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...
When on February 1st 2021 Marilyn Manson was called out by name on social media by Evan Rachel Wood and a number of other women for alleged abusive behavior, and in the lawsuits that followed months later, one of the most common terms used to describe this abusive behavior was "gaslighting", which is an umbrella term that includes grooming, controlling, brainwashing, love bombing and manipulating with a goal to get someone to question their own reality, memory or perceptions. The association of Marilyn Manson with gaslighting began with Evan Rachel Wood's 2018 congressional testimony , in which she described that the abuse she suffered by her then anonymous abuser was centered around gaslighting. She said: My experience with domestic violence was this. Toxic mental, physical, and sexual abuse, which started slow, but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he beli...