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...
What Evan Rachel Wood Said About Marilyn Manson's 2007 'Heart-Shaped Glasses' Music Video Before 'Phoenix Rising' in 2022
Evan's Obsession With Nabokov's Lolita On July 7, 2009, after the second breakup of Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood, when she was dating Shane West, Vanity Fair published an interview with Evan Rachel Wood to promote her film Whatever Works . Whatever Works is a film directed by Woody Allen and is about a middle-aged, misanthropic divorcé (Larry David) from New York City who surprisingly enters a fulfilling, Pygmalion-type relationship with a much younger, unsophisticated Southern girl (Evan Rachel Wood). During this interview, Evan was asked about Nabokov's Lolita , since the film is about the relationship of a young girl and a much older man, and she talked about her obsession as a young girl with Nabokov's Lolita . It is clear from the interview that Evan did not view her relationship with Manson as being in the "Lolita-like" territory, since she does not even mention him. Instead she viewed her relationship with Manson as being between two consentin...