Los Angeles brand Enfants Riches Déprimés is currently showcasing their Spring 2024 collection at Maxfield LA, and the event was attended by Marilyn Manson and his wife Lindsay on April 17th. On March 16th, Manson posted photos on his social media wearing the Enfants Riches Déprimés brand, which is French for "Depressed Rich Kids". Enfants Riches Déprimés is a Los Angeles and Paris based luxury fashion brand founded in 2012 by the conceptual artist Henri Alexander Levy, who has created a French punk streetwear line based on the movements of the late 1970s and Japanese Avant-garde movements of the 1980s. One of the core precepts of the brand is high price points, with T-shirts ranging on average from $500 to $1,000, and haute couture jackets priced as high as $95,000. ERD consistently utilizes the business model of artificial scarcity. In this regard, all styles are sold on an extremely exclusive basis, and thus in relatively small quantities. In a 2016 interview with Complex
When
Patricia Arquette won the best supporting actress statue for her role
in Boyhood at the 2015 Oscars, she accepted her award with an empowering
speech on women’s rights and equality. Since then, and especially after
the rise of MeToo, she and her sister Rosanna Arquette have become very
vocal activists on behalf of women and been very much criticized for
targeting powerful white men, daily posting multiple tweets espousing
left-wing liberalism and denouncing right-wing conservatism. In fact,
Rosanna Arquette was one of the first women to come out against Harvey
Weinstein in 2017 as a victim of his abuse, and all the way back in
2010, Rosanna Arquette became Goodwill Ambassador for The Womanity
Foundation. With such a background, among many other similar things, it
should be no surprise that it would be Patricia Arquette who would be
the first to name Marilyn Manson as an abuser of Evan Rachel Wood.
Patricia
Arquette targeting Marilyn Manson as an abuser on March 1, 2018 must
have been a major disappointment to him. After all, this is an actress
who starred in True Romance (whose character name is "Alabama", which is an alias Evan Rachel Wood used in her exchanges with Illma Gore) and Lost Highway, two movies
which inspired Manson as an artist, the former written by Quentin
Tarantino and the latter by David Lynch, two men who have
incorporated as acclaimed writers and directors extreme violence against
women in their art. In fact, Manson and Twiggy Ramirez were in a scene
with a nude Patricia Arquette as porn stars in Lost Highway, where she is seen drop-jawed at the size of Manson's penis before he is killed off in a snuff film. She was even married to his good friend Nicolas Cage, and starred alongside his other good friend Johnny Depp in Ed Wood.
The day after Patricia Arquette's tweet about Manson and Evan, Glamour published an article titled "Why Is Nobody Talking About Marilyn Manson's 'Fantasy' of Killing Evan Rachel Wood?" This was the first media article naming Marilyn Manson as Evan's abuser. It tries to explain why people at the time, in 2009, brushed off this statement, and further explains how now, in the MeToo era, these things need to be re-examined and explored. But do they? Maybe if someone has been proven guilty of crimes, but when this article came out, Evan hadn't even named Manson, nor had anyone else.
 |
| Marilyn Manson and Rosanna Arquette attend the "I Am Love" Reception hosted by Magnolia Pictures And Quentin Tarantino at Sunset Tower on January 13, 2011 in West Hollywood, California. |
What prompted Patricia Arquette to call out Marilyn Manson on March 1, 2018? The answer is pretty easy to find if we recall what happened the day before, on February 28, 2018. This was the day Evan Rachel Wood gave her congressional testimony.
It appears Patricia Arquette, who keeps up with women's issues, followed this story closely and began to do some research as to who Evan was referring to. Her research led her to Marilyn Manson as the abuser referred to by Evan, with a reference to the Spin interview with Manson in June 2009, where Manson says the following:
"And every time I called her [Evan Rachel Wood] that day — I called 158 times — I took a razorblade and I cut myself on my face or on my hands... I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer."
Ironically, or maybe purposefully, on the night of February 28, 2018, Marilyn Manson posted the following message and image on Twitter:
Oh. The fun that is to come. I love when “they” wanna play F&G. pic.twitter.com/2fvmesBOpu
— Marilyn Manson (@marilynmanson) March 1, 2018
Even though this is dated March 1st for some reason, it was actually posted at 7:53pm on February 28th. "F&G" I believe refers to "Fun and Games", but I'm not sure who "they" refers to. Possibly Evan Rachel Wood, possibly completely unrelated to Evan Rachel Wood. In fact, what Manson writes reminds me of the quote from
Oh, The Places You’ll Go!: "Oh the places you'll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won." But the ironic thing about it all is that Manson is shown in the gif smashing down on something with an axe/sledgehammer, or more specifically a splitting maul. No doubt Patricia Arquette saw Manson's tweet before she made her own tweet after seeing Evan's Congressional testimony, and viewed it in light of the Spin interview from 2009.
The odd thing about Patricia Arquette's tweet is that it is about an interview from nine years earlier, and she is linking Spin to the tweet but not Marilyn Manson or Evan Rachel Wood. Is she calling out Spin for this interview and not calling out Manson at the time? That's what it looks like to me.
