The success of Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn Manson’s breakthrough album, posed an interesting artistic challenge: how do you top the Apocalypse?

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, which can be read as a companion to Antichrist Superstar, provides an answer in the penultimate chapter, which concludes with the words ‘I was even bigger than Satan.’ It was a soundbite repeated in a number of interviews throughout 1998.

Was Marilyn Manson indeed bigger than Satan? Bigger than the infernal entity who inspired Niccolò Paganini, the greatest violinist of the nineteenth century? Bigger than the tormented anti-hero who served as a role model for the most brilliant of the English Romantic poets? Bigger than the mysterious stranger who, down at the crossroads, tuned the guitar of Robert Johnson, the Delta bluesman whose style gave birth to rock’n’roll?

The footnotes of rock history are littered with bands who, after recording an album with a demonic theme, turned their attentions to less contentious subjects. Some got away with it, cashing in on Satanism’s powerful iconography to record a breakthrough album, then distancing themselves from the subject to avoid negative feedback (Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Motley Crüe are obvious examples). But many more went under. Anton LaVey warned that those who use the Devil to obtain power or success (and in Satanism, the creative arts are synonymous with the black arts) and then deny him will lose all they have gained. Perhaps the long list of performers who went bust after first exploiting the Devil is LaVey’s law in action.

Mechanical Animals, the 1998 follow-up to Antichrist Superstar, was much better received by the press than its predecessor. However, the fan reaction was less universally positive. The music sounded less abrasive and more ‘commercial’, the image seemed less confrontational, the concept less powerful – some Spooky Kids interpreted it as a betrayal, rather than a progression. However, while sales were not as phenomenal as those of Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn Manson, as a band, had successfully navigated a difficult stage in their development.

While not universally popular with his fans, Marilyn’s decision to ditch the Antichrist Superstar persona in favour of the decadent Omega character was well-timed, particularly in the light of the oncoming Columbine controversy. Defending himself against charges of promoting violence was, relatively, easier in his Mechanical Animals phase than it would have been in his previous predatory incarnation. As he expressed the contrast between the two personas: ‘Antichrist Superstar was a lot of parallels between my life and someone like Lucifer. Mechanical Animals has a lot more parallels between me and Jesus Christ.’

The transformation from satanic villain to messianic character was radical by anybody’s standards, though it was the martyrdom of Jesus that obviously appealed to Marilyn. Martyrdom is the dark, unspoken side of rock celebrity – many rock biographies are catalogues of personal disasters and early deaths, of earthly messiahs crucified by their own self-indulgence. Many fans secretly like to see their idols meet untimely ends, thrilled by the romantic tragedy of glamorous talent cut down in its prime.

And so rumours of a spectacular onstage suicide by Marilyn Manson started to circulate. He himself dates the start of these rumours to Halloween 1996, noting in his journal, ‘I’ve died so much in the past year, I don’t think there’s much to kill.’ Similar rumours had circulated two decades before concerning Iggy Pop, the original rock’n’roll maverick with a penchant for public self-mutilation (though, in Iggy’s case, he was then an obscure cult figure living dangerously on the edges of the music scene, who could have died at any time). But, so the reasoning went, if Marilyn was willing to cut his chest on stage, why not his wrists? The Dead to the World tour was reaching a level of intensity where it appeared to need some kind of climax – what could be more spectacular than the public suicide of its main protagonist? As he would observe of his fans the following year, ‘No matter how much they love you, they want a tragedy.’ (Or, as the final lines of David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ have it: ‘Like a leper messiah / When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.’)

Evangelical Christians have long tried to construct connections between Satanism, rock music and suicide, accusations they have tried to prove in court. (Both efforts – against metal bands Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz – were dismal failures.) Satanists reverse this accusation, calling Christianity a death cult: Satanism’s lack of belief in an afterlife gives value and urgency to this life, while Christianity’s fixation with self-sacrifice and martyrdom is one big death wish. While the Satanist’s attitude to martyrdom is one of contempt, this growing element in Marilyn Manson’s personal obsessions may have reflected his growing distance from the Church of Satan.

