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“The strains between acceptable hedonism and felony conduct in music have all the time been extraordinarily blurry,” says Jason Newman, information director for Rolling Stone, in Channel 4’s gripping three-part documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked. It’s precisely this “blurriness” that the musician born Brian Warner is claimed to have manipulated so as to perform sickening abuse and assault of a number of girls over his decades-long profession (he denies all the allegations in opposition to him).
Along with his deathly white make-up, jet-black hair and provocative lyrics, the US shock rocker had all the time courted controversy. However in 2021, his former companion Evan Rachel Wooden, recognized to many because the star of the hit drama sequence Westworld, accused him of psychological, bodily and sexual abuse throughout their three-year relationship. Channel 4 units out to analyze – by way of testimony from his accusers, in addition to those that labored with and for him over time – the person behind the masks and whether or not it was this “character” that helped him evade scrutiny for thus a few years.
From the primary episode, it’s made abundantly clear that Warner’s magnetism and appeal performed an enormous position in his success. “He was very charismatic and I used to be drawn to that,” superfan Jennifer Pavao recollects. She is immediately likeable – a type of individuals who all the time appears cheerful – as she particulars how she struggled to slot in when her household moved to Florida. It was solely when she stumbled upon Warner’s band, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Youngsters, after they shaped in 1990, that she felt as if she’d discovered her tribe.
Pavao, then 14, was certainly one of a whole lot of disillusioned youngsters who felt drawn to Warner’s charming onstage presence, his provocative picture and clear disregard for “the norm”. She was delighted when she obtained by way of to a hotline the band had arrange for followers and located she was chatting with Warner himself. She and her associates began carrying kids’s lunchboxes after seeing Warner and his bandmates do the identical; the band referred to as them “the lunchbox ladies”.
Marilyn Manson: A timeline of the allegations in opposition to the embattled rock star
“Once I watch these films about Charles Manson and his Household, it does ring a bell the place these little adoring followers are trying as much as you and no one actually understands why,” she says. Warner was all the time respectful along with his youthful feminine fanbase, she insists, earlier than pausing. “Considered one of my lunchboxes he signed, and he wrote, ‘To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutterslut, love Marilyn.’” She didn’t realise on the time how inappropriate that was. The primary time she noticed a penis in actual life, she believes, is when Manson uncovered himself throughout a present. “Did I simply miss all of this?” she asks, a involved frown briefly clouding that cheery manner. Watching Pavao wrestle together with her love of Warner’s music and what she has heard of his alleged behaviour in the direction of girls is among the most affecting throughlines of the documentary.
Later, the documentary demonstrates how musicians and different celebrities accused of abuse can sit again whereas a lot of their followers converse out on their behalf. On-line, girls are bombarded with abuse from loyalists who mock them in movies or depart appalling feedback, so satisfied are they of their hero’s innocence. In episode three, particularly, the documentary examines how Warner established layers of safety – the devoted followers, the apathetic band, the crew silenced by cash, the supposedly oblivious file label, the media thrilled by his antics – that have been near-impossible to penetrate.
Episode two, in the meantime, introduces us to Wooden, whose allegations sparked a wider investigation and prompted Warner’s file label to drop him in 2021. Whereas the actor, now 37, has spoken about her alleged experiences with Warner at size earlier than, it’s nonetheless haunting to listen to her recount how she first met the musician when she was 18, “simply recent out of mum’s home” and adjusting to early fame because of her efficiency within the critically acclaimed movie 13. She recollects “this huge darkish pale man” strolling as much as her at a celebration on the Chateau Marmont and saying he admired the film, earlier than telling her he was making his personal movie.
“I noticed him as a well-established, a lot older man who was married to Dita Von Teese, a phenomenal, established burlesque mannequin,” Wooden says. However early on, she claims, Warner spoke negatively about his marriage whereas telling her that she impressed him. “That felt good,” she says. She speaks matter-of-factly, for probably the most half, about how their relationship grew an increasing number of poisonous, significantly after the traumatic shoot for his music video, “Coronary heart-Formed Glasses”. The small print are horrifying.
Marilyn Manson: Unmasked does an admirable job of difficult the victim-blaming narrative that questions why somebody trapped in a cycle of abuse didn’t converse up on the time, or why they solely spoke out when others did. The media circus surrounding the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial is only one instance of this pervasive trope – Wooden claims that certainly one of Warner’s accusers recanted her assertion after seeing the extent of on-line abuse Heard suffered through the extremely publicised 2022 defamation trial.
The documentary deftly factors out the methods that allow figures equivalent to Warner to go for many years unchecked. Newman says that a lot of Warner’s statements about his remedy of ladies have been dismissed as “typical rock star behaviour” by the music press. Perhaps after this documentary, the following time a rock star tells us they’re a monster, we’ll consider them.
‘Marilyn Manson: Unmasked’ airs on 14, 15 and 16 January at 9pm on Channel 4.
