For a better reading experience, make sure to listen to the songs before you read the entries. You can see this and previous entries at rorschachmusic.substack.com, “Hello In There” by John Prine  Against my better judgment, I’ve recently gone down the rabbit hole into the works of S. Craig Zahler. In the last month, I’ve re-watched all three of his films (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete), read five of his books, both of his graphic novels, and I’ve even listened to a bit of his hilariously-named metal band, Realmbuilder. Everything he makes is, without exception, horrifically-violent, pulp genre fare: tales of amoral cowboys, crooked cops, brutal convicts, and the like. On the surface, there’s not much separating him from Tarantino, but he’s actually something else entirely. This is because, while you might grimace at a moment of gory violence in a Tarantino film, you’re generally carried away by how cool everything is. Tarantino’s films are buzzy, witty, stylish, energetic, and, essentially, fun. Zahler’s movies, in contrast, are really no fun at all. They are long and slow and unrelenting and contain almost no music. It’s also very hard to find any of the violence exhilarating. It’s all just brutal, nihilistic, and miserable. Yet, somehow, I am addicted. The portion of the film that has been branded on my brain for the last month is from this third (and generally least interesting) picture, Dragged Across Concrete. It is, overall, a pretty familiar dirty-cop narrative: Two well-intentioned but rough-around-the-edges cops are put on suspension for being a little too rough (and a bit racist) with a suspect. One of the cops, played by actual racist Mel Gibson, is desperate for money to move house, as his daughter is getting assaulted at school, so he decides to earn himself some extra money by stealing from criminals. He finds out about a bank robbery, and decides to lift the haul from the crooks for himself. So far, so familiar. But then, about ninety minutes in, a weird thing happens: We’re randomly introduced to a new character in a new location, with no apparent connection to the other narrative. It’s a young woman, Kelly, who is trying to convince herself to board a bus. The driver tries to coax her on, but Kelly changes her mind, and heads back to her apartment. When she gets there, she finds the door locked. She calls out to whoever is inside to ask them to open it. We learn it is her husband, with their baby, and he has locked the door because he’s trying to encourage his wife to go back to work after an extended maternity leave. We learn that Kelly has been suffering from terrible separation anxiety and unable to leave their baby; it’s obvious this moment has played out multiple times before. In the past, he’s always let her back in, but this time, out of real love for her and his family, he’s insisting that she return to work. They need the money and she needs to start living in the world again. She begs to see her baby’s face just one more time before she goes, and he agrees. It’s a truly beautiful scene; he’s kind, she’s fragile, the baby is sweet. Kelly summons her strength and goes back to the bus. It’s a beautiful scene, and one I can relate to, because Tia also really struggled to return to work after staying home with Esme, and I similarly found it hard to encourage her to go back when I really would have preferred for her to be able to stay home until she was ready. But it’s also a really weird scene, because we have no idea how it connects to the rest of the film. And this section is really long, nearly twenty minutes. It’s like someone dropped an entirely different short film into the middle of this dirty cop film. Eventually Kelly gets to work, and her boss and co-workers are incredibly kind to her. Her boss gives a beautiful speech about how happy they are to have her back, they make her feel at home, and we feel her starting to relent a little about being back at work. And then we realize that she works at a bank. When I watched it, a feeling of total dread came over me. I knew she was going to die, probably horribly, and I realized that the only reason Zahler had inserted this twenty-minute aside into his cop movie was to hurt me. And that’s exactly what happens: She tries to stop a colleague from calling the police, but gets her fingers shot off in the process. She then uses her bloody finger stumps to present her bloodied baby’s shoe to the robber before he explodes her head. It’s awful. I’ve seen a dozen or more bungled bank robberies in movies in which a cashier gets accidentally shot in the chaos, but I’d never felt a thing. But here I felt every inch of it. I felt abused. I can’t even say that it was particularly artful, except as a technical feat of emotional engineering, like backwards pornography, the goal of which is to make you feel as awful as humanly possible. And Zahler does this in his works, again and again. The question, then, is why have I been reading and watching Zahler relentlessly for the past month? What’s wrong with me? And what does any of this have