The demonic perspective is best expressed in the play The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw (who Anton LaVey regarded as implicitly a Satanist), in which martyrdom is described as ‘the only way in which a man can become famous without ability’. However, Marilyn Manson revelled in the irony of his Christian opponents’ malevolence on the Dead to the World tour, expressing their dedication to a creed of universal love by threatening him with violence. ‘I’m sure Ozzy [Osbourne] had his problems in the past, but I don’t think he ever had as many death threats as we did,’ he reflected. ‘Hundreds of them. Usually threatening to blow the building up.’

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

The Yellow Submarine - harmless psychedelia - but Christians claim John Lennon is making the sign of the devil’s horns!...

It seems odd to associate the Beatles, standard bearers for the love generation, with Marilyn Manson. Surely the Rolling Stones, with the demonic overtones of their late-1960s material, would be more appropriate? Or Elvis Presley – whose success turned him into a bloated caricature, and who thus, like Marilyn, symbolises a bizarre side of Americana? But early Marilyn Manson material features songs with punned titles based on Beatles numbers like ‘Revelation #9’ (taken from ‘Revolution #9’), and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Demons’ (‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’), while Marilyn credits the Beatles’ 1968 White Album as an influence on Mechanical Animals. Perhaps no ambitious rock band can reach their peak without at least acknowledging the Beatles, who pretty much invented modern pop music.

The Beatles also had a darker side that contrasts with their modern image as chirpy, peace-loving moptops, centring on John Lennon, the group’s most talented but volatile member. Beneath his well-publicised persona as a campaigner for peace and understanding, Lennon could be cynical, selfish and loutish. His curiously surreal short stories and poems also seemed to revel in cruelty and misery.

The most sinister aspect of the Beatles, however, can hardly be blamed on any member of the band. The Manson Family were big fans of The White Album, claiming that Charlie himself heard prophecies in its lyrics of an apocalyptic race war called ‘Helter Skelter’ (the title of a song later covered by Marilyn Manson), and that other messages prompted him to order the murders that were to provoke this war. Many (including Charlie himself) have denied this, but the chilling graffiti written in a victim’s blood at one of the murder scenes included the legend ‘Healter Skelter’ (sic).

He was acutely aware that his martyrdom might become more than symbolic, that some heavily-armed Christian extremist might decide to assassinate ‘the Antichrist’. Such things have happened before. Marilyn’s ‘bigger than Satan’ quote was a deliberate, ironic echo of the notorious suggestion made by John Lennon before a 1966 US tour that the Beatles were ‘bigger than Jesus’. Pious Americans had long been suspicious of the British rock group, but Lennon’s blasphemous comment was a declaration of war. The tour was plagued by a storm of public protests that reached an intensity seldom matched until the Dead to the World tour 30 years later. Christian antipathy towards the Beatles reached its grim climax in 1980, when Lennon, the most outspoken ex-member, was shot outside his apartment in New York. His assassin was a young man named Mark Chapman, who had just become a born-again Christian.

Bizarrely, Chapman had been an obsessive Beatles fan. However, since 1966 his hero Lennon had been cultivating a Christ-like image, consciously or otherwise, complete with long hair, beard and flamboyant statements in favour of world peace. There was even talk of him taking the title role in the 1972 rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar (he turned it down when producers refused to consider Yoko Ono as the Virgin Mary).

Whether Lennon’s Christ affectations were a subtle act of blasphemy, or whether he genuinely saw himself in a messianic light, perhaps it’s not so surprising that an unstable fan might be pushed over the edge when told that his idol is a false messiah, an Antichrist. Lennon had predicted his own violent death, dreaming about it regularly, and telling friends that death by the bullet was a ‘modern day crucifixion’.

‘Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around,’ Marilyn Manson has noted. ‘A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world’s most famous murder-suicide was also the birth of a death icon – the blueprint for celebrity.’

The Antichrist Superstar seems to have been tempted by the charismatic appeal of the messianic role, to become ‘bigger than Jesus’. He recalls how, at the first ever Marilyn Manson gig, he had recently had a mole removed, noting how it bled onto the Marilyn Monroe T-shirt he was wearing, giving her one red eye. He also notes that the ‘wound’ was in his side in the same location Christ’s side was pierced by a Roman lance, according to biblical lore. In late 1996 he observed to an interviewer, ‘Sometimes I think the most shocking thing I could do would be to behave politely and speak of Christian morality.’

