted
man than of a ghost asking for revenge. The narrator suffers for his loss and
screams out his pain.
In ‘‘Ligeia’’, ‘‘the narrator’s
willful effort to supply an “artificial introduction of a strong continual
current of wind behind the draperies” (Poe 34) essentially animates the “simple
monstrosities” (34) pictured in the tapestries in an infernal dance macabre
designed to produce an overall sense of disquietude for the reader as well as
the new bride’’ (Magistrale 179-180). Lady Rowena, the narrator’s new wife
after Ligeia, agonises in a bedroom with curtains and tapestries similar to those
observed in the video.
Nevertheless, the artistic atmosphere of the video
echoes Poe’s ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’: ‘‘Many books and musical
instruments lay scattered about but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I
felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and
irremediable gloom hung over and pervaded all’’ (Poe 52). The possible
incestuous relationship between Roderick and his ailing sister Madeline Usher, and
the decay of the lineage are emphasised with the inset poem ‘‘The Haunted
Palace’’, in which Roderick’s ending is foreseen. The unnamed narrator calls
attention to the siblings’ striking physical similarity, and how Madeline haunts
Roderick from the grave only to assault him and, consequently, end the family
line:
‘‘But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)’’ (57)
NIN’s video can also be understood as the termination of
a clan. The youngster in manly costumes can represent the singer in his
boyhood, and the deceased girl his twin with identical features. While Madeline
returns from the tomb to destroy her brother, the memory of the dead girl of
the visual narrative troubles the unbalanced narrator. This behaviour
represents Roderick Usher, as ‘‘there were times, indeed, when I thought his
unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge
which he struggled for the necessary courage’’ (Poe 60).
This possible mystery will be analysed in the last
section of the blogpost, in which the imaginable perverse psyche of the speaker
will be studied taking Poe into account. In examining the American author’s
‘‘The Imp of the Perverse’’ and ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, the singer’s
clandestine evil deed will be considered. Poe’s alleged addiction to absinthe
will be mentioned.
The Wicked Narrator of The
Perfect Drug
‘‘I got my head but my head is unraveling
Can't keep control can't keep track of where it's traveling
I got my heart but my heart's no good
You're the only one that's understood’’ (NIN)
Can't keep control can't keep track of where it's traveling
I got my heart but my heart's no good
You're the only one that's understood’’ (NIN)
With this beginning, the lyrics of NIN’s song introduces
us to the gloomy tone of its narrator. When he claims that he ‘‘can’t keep
control’’ and that his heart ‘‘is no good’’, he echoes Poe’s distinguished
theory of the ‘‘Imp of the Perverse’’, a tale in which an unnamed narrator
commits murder and reveals it years later. To Poe’s killer, ‘‘induction, a posteriori, would have brought
phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a
paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness,
for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact,
a mobile without motive, a motive not
motivirt’’ (Poe 284). In this
essayistic tale, Poe introduces his reader to a theory about the reasons of
doing impulsive self-destructive evil and finishes his narration with the
dramatic events which befall his speaker, a sufferer of this principle. Phrenology
is ‘‘the
study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and
traits of character’’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica), and it was popular during the
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Poe challenges the concepts this pseudomedicine
support: ‘‘In opposition to the American phrenology[ii] of that
period, …the main character emphasizes how this impulse, though rooted in
humankind, escapes any attempt at scientific rationalization and
interpretation’’ (Liguori ).
There are some similarities between the relator of his
crime in Poe’s writing and the singer in the music video. Although the audience
does not learn of any crime committed by the performer in the visual tale, he
is constantly depicted in a violent mood: he strikes the sides of the maze he passes
by with his walking cane, he points with a dagger while he glares at the
camera, and he swings in front of a Frankenstein-like machine which reflects
his neurotic emotions with electrical movement.
Consequently, Poe’s perverseness
(also seen in tales such as the abovementioned ‘‘Berenice’’ or ‘‘The Black
Cat’’ (1843)) is present throughout the plot. Furthermore, there is a
resemblance between Poe’s murdered character, with a ‘‘habit of reading’’, and
the portrayal of the girl with a book.
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| 1935 illustration by Arthur Rackham for ''The Imp of the Perverse'' |
Poe describes the impressions of the demon who triggers
that slaying behaviour:
‘‘By slow degrees our sickness, and
dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By
gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the
vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights… There
is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who
shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge’’ (Poe
285-286).
NIN’s video illustrates two ideas from this definition:
the idea of a demon emerging from a bottle, and the sinking into the abyss,
since the singer is depicted in a pool with vapours while performing.
Therefore, his delirium coincides with Poe’s fiend.
The vocalist also relates his image to the American
writer in his drinking of absinthe, a spirit originated in Switzerland in the
late 18th century. Reznor seems to mourn the death of the child and uses
the absinthe to detach himself from reality, yet there is also a possibility
that the beverage triggered the crime against the youngster. The breakdown of
the performer after tasting the liquor is depicted with flashing green light in
contrast to the melancholic blue shade of the other scenes.
Poe’s persona is frequently associated with the
so-called ‘‘green fairy’’: ‘‘Though it is not known that Poe was
addicted to absinthe, the severity of his hallucinations and other symptoms
suggest that absinthe drinking may have been part of his problem’’ (Lanier). The
author’s symptoms coincide with those suffered by abisnthe addicts, such as
hallucinations:
‘‘Acute effects of absinthe include confusion,
delirium, restlessness, and hallucinations. Users describe feeling euphoric,
invigorated, and creative, with slight visual distortion and increased libido. Chronic use of absinthe has been claimed to
cause loss of intellect, derangement of sleep, visual and auditory
hallucinations, impairment of speech, convulsions and death’’ (Rusyniak 92).
