NIN's ''The Perfect Drug'' : A Flawless Representation of Edward Gorey and Edgar Allan Poe

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.    

''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.

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:

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.

Gustave Doré's illustration for ''The Raven'', 1883

The main feature the child depicts is innocence. If we follow the abovementioned quote by Poe, ‘‘The Raven’’(Poe analyses the poem to illustrate his theory of ‘‘unity of effect’’ in‘‘The Philosophy of Composition’’) exemplifies how the composer suffers for the passing of  the ‘‘sainted maiden’’ (Poe) Lenore. The oppression by the raven the protagonist endures as well as the repetition of the famous ‘‘Nevermore’’ are echoed in the video with the images of the vulture over the skull and Reznor’s voice, almost screaming in despair the chorus ‘‘And I want you’’.  Nevertheless, Romanek’s story also exemplifies Poe’s ‘‘Annabel Lee’’, who was ‘‘a child’’ whom the narrator recalls as ‘‘my darling, my life and bride’’ (Poe). Both Lenore and Annabel prevail as a memory of the speaker’s fancy, the same as the girl belongs in Reznor’s daydream. Many scholars emphasise that Edgar Allan Poe may have written ‘‘Annabel Lee’’ with his cousin Virginia, whom he married when she was thirteen years old, in mind. Virginia died of tuberculosis before the author’s death in 1849. Consequently, even when the maiden in the film seems younger than thirteen, Poe’s last poem is also represented.
 

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)

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. 

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)

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.

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 18^th 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,

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.

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[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 10^th 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 25^th 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

Liguori, Daniela, ‘‘‘‘Marquis Pour le Mal’’ : Baudelaire and Poe’’, Chapter Six in Edgar Allan Poe across Disciplines, Genres and Languages (Cambridge : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018)- via Google Books (Accessed 13^th June 2018)

Llewellyn, Mark, ‘‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’’Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1 (Autumn 2008): 164-185. http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/autumn2008/NVS%201-1%20M-Llewellyn.pdf (Accessed 25^th April)

Lombardo, P., Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)-via Google Books

Magistrale, Toni, ‘‘The Perfect Drug: Edgar Allan Poe as Rock Star’’, chapter 10 in Adapting Poe: Reimagining in Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012), https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137041982_14 (Accessed 21st May 2018)

Marshall, Bridget M., ‘‘The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain’’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) Vol. 6, No. 2, CHANGING PICTURE SETTINGS (Fall, 2000), pp. 161-172 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41274102?read-now=1&loggedin=true&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents (Accessed 29^th May 2018)

McGrath, Patrick and Bradford Morrow, eds. The Picador Book of the New Gothic (London: Picador, 1993).

Nine Inch Nails, ‘‘The Perfect Drug’’, Dir. Mark Romanek. Sony, 1997. Music video. https://vimeo.com/3612941 (Accessed 17th April)

--- ‘‘The Perfect Drug’’ lyrics https://genius.com/Nine-inch-nails-the-perfect-drug-lyrics (Accessed 15th April 2018)

Patterson, Carl D., ‘‘Trent Reznor Presents the Radio 1 Rock Show-Carl D. Patterson’’ http://carldpatterson.com/2005/07/20/trent-reznor-presents-the-radio-1-rock-show/ (Minute 1:39:25)

Poe, Edgar Allan,‘‘Annabel Lee’’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44885/annabel-lee (Accessed 15th May 2018) (First published in 1849)

---‘‘Berenice’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1835)

--- ‘‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1839)

--- ‘‘Imp of the Perverse, The’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1845)

--- ‘‘Ligeia’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1838)

--- ‘‘Morella’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1835)

--- ‘‘Philosophy of Composition, The’’ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/composition.html (Accessed 15th May 2018) (First published in 18469

--- ‘‘Raven, The’’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven (Accessed 15th May 2018)  (First published in 1845)

--- ‘‘Tell-Tale Heart, The’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) (First published in 1843)

Rusyniak, Daniel E., ‘‘Absinthe: The Return of the Green Fairy’’ in Seminars in Neurology, 22 (1): 89-93, April 2002 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11217401_Absinthe_Return_of_the_Green_Fairy (Accessed 20th April 2018)

Seufert, Christopher, ‘‘Mark Romanek Interview - Edward Gorey Documentary Raw Footage (Trent Reznor)’’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDRYwULurGk (Accessed 20^th April)

IMAGES:

‘‘The Perfect Drug’’ images  https://www.girllightning.com/2008/10/halloween-perfect-drug.html (Accessed 25th May 2018)

‘‘Ashes in Urn’’, by Edward Gorey https://hyperallergic.com/48285/edward-gorey-columbia-university/ (Accessed 20^th April)

Cover for ‘‘The Hapless Child’’ by Gorey https://www.charlesagvent.com/shop/agvent/017334.html (Accessed 1st May)

‘‘L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks’’ by Edward Gorey http://www.goreystore.com/shop/gashlycrumb-tinies/edward-gorey-l-leo-who-swallowed-some-tacks-square-magnet (Accessed 20th April 2018)

Illustration for ‘‘The Raven’’ by Gustave Doré https://hyperallergic.com/102457/rediscovering-the-dark-splendor-of-gustave-dore-with-edgar-allan-poe/ (Accessed 30^th May 2018)
Illustration for ''Morella'' by Harry Clarke http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/Morella (Accessed 30th May 2018)

Illustration for ‘‘Ligeia’’ by Harry Clarke https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ligeia-Clarke.jpg (Accessed 30^th May 2018)

Illustration for ‘‘The Imp of the Perverse’’ by Arthur Rackham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imp_of_the_Perverse_(short_story)#/media/File:09_rackham_poe_impoftheperverse.jpg (Accessed 30^th May 2018)

Illustration for ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ by Andrew Mar https://andrewmar.deviantart.com/art/Tell-Tale-Heart-300686960 (Accessed 30th May 2018)