In 1997, Reverend Manson of the Church of Satan announced to his Spooky-Kid fans on a radio show, ‘A long time ago, there was a man as misunderstood as we are and they nailed him to a fucking cross!’ On a discussion panel that year, he discussed Christ with Lakita Garth, Miss Black California (according to Raygun magazine, ‘a rabidly-judgemental embarrassment to Christian activism’). ‘When we were talking about Christ and me being not like Christ,’ recalled Marilyn, ‘I mean, if you look at things from a different point of view, one person could see Christ as being someone a lot like me. Someone with long hair, had a lot of fans, a lot of people that followed. He had twelve disciples – that could have been his posse for all we know. He hung out with hookers. He drank. People were against him.’

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING OSCAR

Marilyn Manson has often referred to the important influence of the Irishman born as Oscar Fingal Flaherty O’Wills Wilde, in 1854. Upon moving to England, Wilde soon became as well-known for his theatrical dress and manners as for his writing. Today he is best remembered for his dry wit, no anthology of quotes complete without a few of his droll, acidic put-downs or cynically camp observations on life.

Wilde’s love affair with London society came to an abrupt end when his private life became the subject of a high-profile court case in 1895. He was accused by the father of a close friend, a decadent aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas, of corrupting the young man. Furthermore, Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensbury, accused Wilde of being a ‘sodomite’. His bisexuality, for long the subject of gossip, now became a source of scandal. His conviction and subsequent imprisonment destroyed not only his reputation, but the sharp-but-brittle author’s health.

Today he is viewed as a great literary character, martyred by Victorian sexual hypocrisy. There was, however, an almost demonic side to Oscar Wilde. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, concerns a deal made between the title character and the immoral Lord Henry Wotton, whereby all the wages of sin and debauchery will be etched onto a portrait of Gray instead of upon its subject. Many have interpreted this deal as a classic medieval satanic pact in decadent dress. More decadent still was Wilde’s retelling of the biblical story of Salome, who seduces her stepfather King Herodias in order that he will behead John the Baptist. The critic Christopher Nassaar has described the play as a Black Mass, the basis of a ‘satanic religion’ based upon the adoration of ‘evil beauty’ instead of Christian virtue.

For all this, Marilyn Manson was adamant: ‘I don’t want to be Christ.’ In The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, however, he describes an interesting dream with messianic overtones. He dreams it is Judgement Day – the end of the world in Christian mythology – and he is strapped to a huge cross parading on a float towards Times Square. Joyful crowds, anticipating their demise with joy, are pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables.

While highlighting parallels between rock concerts and Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies on the Dead to the World tour, Marilyn also struck an analogy with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. ‘Because what Christianity started out as wasn’t anything more than what we saw at the show today. It was one person getting up and saying what he felt, and a lot of people going,“Yeah, I feel that too.” Jesus was the first rock star, the first sex symbol and the first icon.’

By the time of Mechanical Animals Lucifer had all but disappeared from the imagery of the lyrics, and from interviews, replaced by Christ: ‘It’s not to say that what I’m presenting is Christian, but I’m finding comparisons between the alienation that occurred with Jesus as much as the alienation that occurs with me.’ Marilyn even began to describe the progress from Antichrist Superstar to Mechanical Animals in messianic terms. ‘Things need to go to a point of extremism in order to be born again, so we can once again appreciate the little things in life: sex, drugs and rock and roll. Things need to go past that point as far as they can go, and then we’ll become innocent again. It’s my job to sort of cleanse the world of all its sins. I’m offering myself up as a sacrifice to the world to become innocent again.’

This idea of immersing yourself in carnal excess in order to achieve redemption is nothing new. Some of the earliest heretical Christian sects – like the Carpocratians in the third century – were branded ‘satanic’ for their doctrines of salvation through sin. Some of the nineteenth-century Decadent writers believed you could only reach the heights of sanctity by experiencing the depths of depravity. T. S. Eliot, the celebrated poet, was a confirmed Christian who conceived the idea of ‘redemptive Satanism’. Maintaining that immersion in sin had been a curious way to convert from Decadence to Christianity, he wrote, ‘Satanism itself, so far as not merely an affectation, was an attempt to get into Christianity by the backdoor.’

