There is a point in One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2 where the language of survival finally becomes the language of retaliation. “The Arsonist” is that point. The song is not simply about having survived an attempt to destroy you. It is about what happens afterward, when the person who has been burned decides that the fire did not finish him and that the scars it left behind have become part of his strength. Manson himself described the song as the moment when the narrative of the two chapters “crystallizes into a battle stance,” and, referring to the painting he created for it, said that the “burned scar tissue” had formed into armor. That description gets very close to the heart of the song. The fire has not disappeared. It has changed him. The title is important because Manson does not call the song The Survivor or The Victim . He calls it "The Arsonist." An arsonist deliberately starts a fire, and this changes the entire perspective of the song. The speaker is no...
How the Relationship Began In the August issue of Elle U.K. magazine in 2007 there is an interview with 19 year old Evan Rachel Wood titled "Dark Angel" in which she explains how she met Marilyn Manson at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 2006; she was 18 and he was 37, married to Dita Von Teese at the time. The interview took place at the Chateau Marmont, for which reason she commented about a particular sofa there: "I love this place and this is my favourite sofa. This is where I met Manson, both of us hiding in the corner of a party neither of us wanted to be at." In the April 2007 issue of Le Parisien , Manson explained how when he first met Evan he asked her to be in his upcoming horror film, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll. It was to feature Evan and British teen model Lily Cole sharing the role of Alice in Wonderland. Both insist a romantic relationship between the two did not exist while Manson was married to Dita. Evan says they became ...