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“The traces between acceptable hedonism and legal 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 towards 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 associate Evan Rachel Wooden, identified 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 function 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 appear 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 & the Spooky Youngsters, after they fashioned in 1989, that she felt as if she’d discovered her tribe.
Pavao, then 14, was certainly one of tons of 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 talking to Warner himself. She and her buddies began carrying kids’s lunchboxes after seeing Warner and his bandmates do the identical; the band known as them “the lunchbox ladies”.
“Once I watch these motion pictures 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. “One in every 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 along with her love of Warner’s music and what she has heard of his alleged behaviour in the direction of girls is likely one of 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 go away appalling feedback, so satisfied are they of their hero’s innocence. In episode three, specifically, the documentary examines how Warner established layers of safety – the devoted followers, the apathetic band, the crew silenced by cash, the supposedly oblivious report label, the media thrilled by his antics – that had been near-impossible to penetrate.
Episode two, in the meantime, introduces us to Wooden, whose allegations sparked a wider investigation and prompted Warner’s report label to drop him in 2021. Whereas the actor, now 37, has beforehand spoken at size about her alleged experiences with Warner, 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 due to her efficiency within the critically acclaimed movie 13 4 years prior. She recollects “this massive 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 stupendous, 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, notably after the traumatic shoot for his music video, “Coronary heart-Formed Glasses (When the Coronary heart Guides the Hand)”. 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 throughout the extremely publicised 2022 defamation trial.
The documentary deftly factors out the programs that let figures reminiscent of Warner to go for many years unchecked. Newman says that a lot of Warner’s statements about his remedy of ladies had 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 10pm on Channel 4.