The inspired but neurotic Decadent novelist J. K. Huysmans seems to have been a closet Catholic even when examining the darkest corners of the Parisian underworld. One of the themes of his satanic novel, Là-Bas, was the thin barrier between sainthood and Satanism, as illustrated by the relationship between medieval sodomite-sorcerer Gilles de Rais and his friend the virginal Saint Joan of Arc. The novel caused a minor scandal, one critic famously exclaiming that after such a book, Huysmans would have to choose between ‘the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross’. Few were truly surprised when he opted for the latter and converted to Catholicism in 1892.

Many were surprised, however, at the conversion of Oscar Wilde while living in self-imposed exile in France. Wilde, the Irish-born decadent writer and celebrated wit, was convicted of sodomy in 1895 and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. He emerged a broken man, dying in Paris in 1900. During the intervening years of exile, however, a penitent Wilde had solicited an audience with the Pope.

THE CITY OF LOST ANGELS

For his third album, Mechanical Animals, Marilyn Manson returned for inspiration to the same city where he had recorded the first, Portrait of an American Family – which, with all its arch commentary on the connection between celebrity and serial murder, was recorded on the site of the notorious Manson-Tate murders. As his producer Trent Reznor observed at the time, ‘The view from the front door is the best view of LA I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing how beautiful looking down into a smog pit can be.’

Los Angeles is also home to Hollywood, the world-famous ‘dream factory’. Its surrounding areas are also a polluted cultural melting pot, which has boiled over on a number of occasions into violent race riots.

David Bowie lived for a period as an outsider in LA, before leaving with some very negative impressions. In the biography Alias David Bowie, Peter and Leni Gillman suggest part of the reason for the singer’s personality crisis of the mid-1970s was ‘the malign influence of Los Angeles itself. With its vast, random sprawl, its network of helter-skelter freeways, its lack of anything that could be called a city centre, its garish newness, its population of attention-seekers, its worship of the entertainment industry and all its attendant fantasies, it was perhaps the least suitable place on earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability. Later on David was to express his feelings about Los Angeles with vitriolic passion. It was, David said, “the most vile piss-pot in the whole world . . . It’s a movie that is so corrupt with a script that is so devious and insidious. It’s the scariest movie ever written. You feel a total victim there, and you know someone’s got the strings on you.”’

LA formed part of the inspiration for Mechanical Animals, Marilyn Manson’s musical comment on the emptiness of fame, as did Bowie himself. ‘Moving to Hollywood, I experienced a rebirth,’ recalls Marilyn. ‘I’d stripped away all my emotions in the past and I started to get them back. Living in this strange city I felt almost like a child or an alien, and the more I got my emotions back, the more I saw that the rest of the world had less and less. I started seeing people as the mechanical animals I talk about on the record.’

On another occasion, he sought to describe the city’s homestate. ‘California’s just too complicated to explain in one conversation. It’s best described as – from where I live on the hill, looking down on the city, it’s like floating in space. Even the stars seem below you – it can be very depressing. So there’ll be a lot on this record about the darkness behind the California smile.’ LA now looks set to figure large in the Marilyn Manson film project Holy Wood, which sounds intriguingly close to the metaphorical movie that Bowie described.

WRAPPED IN PLASTIC

Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) ‘wrapped in plastic’ -the corpse at the core of David Lynch’s cult Twin Peaks TV show.

Maverick film director David Lynch’s work has been a longtime pre-occupation of Marilyn Manson. Lynch has mastered the difficult act of achieving some success in Hollywood while retaining his own unique vision and style, both quintessentially American and disconcertingly alien. After a couple of surreal shorts, Lynch made Eraserhead (1977), a celluloid nightmare of frightening absurdity. It attracted the attention of comedy legend Mel Brooks who contracted Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980), the story of a Victorian freak as beautiful on the inside as he was physically deformed on the outside. Its box-office success and eight Academy Award nominations established Lynch as a director to be reckoned with.