Another odd thing is that she seemingly decides on her own to name Evan Rachel Wood's anonymous abuser without Evan's permission. Evan has stated that she didn't name her abuser out of fear of retaliation, yet Patricia Arquette ignores the possible consequences of her actions and decides to get on social media and call out her alleged abuser, without even being absolutely certain that it was Manson that Evan was referring to. Either Patricia was prompted and recruited to do this by Evan Rachel Wood herself, or Patricia irresponsibly called out someone else's alleged abuser in ignorance of who it really is - and both of these scenarios are very problematic for Patricia Arquette.
A third odd and problematic factor about Patricia's tweet is that she gives no context to her accusation except linking the source article, which few will actually read. And even if it is read, many people will not understand that this interview, like many interviews of Manson, is not meant to be taken out of the context of what he was promoting at the time, which was the release of his album The High End of Low.
In the Shockhound interview from June 2009, the same month as the infamous Spin interview cited above, Marilyn Manson explained the story line of The High End of Low era, which consisted not only of the story line of the concept album but also the interviews he gave during this time. He said:
"It may be autobiographical, but only because I realized I can't create a more fucked up story than my own. And the characters that are in my life, I don't need to imagine metaphors for them. But at the same time I set out to tell a story everyone can relate to. I don't want to tell a story about my personal relationships, I want to tell a story about being a person that wants to try and be human. I think that's how everyone feels. I'm not trying to be the ultimate outsider."
In other words, the story line of this era was an autobiographical story of Manson trying to be human, but it is not an autobiographical story of his personal relationships, instead he just used the characters in his real life to tell the story described in the album. In doing this, he continues the story line of Eat Me, Drink Me, and brings it to a conclusion with The High End of Low, sort of like a two-part movie.
When the quotes from Spin about Manson calling Evan 158 times, scarring himself each time she didn't answer, and fantasizing about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer, are put in context, you realize this is part of the story line, because Manson in context is explaining what the songs "Into the Fire" and "I Want to Kill You Like They Do in The Movies" mean. If this were to translate into literature, it would be like an author explaining two chapters of his book, or a director of film describing two scenes of his movie. What confuses people with this story line from The High End of Low era, however, is that the characters are real life characters from Manson's life at the time, and he is using imagery of desperation and rage and self-abuse as language which most people can relate to, because ultimately that is what Manson wants - he wrote these songs and this story line in order for people to relate to it, just as he relates to these extreme emotions when he hit a low point in his life. When you feel betrayed by the person you loved, and I'm speaking generally, you tend to feel a certain resentment and hatred, even for a brief moment, and this is what Manson is exploring, just as he explored the resentment and hatred he felt growing up with difficult parents and fundamentalist religion in Antichrist Superstar, and many people related to that as well. From a personal perspective, I was going through a difficult divorce when both Eat Me, Drink Me and The High End of Low came out, and to me they were a comforting source to go to when I felt I needed to explore those feelings and deal with them internally.
We have also been assured by Manson's representatives in a statement from 2019, that Manson calling Evan 158 times and scarring himself each time she didn't answer on his face and hands was said merely for promotional purposes for his new album. The fact that Manson at the time had no visible scarring on his face or hands also proves it is not meant to be taken as literally true. I have written elsewhere that the number 158 could have biblical allusions too, as well as the fact that he mentions his hands and face and that it was done because he felt like she had broken a promise to him. As for smashing her skull with a sledgehammer, in context it is said as if he was joking, and I personally believe he chose that wording the way it is comically used in the movie Punch-Drunk Love by Adam Sandler's character.
As for the gif image of Manson's tweet, in context it comes from the Christmas feature in the December 2017 issue of Kerrang, with photos taken by Manson photographer Perou while they were in Berlin. The splitting maul was a prop in the shoot because in it Manson is depicted as a rebellious reindeer who slaughters Santa Claus with it. Manson is in a cast for this shoot because of a stage accident that took place in October that year. More images from this shoot can be seen below.
Concluding Remarks
It appears that Patricia Arquette was trying to jump on the bandwagon against Marilyn Manson even before Evan Rachel Wood named him as her abuser, or anyone else for that matter. By referring to a quote of Manson from nine years earlier and using it out of context, she did nothing but stir trouble for both Manson and Evan, because if Evan's allegations were true and they did refer to Manson and she truly did fear retaliation from him, then the normal reaction for Evan against Patricia Arquette would have been anger and frustration towards her. Instead, as we see in Evan's documentary Phoenix Rising, Evan fully embraces Patricia's interpretation of the quote and builds off of it to create an elaborate tale around it in which she depicts herself as so good-natured that she goes out to Manson and heals his 158 wounds, and in return he tortures her endlessly for months because he is a monster and that's what monsters do. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, it appears Patricia jumped the gun, because she failed to do the research and investigating necessary to condemn an abuser properly and instead she targeted an innocent man. If we are to learn a lesson in all this, it would be that before we jump on the bandwagon, we should make sure to not jump the gun and falsely accuse someone unless there is actual substantial evidence against them, and by no means should someone name another person's abuser before the victim chooses to do so and without their permission.
