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All Writing & Content © Nick Kushner Unless Noted Otherwise
In collaboration with Gilles R. Maurice

The limited edition film directed by Manson which came with The Golden Age Of Grotesque, Manson has said, is a stream of conscious directly into the mind and ethos of who and what Marilyn Manson is. For those unfamiliar, the term 'stream of conscious' was first used in the poetic sense by the early Nineteenth Century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe the mechanism at work of the poet writing forth his thoughts as they come forth, unabridged and unedited in a similar sense that automatic writing is used, which paints a very personal and very internal portrait of the poet. Albeit often so personal that the significance is easily missed as it delves so deep within the interior mind of the composer. Many elements of and in The Golden Age Of Grotesque, as Manson has said, are what they are in that they aren't meant to be "understood" via conventional means, they exist and they're in existence to be absorbed and taken in for what they are. DOPPELHERZ is this stream of conscious into the very personal mind of Marilyn Manson, unhindered and unobscured by any metaphors of previous eras, which have been thoroughly misunderstood by many, the thoughts plain and pure; abstract expressions like DaDa. In its writing/creation Manson ordered everyone else outside of the recording studio, laid out all of his open notebooks and recorded as each thought as it came to create what has been made.

Following in the theme of the redefinition of Marilyn Manson, DOPPELHERZ acts very much as a prelude to The Golden Age Of Grotesque, another key or element presented to 'understanding' this new beginning. The most significant aspect of the film is the overlay and repetition of the album's introduction, THAETER, which both illustrates that the film is a prelude and also plays into a very specific aspect of Manson's monologue. Towards the completion of the film a reiteration Manson makes is:

As Manson has said often, his art is only art until it's been viewed by someone, and the conception his audience has, the manifestation and form it takes in their mind, is when the creation is complete and whether that conception is "right" or "wrong" based on the artist's original intent is superfluous because the art has taken on a life of its own and had become tangible reality in that we're affected by it. The reiteration Manson quotes towards the end of the film reflects this, that WE, the viewers of Manson's art, are part of The Golden Age Of Grotesque and that it becomes manifest through us, and this completion of his art through his audience, is what he gains his pleasure from. We are the "screens that (he) projects (his) images of suffering, sorrow, pain, sex" upon and our viewing of his art is the THAETER.

Of course the aspect that is half facetious/sarcastic is that he finds happiness in his viewer's misery, which is done mockingly at those who feel it's "expected" that someone such as Manson would be a beacon for pain and misery. It's a theme that plays out throughout the album but especially in the title track where Manson proclaims, "We are the LOW ART GLOOMINATI and we aim to depress". Gloominati is a play on the words, the prefix gloom juxtaposed with Illuminati to insinuate Marilyn Manson as a dark, overly sinister misery spreading entity, which again is done so sarcastically as they bring nothing but joy to myself and anyone else who gets "it".

As stated elsewhere in the Celluloid section of my site, the flow and imagery of this film is very much evocative of Pasolini's SALO in many respects. Firstly the flow of the film and each of its section is very reminiscent to the allusions of the overlaying "Circles Of Hell" imagery Pasolini used in SALO, as well as the concept of capturing something rare and beautiful as Manson did with the siamese twins in DOPPELHERZ. In SALO, each of the 9 boys and 9 girls were inspected thoroughly before they were chose to be degraded, the most striking example of this was when a girl was refused because of her poor teeth, although supple and desirable in every other aspect, the Libertines wanted only the most perfect and the most beautiful to be defiled and humiliated. And it's the allusion of this that puts Manson in the role of the libertine, wanting only the most rare and beautiful, to inflict his images of "suffering, sorrow, pain and sex" upon. It's the role of Manson as de Sade, while not literally, but another artist who suffered at the hands of the society he lived in for his art.

But also in keeping it originally Manson it's also a scathing criticism modern society, particularly for example, "the young are too senile, the young are too Sieg Heil" where children (and adults) are taught to blindly follow without question or independent thought. So while seemingly very abstract at times everything within the film has meaning and the juxtaposition of the surreal images accompanying the stream of conscious is very Dadaesque in nature but it all comes back to how it's viewed and the emotions it evokes, which is the essence of Marilyn Manson and the viewer making his art complete.

Hans Bellmer, German born in 1902 and another artist whose work was condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazi party, was the most consistently explicit of the artists involved in the surrealist movement in the early Twentieth Century. Bellmer considered certain pornography to be art and his own work at times leaves no delineation between art & pornography with a particularly explicit series done as an homage and addressed "to" the Marquis de Sade, who was very influential to the surrealist movement in that he was regarded as the epitome of the surrealist man as his works embodied the antithesis of societies moral and religious standards. Though his drawings are unparalleled to any other surrealist, Bellmer's name is synonymous with his Doll which is his most well known creation.

Bellmer created many different versions of his Doll, some ranging from plump with truncated limbs to bizarre yet seductive long legged of a fully matured woman. Each doll though was created with the same elemental formula of two sets of legs on polar ends which share a navel. The primary subject depicted in DOPPELHERZ are the siamese twins which Manson captures to use a his play-thing, a type of "living doll" abducted whose capture and enacted submission of is his outward pleasure we see in the film. It goes without saying that the surrealist artists of early Twentieth Century were a primary influence on The Golden Age Of Grotesque, with Hans Bellmer arguably the most notorious of them all, making his doll a large influence on the use of the siamese twins throughout the era, along with the other influences outlined in The ART in The GOLDEN AGE OF GROTESQUE section. Particularly within DOPPELHERZ the siamese twins, in their depiction and role in the film evoke Bellmer's creation as an inanimate, submissive, unfeeling creation used for the pleasure of those who capture and possess it.

The line which directly follows, "Everything has already been created / So we can only deal with new ways of destroying them", is very childish and Dada in essence, and echoes the first line sung by Manson in The Golden Age Of Grotesque "Everything has been said before / There's nothing left to say anymore", a nod to Duchamp's concept according to which "everything has been said in art" as detailed in the "Arch Dandy of Dada" article on The NACHTKABARETT.

Parallelly, passages from the song Slutgarden "(I'll never promise you a garden) / You'll just water me down" and "I'm a VCR funeral of / Dead-memory waste and / My smile is a chainlink fence / that I have put up / Love the enemy, my love is thee enemy" are almost taken verbatim from several moments of Doppelherz, just as the "senile teens" and "Version point (less) downloadable suicide" in the song Vodevil. Another notable line appears both in Doppelherz and (s)AINT is : 'Your "sell-by date" (has) expired'. Manson continued to distillate powerful tirades from Doppelherz in his two following albums, 'Eat Me, Drink Me' and 'The High End Of Low' as shown in links below...

Also, at several (caucasian) occasions during his Grotesk Burlesk tour, Manson could be heard reciting whole passages from his Doppelherz monologue such as the example above, a remarkable occurence of Manson's obsession for always combining different aspects and disciplines of his Art (thanks to user Heather Quick from Babalon for this find). The full, official transcription of the film's credits and soundtrack can be found on Gottfried Helnwein's website.