After the science fiction epic Dune (1984), a bloated, over-ambitious if underrated mess, Lynch redeemed himself with Blue Velvet (1986), his unforgettable gothic- noir thriller. Wild at Heart (1990) followed, a lurid, sprawling road movie saturated with Lynch’s hallucinatory directorial style. As if predicting the style of Marilyn Manson, Wild At Heart blended adult themes (graphic sex and violence) with classic images taken from children’s entertainment (the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz being an obvious influence).

However, most people know David Lynch best through his work on the small screen – specifically the cult hit Twin Peaks, a TV series that gave the traditional American murder mystery the distinctive, delirious Lynch treatment. (The Twin Peaks world was later supplemented with a full-length 1992 feature film, Fire Walk With Me.) The agonised murmur of the character who finds the body of murdered high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer – ‘She’s all wrapped in plastic . . .’ – is echoed in the Marilyn Manson song of the same name. In ‘Wrapped in Plastic’, images of temptation and corruption weave through a sinister image which seems to suggest Laura Palmer’s relationship with her incestuous, murderous father: ‘Daddy tells the daughter while Mommy’s sleeping at night / To wash away sin you must take off your skin. / The righteous father wears the yellowest grin.’

Marilyn Manson scored his Hollywood debut in Lynch’s next movie, Lost Highway (1996), where he plays a sleazily sinister sleazy porn star alongside Twiggy Ramirez and contributed two songs to the soundtrack, ‘Apple of Sodom’ and his cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’. (The soundtrack features a number of Manson influences and associates, including Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie and the Smashing Pumpkins.) A dark, deranged, almost psychotic thriller, Lost Highway is vintage Lynch.

The creative affinity between the wholesome misfit film director and the androgynous sleazoid rock star is born out by the brief, epigrammatic introduction to The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, in which a characteristically cryptic Lynch opines that ‘He [Marilyn] was beginning to look and sound a lot like Elvis’ – a reflection, perhaps, of Manson’s post- Antichrist transformation into Omega, his self-conscious personification of rock-god excess.

FINE AND DANDY

‘I don’t consider myself a musician as much as just a "dandy" in the Oscar Wilde sense,’ observed Marilyn Manson in a recent interview, ‘as someone who is always putting on a show, and not for anyone but themselves.’ Wilde explained the dandy philosophy with elegant economy when he said, ‘One must either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.’ However, dandyism is more than a mere excuse for excessive vanity, but also an ethos, which the dandy Charles Baudelaire described as ‘the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages’. It is an attempt to attain a level of aristocratic style in the face of a grey and vulgar world, which Baudelaire defines as ‘above all the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.’

With roots in the polite society of the early 1800s, the original dandies dressed in impeccably-cut black suits, and treated the business of dress and manners as a religion. They cultivated a razor-sharp wit and an unflappable attitude of sang-froid (cold blood) – the characteristic we might define today as ‘cool’. In this form, paradoxically, the nineteenth-century dandy was the forerunner of both the classic conservative City of London gent, with his black Savile Row suit and air of unshakeable calm and decorum, as well as the Goths of more recent years – those midnight peacocks who ritualise the process of primping and preening.

Debate still rages as to just how sincere Wilde’s conversion was – whether the supreme poseur was simply striking another pose. Like Marilyn Manson, however, Oscar Wilde had confessed to an early admiration of The Bible on his own typically idiosyncratic terms, observing, ‘When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.’Also like Marilyn, he subversively described the holy scriptures as a storybook: ‘Do you know, The Bible is a wonderful book. How beautifully artistic the little stories are!’Verging on blasphemy, he didn’t revere Christ so much as identify with him as ‘the supreme artist’. As Ellis Hanson observes in Decadence and Catholicism, Wilde regarded Jesus as ‘a great work of art, the ultimate object of aestheticism, a poetic icon whole and in himself, a Christ for Christ’s sake’.