The music video emphasises the singer’s consumption of
absinthe to depict a nightmarish scene in which the other characters of the
video haunt him. Besides the interpretation of his bereavement after the
passing of the girl, the images depicted in these green flashes also present
concepts to express the performer’s guilt of the alleged fatal deed. Echoes of
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ are illustrated in
this green extract (Minute 2:32-2:58).
‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ is the story of a nameless
narrator and his/her killing of the old man he/she lives with. Prior to ‘‘The
Imp of the Perverse’’, E.A. Poe depicts in this story a speaker who commits
murder and feels the need to confess his action. The relator endures ‘‘over-acuteness of the senses’’ (Poe 195), similarly to Roderick in ‘‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’’, and he explains that it should not be mistaken for madness.
His listening to the dead man’s heart leads him to admit his wrongdoing. It is
remarkable, though, Poe’s choice of the heartbeat’s sound, ‘‘louder! louder!
louder! louder!- ‘’ (Poe 197). The drumming in the absinthe scene in which
the singer’s senses are increased after he tastes the beverage echoes Poe’s
opening of the tale:
‘‘TRUE!- nervous- very, very dreadfully nervous I had
been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease
that sharpened my senses-not destroyed- not dulled them. Above all was the
sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth’’
(Poe 193). Not only does this quote express the speaker’s disturbed mind in the
music video, it also reminds the viewer that he can sense the dead and buried youngster.
Once the percussion solo starts, the singer does not hide behind the curtains,
he releases his thoughts. The parallelism between the musical narrative and
Poe’s commences:
One of the first images is the girl on one gigantic
sculpture of a hand, which is reminiscent of Poe’s narrator method of slaying, as
he explains that ‘‘first of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head
and the arms and the legs’’ (Poe 196). Legs can also be seen in the video.
Yet there is one noteworthy figure in Romanek’s story:
the vulture. The bird is on a skull underlining death, but this can also be
understood as a homage to the central reason for murdering in Poe’s tale, as
the narrator clarifies that ‘‘I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of
his eyes resembled that of the vulture-a pale, blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so,
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| Illustration by Andrew Mar for ''The Tell-Tale Heart'' |
by degrees- very gradually- I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever’’ (Poe 193). In the writer’s narrative, ‘‘the old man becomes ‘his Evil eye’, but ‘eye’ sounds like ‘I’, and the gaze I cannot meet is above all my own gaze. So it is ‘I’ that am the old man, ‘I’ is the ‘Evil eye’, and in that respect something wicked, impish, namely the genius of crime, the one ‘I’ have committed and ‘I’ tell’’ (Lombardo 43).The music video depicts the singer with the child on several occasions, yet he never looks at her directly, and she only does it once (Minute 1:25), apart from at the end of the video when her face emerges from the windows as if staring at the musician. Consequently, he is the tormented murderer recounting the deed, although not prepared to face her figure. Her ghostly appearance is distant to him, she is not a real character for him. On this occasion, the vulture and its gaze represent Poe’s old man as a witness of the crime the performer commits.
Furthermore, musicians Charlie Clouser, Danny Lohner and
Chris Vrenna also appear in the video, yet while at the beginning they play
string instruments with their eyes closed, at the end they sing open-eyed
‘‘Take me with you’’ (Minute 3:25). They echo Poe’s three policemen after they
hear the murderer’s confession in ‘‘The Tell-tale Heart’’. They are no longer blind to the truth of the acts, even if the viewers remain unaware of
the criminal acts.
In conclusion, this blog post has offered a personal
view of Nine Inch Nails’ The Perfect Drug. Its complex narrative has
been studied taking into account authors Edward Gorey and his employment of
children’s macabre deaths, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, with a more extended
analysis of his work. Both Poe’s fiction of the death of beautiful young women
along with his theory of perversity in villainous characters have been scrutinised
comparing them to the story of the music video. A brief summary of Derrida’s
‘‘hauntology’’ has been explained to give a short clarification of some scenes
of director Mark Romanek’s music video.
[i] For further information on Edgar Allan
Poe’s relationship with women, I recommend this BBC programme: Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1d9w1z
[ii] For further reading on phrenology
and Gothic literature, I highly recommend
this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41274102?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
BBC
Four, Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women,
London, 2010. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1d9w1z
(Accessed 28th May 2018)
Davis,
Colin, ‘‘Hauntology, spectres and phantoms’’ French Studies, Volume
59, Issue 3, 1 July 2005, Pages 373–379, https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/59/3/373/638853
(Accessed 10th May 2018)
Encyclopaedia
Britannica, ‘‘Phrenology’’ https://www.britannica.com/topic/phrenology
(Accessed 30th April 2018)
Gorey, Edward,
‘‘Chinese Obelisks, The: Fourth Alphabet’’ (New York: Fantod Press, 1970)
---
‘‘Gashlycrumb
Tinies, The’’ https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/01/19/edward-gorey-the-gashlycrumb-tinies/
(Accessed 10th April 2018)
---
‘‘Hapless Child, The’’ https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/the-hapless-child-pdf-extract.pdf
(Accessed 20th April 2018)
Johanyak,
Debra, ‘‘Poesian Feminism: Triumph or Tragedy’’ College Language Association
Journal 39.1 (1995): 62-70 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44322928?read-now=1&loggedin=true&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
(Accessed 25th May 2018)
Lanier,
Doris, Absinthe- The Cocaine of the
Nineteenth Century. A History of the Hallucinogenic Drug and Its Effects on
Artists and Writers in Europe and the United States (Jefferson: McFarland,
2004)- via Google Books
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