to do with this John Prine song? There’s certainly something in me right now that really wants to feel things. But it’s not just the usual things that films and songs make me feel: sad or joyful or heartbroken or depressed. I want to feel horrified. This probably has something to do with the kind of psychoanalysis I’ve been involved in over the last year or so: If you go back to some of the song entries I’ve written over this time, you’ll see that I keep returning to the idea of mapping my internal and emotional worlds. I’ve been pretty committed to this, and I’ve learned a lot. But there has remained this dark area on the map that I haven’t been able to get at, and I’m pretty sure what’s under that shadow are the awful things I’m most afraid of: aging, of course, but also being left behind by the people I love. I’ve been able to avoid thinking about both these things for almost my entire life, but now, in my forties, both are starting to needle at me in unpleasant ways. I’m getting older, of course, and no longer feel as invincible as I once was. But I’m not afraid of death, really, but of the idea that I will get to the end having pissed all this time away, and I’ll have learned nothing at all. I’m scared that my body and brain will begin to break down before I’ve used them properly. But that’s really the secondary fear. The first is being left behind by the people I love. Both my parents are getting older, and both have struggled with cancer, and it’s terrifying. But, weirdly, I’m just as scared by the fact that my children are getting older, and my oldest, especially, feels like she’s already starting to slip away. For example: we take her swimming every week, and usually my wife gets the baby changed and I get my older daughter changed. But there has always been this sign in the men’s changing room that says girls over the age of seven aren’t allowed in, and my daughter has been very aware of it. She finally turned seven two weeks ago, and, this week, announced to me that I couldn’t get her changed anymore. It crushed me. And then, this morning, she asked me what age you have to be before you move out of your parents’ house. I told her eighteen, and she said “I’ll move out when I’m nineteen so you don’t get too sad” (I’m giving her complexes already, apparently). I replied, “Okay, but you know you can stay longer than that if you want.” She said, “My husband and kids will need me to live with them. But sometimes my husband can look after the kids so that you and I can go out and have a little drink.” Which is nice. But still… I think the reason I’m currently attracted towards all this horrifying art is because, right now, I need to look right at the things that are horrifying me to try and get to know them, to make them less frightening. I don’t want distraction or escape – which is what my students always tell me art is for – but catharsis, in the truest sense of the word: not purgation but education. Tragedy is not for expelling dark thoughts and feelings, but confronting and understanding them. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that three thousand years ago (and for most of human history) tragedy was the dominant story structure. People went to the theater to see awful, awful things happen to people who didn’t really deserve it. We almost never confront these stories anymore (except in horror films, which I love), and I think we’re the worse off for it. “Hello In There,” then, is a tragic song and a horrific song. The chorus pulls no punches:
I teach my students “The Lost Mariner” by Oliver Sacks, about a man who loses his memory. Sacks’ central question is whether life can have meaning if you have no thread connecting your past and present. My students usually say no, because how could you see your growth, your improvement, your evolution, without a memory? And what is life without growth? I often reply by asking if they really think old people are happier than young people. Is life really a process of improvement? Do we really get stronger and smarter? That usually stops them in their tracks for a minute, poor buggers. The idea that we actually degrade rather than deepen over time is a cruel and nasty one, especially because it’s probably true, and Prine pulls no punches with it. The first verse directly relates the fact that all four of their children are gone: two to marriage, one to war, and the other into thin air. Of Davy, who died in Korea, Prine sings “I still don't know what for / Don't matter anymore.” But it’s the second verse that kills:
The image here – life as a thing of repetition, silence, forgetting, and nothing, nothing, nothing – is as brutal as anything in a Zahler film. And the speaker and his wife are not in this state just because the kids left; it’s just that everything has just degraded. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s just what life becomes at a certain point. All is entropy. The only thing that doesn’t ring true for me in this song is the third verse:
There’s nothing in the lead-up to this verse that suggests the speaker’s problems could be solved by a friendly word from a kind stranger. This final verse is too simple, too neat, too Phil Collins, to tie up what came before. I understand why Prine did it – there’s not much precedent in popular music for something quite this nihilistic – but it ruins the song, particularly because denying the existence of happy endings is really what the song is about. “Mother” by John Lennon  I think I’ve mentioned the great review of Lennon’s Imagine album in which the reviewer said “It has some of the most affecting love songs ever written, providing that you happen to be in love, specifically, with Yoko Ono.” This is a fair description of much of Lennon’s solo career, as his songs tend to be about what he is experiencing, rather than ushering in experiences for the listener. Where John Prine provides a void for the listener to stare into, John Lennon asks you to stand on the sidelines and watch while he stares into it. It doesn’t always work, but, man, it works here. Lennon had a traumatic childhood. His father, Alfred, was a sailor who was absent for most of John’s life, and didn’t live with John’s mother for any of it. John’s mum, Julia, appears to have been a lively and creative woman, but was also wild and irresponsible, an unfit mother. Julia’s sister, Mimi, called social services on her several times during John’s youth, and Julia ended up relinquishing John into Mimi’s care when John was only five. John only saw his lively and effervescent mother on occasion, when she dropped by Mimi’s house to visit. And then Julia tragically died in a car accident when John was only fifteen. John wrote the Beatles’ song “Julia” about his mother. In it, he pictures her as a magical creature with “seashell eyes” and “hair of floating sky.”¹ In “Mother” Lennon tries to kill this fairy tale fantasy in its tracks. This song is from Lennon’s first solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup. In the fallout, Yoko had convinced John to take up primal scream therapy with Arthur Janov, in which patients are encouraged to look directly at their deepest fears and traumas and expel them through literal screams. This philosophy colored all the songs on this excellent album, but it’s on “Mother” that you hear Lennon actually performed the primal screams. The lyrics are simple. The verses go:
(The third verse, as in Prine’s song, tries to tie things up too neatly and offer a lesson, and is best ignored). Then, in the extended outro, Lennon repeats, over and over again, in increasing pain and anguish, like some satanic version of McCartney’s freakout at the end of “Hey Jude"“:
Interestingly, Lennon’s “primal screams” are actually rather tentative. In each case, he begins to sing “Mama don’t go” in his normal singing voice, and then compels himself to hang on the word “go,” and force the pain out of it. He’s clearly making himself do this; it’s not coming naturally. That doesn’t, I think, undercut the impact of it at all. On the contrary, if he’d just launched into his screaming like Kurt Cobain, the release would be too easily achieved. Watching Lennon go through this process of looking into the void is most fascinating because he’s really struggling with it. It doesn’t come easy. The song’s structure is also interesting in that it’s backwards: Lennon says goodbye to his mother and father in the opening verses before he reaches the state in which he’s able to let things go. Those initial verses, then, are essentially preamble, building up to the moment of release. I see immense value in staring directly at awful things, because, if we’re strong enough to not be charmed or excited by the things we see, we become wiser and stronger. That void is there, regardless, exerting its pull on you like a black hole. To some extent, I’ve been staring into the void for most of the last month, and, strangely, I feel more calm and peaceful than I have in a while. Honorable Mentions “The Grand Tour” by George Jones  There are few things I love more than a manly country singer with a big, deep voice being reduced to a blubbering wreck when his wife decides she’s had enough of his shit. I feel for Jones in this song, but I also suspect he totally deserved it. “Every Time You go Away” by Paul Young  When I was a kid, my dad worked overseas; he would come home for a few weeks and then fly off for a couple of months, and it was all pretty sad. This song is burned into my brain because my mum played it on repeat in the newly-empty house every time my dad went away. I mentioned this song to my wife once, and she said she always thought the lyrics were “Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you,” which is hilarious. 1 Interestingly, Lennon also calls his mother “ocean child” in the song, which is what “Yoko Ono” means in Japanese. The fact that he frequently called Yoko “mother” suggests that his mummy issues ran rather deep. You can read older entries on the Rorschach Music website. You can hear Jim's own music on his other site, Jim Clements Music. If you liked this post, please share it!
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