Perhaps most shocking to the pious was Wilde’s tendency to project his own homosexuality onto his version of Christ. ‘The homoeroticism of discipleship was by no means lost on Wilde,’ writes Hanson, ‘who was evidently delighted by Frank Harris’s [the famous pornographer’s] interpretation of Judas’s betrayal as the act of a jealous lover who thought himself abandoned for “that sentimental beast John.”’ Like those blasphemous Decadents who regarded Jesus as an object of homosexual desire, Wilde even compared Christ to Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’), the aristocrat with whom he had enjoyed the homosexual affair that led to his arrest and imprisonment. ‘Wilde struggled to see the lovely figure of Christ even in the slim-gilt body of Lord Alfred Douglas,’ says Hanson. ‘On the eve of his sentencing – his own martyrdom – he wrote a love letter to Douglas, claiming that the boy had Christ’s own heart.’Wilde converted because he saw a parallel between his own persecution and that of Christ, ignoring the fact that, according to biblical lore, Christ’s martyrdom was a noble self-sacrifice, while The Bible prescribes death for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality.

Just as Oscar Wilde saw a reflection of himself in Christ, so Marilyn Manson has compared himself to the decadent Irishman, claiming, ‘We were both persecuted for our beliefs.’While on his way to Reading gaol, Wilde was forced to wait on a train platform while crowds jeered and spat at him, later comparing this salvo of spit to the abuse suffered by Christ as he made his way to his execution. Perhaps this is why Marilyn Manson encourages the audience to spit at his shows – an act of self-conscious (or possibly sub-conscious) self-martyrdom.

So where next for Marilyn Manson in this new millennium? Marilyn himself hinted at a new persona, his previous identities strewn behind him like skins shed by a luridly sinister snake. Gone was the drug-crazed childhood villain of Portrait of an American Family; gone the Nietzschean fallen angel of Antichrist Superstar; gone the androgynous space-age decadent of Mechanical Animals. ‘I reinvent myself before I can get bored of myself,’ he observed in a 1998 interview. ‘Anyone who remains static is not only unimaginative but is being safe. The real safe thing for me would be to make another album like Antichrist Superstar, look the same way I looked, and say the same things in interviews. But I’ve grown tired of that. There’s lots more to explore.’

In December of 1999, Marilyn announced via his website that Omega had been ‘disposed of, as he was a ruse to lure commercial mall-goers into the web of destruction.’ His new persona, identified only by the alchemical symbol for mercury, came clad in spartan black, shaved bald, his eyes and lips outlined in ebony – resembling a more glamorous version of Uncle Fester from camp gothic favourite movie The Addams Family, or, more poignantly, the lead figure in the 1981 film of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto. (As in the original story of Faust, who sold his soul to Mephistopheles, the Devil, for knowledge and pleasure, in Mephisto the actor Hendrik Hofgen sells his principles and humanity to the Nazis in 1940s Germany. Hiding behind applause, the most memorable of the series of masks he wears is that of the white-faced Devil.)

In the same Internet broadcast, Marilyn announced the title of his upcoming fourth album as In the Shadow of the Valley of Death, identifying it as ‘the final piece of a triptych that I began with Antichrist Superstar’. In an earlier interview, he explained, ‘It’s probably the darkest and most violent music we’ve ever done. We took the melodic rock arrangements on Mechanical Animals and combined them with the more nihilistic approach that Antichrist Superstar had. The synthesis of the two is beautiful.’

Just as significant as its connection to the two previous albums was his intention to use it as springboard into a new medium. ‘It contains songs that will hint at the story that will be told in my film Holy Wood,’ he announced. ‘It’s all really a metaphor for my own life, but the story, without giving away too much, takes place in an alternate dystopia of Hollywood where everything is taken to the extreme,’ elaborated Marilyn. ‘It’s sort of Andy Warhol’s worst nightmare, combined with scientology and communism. If you imagined everything was as far as anyone can take it, the way movie stars are treated. There are a lot of references to the way that I see John F. Kennedy as a modern day Christ and how religion kind of sprouts from that. It’s a really strange story, but in the end it’s a parable about fame and love and what matters to you the most . . .

‘In a sense it’s very Shakespearean. It’s a very traditional story but the way I’m going to tell it is with extreme, never-before-seen images, never-before-heard-of concepts. I wanted to have a very traditional story so people don’t get lost. The way I show violence in this film will be in a way that no one has ever seen . . . It’s going to make people reevaluate their feelings on violence. It’s going to make them really wonder whether they’re hating it or glorifying it.’

