Shaped By Anti-Heroes

 

Marilyn Manson at Cannes Film Festival/Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

There has been a reckoning in recent years, exemplified by the #metoo and #timesup movements, that has left people reassessing their heroes and reconsidering the intrinsic value of their influences. Most visible has been the raft of celebrities caught up in various scandals. But where does the responsibility of the public override the value of their work, and where do we derive our guilt from?

Fans of cinema auteur Roman Polanski had to reconsider their willingness to forgive when they learned of his pending statutory rape charges, although too many artists have left this glaring red-flag unaddressed as they travelled to Europe to work with the man (where his return to the United States would result in his immediate arrest). And spare a thought for the ongoing confusion of Michael Jackson fans, as his innocent boyhood pop-star legacy has been thoroughly tainted by allegations of sexual abuse that simply nobody can agree on the legitimacy of.

It is obvious why the story of Marilyn Manson’s alleged abuses has struck such an uncomfortable chord; he was a rock-star, admired and beloved for decades, not just for his music but for his public persona. And his adoring fans are now caught in the wake of his worst decisions as they try to reconcile the possibility of having supported a monster.

But what if you never felt betrayed by your heroes? What if you learned from their faults as much, or more, than from their celebrity?

Returning to Marylin Manson, there is an argument that his public persona possibly obfuscated his nefarious personality. This might seem like a reasonable argument on the face of it, but there is an essential flaw to it: Marilyn Manson is more than simply a character, it is a choice made by a real person to promote himself as a drug-addled, criminalistic freak. That was the choice he made. It was never hidden. And people bought it, dicks-in-bibles and all.

When he spoke about outsiders and acceptance on talk shows or in Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, he drew admiration for his empathy and intelligence.

But learning of the allegations of significant and frightening physical and sexual abuse has left people questioning whether this was simply a ploy by a deeply manipulative person.

Therein lies the rub. For many fans, there was simply no illusion that Manson was a “good guy”. His interviews implied a drug-addicted lunatic – one capable of great empathy and intelligence, just as people had believed, but a drug-addicted lunatic nonetheless. His value was as an anti-hero. Any effort to emulate him would make you a villain.

I grew up heavily influenced by Hunter S Thompson. He was an influential American writer, known most prominently for his wild, drug-addled, and violence-hued takes on American politics and culture, with his most famous work being the seminal roadtrip novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It is difficult to justify admiring a man who so actively broke the rules of human conduct. He was a rude, dangerous, emotionally abusive person who took more drugs than is medically sound for longer than most people could maintain an addiction. Learning about his life was learning the limits of legality. He was regularly armed and under the influence of wild polydrug mixes that earned him a beastly reputation as a world-class drug-hoover. His sweet and inquisitive instincts seemed to be constantly twisted by a dark and violent spirit.

And while he is widely admired for his insightful words on the decline of American exceptionalism and the death of the democratic soul that his nation had grown up feeding on, his death marked a clear view of his terrible nature. Famously, his ashes were fired from a giant custom cannon which was commissioned by Johnny Depp. But few words have been written about his last moments. Thompson, ailing and consciously losing what made him formidable as a writer and a man, chose to take his own life.

That, in itself, might paint a sympathetic image. What many people don’t realise is that Thompson attempted to do this while he was on the phone to his estranged wife Anita; taking a rifle and pulling the trigger after an argument. His wife had, mercifully, hung up the phone before he took his life with her as audience.

So how do I reconcile my admiration for the man with the abusive instincts that he so readily showed?

The truth is, I don’t. I compartmentalize, for the sake of my own learning and growth. I look to the writing of Hunter Thompson to teach me passion and empathy in ways that only a personality that aggressive might impart. I look to the lessons of his worst moments and temper them with the lessons of his best. I regard him the same as one might regard Genghis Khan; a tyrant who advanced civilisation in his wake.

To hold an anti-hero in any kind of regard, it is vital to regard them wholly. Ignoring the best of these influences might limit the true breadth of their lessons. Michael Jackson does not lose his cultural influence if we learn he was indeed a sexually predatory monster. We do not unwrite the 1990’s if we find that Manson is culpable for crimes of abuse. I look to Jackson as a musical, cultural touch-stone; a common sound to our collective experience. I look to Manson as a unifying voice for people who desperately needed to learn how to say “fuck you” to authority. These lessons are distinct from those things that shape my empathy.

Where do I draw the line at my own culpability? I have supported these people financially, as have countless others. Do I deny myself influential art that I arguably understand the hazards of for the sake of telescoped political correctness? Do I burn my Mayhem album? I have shown these artists’ product to my friends and encouraged them to partake of it. Am I then a negative influence on my friends? Am I enabling the behaviour I abhor or, worse, am I relating to it in a way I am not cognizant of just by enjoying the content?

I posit that the responsibility of audiences to understand the motivations of the artists they admire does not cease with their positive and beneficial motivations. It is important to understand the poorer motives to grasp the whole of the lesson. Remember, nobody thinks they’re the villain in their own story. Even Hitler was attempting to bring freedom to his people, such as he saw it.

And for broader motives, there are other considerations. The overriding motivation for celebrity is economic – layers of vested interests funding the creation of public images that can be broken down to constituent parts, replicated, marketed, and sold at retail –, and that there are such powerful economic factors involved makes any reading of the situation on purely moralistic terms fraught. Forgetting that the product you are purchasing is not the whole of the personality behind it is one of the essential mistakes of fanaticism, and equating that product with that personality can conceivably warp one’s view of it.

What we are presented is not whole and complete humans, but mere facets of human experience wrapped up for mass consumption. The same is equally true of Roman Polanski as Marilyn Manson as Hunter S Thompson. The ability, let alone the obligation, to know the secret lives of these people is beyond mere civilians, so we rely on the gossip and allegations to fill in the gaps for us. But there aren’t really any gaps in these images, nor in the people who hide behind them. The gaps exist with us, the audience, as we try to reconcile the knowledge that our heroes are no better than we are.

Disconnecting the artist from the art has become a controversial concept, as so-called “cancel culture” becomes a topic of conscientious debate, but there are costs to us a society if we cannot separate the values. We know, for instance that Elmo is a puppet controlled by a person. We learn to love and hug from Elmo, all the while conscious that underneath that adorable fuzzy face is a man who probably says “fuck” once in a while. If we begin to see the man behind the puppet as the person teaching us the lessons, we might lose the innocent value of the naïve red puppet actually speaking to us.

KMM