After all of this, this other song jumped into my head because it keeps coming up in shufflemancy. There are no coincidences.
This is Halsey’s I Am Not A Woman, I’m A God.
Trent Reznor produced both this album (If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power) and Anti-Christ Superstar.
Pay attention to the lyrics and the way Halsey is presented here.
Talented production team. Beautiful voice. But this is all about dissociation when you’re trained as an MK assassin.
“I’d be better off alone” is not wanting all of these separate personalities in her head which were trauma generated to keep the other parts of her from knowing what she did. (The issues they’ve been citing in the Maxwell case with false memory emergence are paralleled here.)
The second the water hits her head in the bathhouse, you can see a change in her eyes. This personality goes somewhere else and another emerges. It’s like a dark baptism where she becomes someone else, someone clearly dead inside who doesn’t remember what the other personalities are doing because she’s trained not to.
The rest of the lyrics discuss an identity crisis and cop to murders she can’t quite remember committing except for a hint of some triggering grass stain from the garden where the bodies are buried:
“Everyday I've got a smile where my frown goes
A couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
I take 'em with me to the grave in a suitcase
Maybe I could be a different human in a new place.”
“Every morning, got a hollow where my heart goes
I never listen but I see it with my eyes closed
I know you, I remember from the grass stain
Maybe I could be a better human with a new name”
The line “I am not a martyr, I'm a problem” is particularly interesting - if you’re not willing to die of your own volition, to offer yourself up, you’re a “problem.” Our society has been adjusted to place a high value on martyrdom, but when you view this through the lens of “not forgetting past orthodoxies,” it’s really just a matter of repackaging suicide.
The line “I just wanna feel something, tell me where to go, 'Cause everybody knows something I don't wanna know” feels particularly resonant regarding current events - most people are acting like they don’t want to be told anything they ought to know in order to save themselves, which goes back to the tenet of avoiding self-deception above.
Halsey wears a collar and a chain because she is enslaved despite rattling off all of these identities she has. She’s basically like one of the “dolls” from Whedon’s Dollhouse.
Time is clearly disjointed here. She’s giving birth in these flashes that we never see resolve. What is this ritual they’re performing around her pregnant belly? Where did the baby go? She’s running away and the throne is on fire.
Notice the crest on the tapestry hanging beneath her at the end - the central figure is a cross between a hydra and a phoenix.
A “hydra” rising up from the ashes, huh?
Well, that’s interesting….
Marilyn Manson, Anti-Christ Superstar:
“Cut the head off
Grows back hard
I am the Hydra
Now you'll see your star.”
“When you are suffering, know that I have betrayed you….”