As ever, the almost megalomaniacal intention was to create a work of art rather than just a product. ‘I’m going to show people that I have a really new outlook on religion. I have a true belief in Christ in a different sense than Christianity has portrayed. I have a different interpretation of Jehovah, the Old Testament God, than people have portrayed. And a different interpretation of Satan . . . I’ve taken a lot of my inspiration from Kenneth Anger, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard: people who took very powerful symbolic ideas and took the time to really see what makes the world go round.’

KILLING FOR CHRIST

The powerful image at the centre of Manson’s Last Tour on Earth: Christian or anti-Christian?

Marilyn Manson once observed, ‘If you want to blame rock music for things, think about what The Bible has done. What about Heaven’s Gate or Jim Jones or the Ku Klux Klan? What they do in the name of Christ.’

While killers with alleged satanic connections regularly feature in the mass media, murderers motivated by their Christian beliefs do not receive the same scrutiny. Both in lunatic asylums and on death row, for every inmate who thinks they have a hot-line to Hell there are several who believe they have Heaven’s divine sanction.

For example, blood-drinking murderer John George Haigh, ‘the Acid-Bath Killer’, was partially inspired by the blood symbolism of holy communion, but this was suppressed at his trial. And perhaps the most spectacularly appalling example was Albert Fish, who lent his name to Marilyn Manson band-member Ginger Fish. At his arrest in 1934, Fish was connected to many violent sexual attacks on children across the USA. Most vilely, he also ate pieces of a little girl’s body and sent a taunting letter to her grieving parents. Fish was assisted in his crimes by his appearance – he looked every inch the kindly grandfather – and had been apprehended and released on more than one occasion because authorities couldn’t believe that a ‘sweet old man’ could be a child molester.

His motive seems to have been the expression of an extreme sadomasochistic sexuality. Fish loved being savagely beaten with a paddle studded with nails, and enjoyed watching the suffering of others almost as much. He approached the electric chair with anticipation, believing it to be ‘the supreme thrill’, but the first attempt to fry Fish was thwarted when needles inserted in his own scrotum short-circuited the chair.

Behind this perversity was a deep, demented piety. Fish, who carved crosses into himself, would shriek ‘I am Christ!’ while in reveries of pain. He was obsessed with punishment and purity, believing that his murder of the little girl, Grace Budd, was somehow ‘holy’ as he claimed that she died a virgin. All the Christian faith’s masochistic hatred of pleasure, pathological fear of sex, unhealthy obsession with innocence and desire for martyrdom appear to have been embodied in Albert Fish. It was not a pretty sight.

JFK

JFK as a cultural icon in this hispanic true crime comic about his assassination.

President John F. Kennedy has become one of the most significant figures of twentieth-century America, an icon of political idealism and lost innocence. After fighting a charismatic, TV-led campaign, Kennedy took power in January 1961 as the youngest-ever president in the White House. Incumbent for less than three years, an assassin’s bullet ended his life in November 1963, whereupon he entered the public consciousness as a political martyr. The handsome young war hero’s efforts to attack corruption at home, and improve relations abroad, had led the darkest forces in American society to destroy him.

But there is also a dark side to JFK himself. Despite his reputation as a conciliatory leader, the world was closer to nuclear war and global annihilation under Kennedy than at any other point before or since. While he publicly fought corruption, he belonged to a political dynasty that manipulated power behind the scenes for decades, and that some allege had Mafia connections. Indeed, some suggest the conspiracy behind Kennedy’s shooting was composed not of American reactionaries, or Cuban radicals, but Mafia ‘capi’ who believed the President was inadequately repaying their assistance. Kennedy’s personal life was not beyond scandal either – his affair with Marilyn Manson’s namesake, the legendary Monroe, led to rumours that she was murdered by the security services to maintain her silence.

Kennedy was alluded to a number of times in Mechanical Animals – particularly on ‘Posthuman’ – before becoming a central figure in Holy Wood, Manson’s meditation on martyrdom. ‘My main interest in politics has always been the Kennedy story,’ he confirmed. ‘That was when America lost its innocence. I think part of America died back then because he represented something that was supposedly so grand and royal. Since he was slain in such a way, the drama of his death has made him into something he really wasn’t when he was alive. That’s why I’ve compared him to Christ in a lot of ways.’

Anger is a highly respected underground filmmaker, a founder member of the Church of Satan, and one of the most important disciples of Aleister Crowley alive today. Acclaimed among art-film aficionados for his Magick Lantern Cycle – a series of short films capturing Crowleyan ritual on screen – he came to popular prominence with his scandalous 1975 exposé of golden-age film-star excess, Hollywood Babylon. ‘I want to make something that really raises the standard in the way that someone like Kenneth Anger did in his time,’ insisted Marilyn – but Holy Wood, as a feature film project, would prove too audacious an ambition even for him.

Crowley figured ever more prominently in Marilyn Manson’s world-view, perhaps moreso than Anton LaVey, or his Church of Satan. He was more apt to compare his position to that of the Great Beast than to either Wilde or Christ, observing of his scapegoating for the Columbine High massacre: ‘It’s like Aleister Crowley who, in his time, was destroyed by the press. They called him a Satan worshipper when he was one of the greatest philosophers and magicians of his time.’ Crowley attempted to become, in the words of John Lennon, ‘bigger than Jesus’; he created a new religion that was supposed to wipe the last remnants of Christianity from the planet with his dogma of ‘do as thou wilt’. Could it be that the new millennium will see the dawning of his Aeon of Horus, as evangelised with increasing frequency by the charismatic Marilyn Manson?

His July 1999 message to the Spooky Kids at least suggested the possibility. ‘You are a slave,’ begins the communication. ‘Even Christ wouldn’t kill himself for this pitiful America that hides under “Christian values” . . . It’s time for their world to be destroyed. It is time for a new age, the Age of Horus. It is time for a new standard, a new canvas, and a new artist. We must forget this wasted generation and amputate it before the mind rots away with it . . .’ Signed, ‘The third and final beast Marilyn Manson.’

Crowley was known as the Great Beast, but the identity of the ‘second beast’ remains obscure. Was it Kenneth Anger? Anton LaVey? Whatever, Marilyn Manson makes an intriguing candidate for the inheritor of Crowley’s anti-Christian mantle, anticipated by few in the occult community. Deliberately isolating himself from humanity, turning his website into a refuge – his own Abbey of Thelema in cyberspace – Manson’s Mercury blurred the lines between cyberpunk sorcerer and multi-media messiah.

In many ways the persona of Mercury was a form of camouflage, his self-imposed exile a retreat from the dark clouds gathering in the wake of the Columbine massacre. ‘I didn’t leave the house for three months,’ he later revealed of the traumatic period in 1999. ‘Most of that time was spent in my attic, which I turned into my writing isolation chamber. I was just trying to decide what I wanted to do. Was it worth trying to put my heart and soul into an album if I was going to be treated so brutally and unjustly by religious people and the media?’ Yet Manson would, in his own words, ‘come out swinging’. The music he composed during this time – the substance of his next album, now re-titled Holy Wood after his film screenplay – was to be ‘a declaration of war’.

‘A lot of this record was being written before Columbine happened,’ he explained, though it clearly bore some of his psychic scars from the period. ‘I had already started to form the ideas because I intended to finish the trilogy. But it definitely helped put it into shape and helped put the fire back into it.’

If his previous work had been deliberately misinterpreted by critics as inciting violence, Holy Wood was, he announced provocatively, ‘specifically designed for use while being beaten upon or inspiring you to beat upon someone . . . If you don’t want to hurt anybody after listening to the entire record, I think you can take it back for a refund.’

Further interview pronouncements, issued in the persona of Mercury, revealed an increasingly Crowleyan philosophy, influencing his predictions for the future. ‘Now that everyone has the ability to be a star it’s gonna get to the stage in the next few years where the really talented people and the really strong-willed people will come to the forefront and really lead the world into something stronger,’ he proclaimed. ‘All of the mediocre people who are riding on luck will be cast aside. I think I’m a rival to religion and a rival to politics and people prefer you to feel strongest about those things. Kids feel stronger about something else so it becomes dangerous to everyone.’

More ominous for his opponents, and most intriguing for his fans, was Manson’s 2000 declaration that, ‘In some ways Christianity should thank me and in some ways they should hate me, because I’m really going to pull the curtain down on them. And not in the way they expect me to.’