Dear God, can you climb off that tree?

Meat in the shape of a “T”

Dear God, the paper says

You were the King in the black limousine

Dear John and all the King’s men

Can’t put your head together again

Marilyn Manson, GodEatGod

Marilyn Manson’s album Holy Wood (In The Shadow of the Valley of Death) , the final installment in the trilogy that began with Antichrist Superstar, presents a satire of the United States as “as a Disney-esque city-sized amusement park where the main attractions are death and violence, and where consumerism is taken to hyperbolic extreme.”¹ Along with Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this concept album is one of the most scathing critiques of celebrity and consumer culture. In congruence with our topology, Holy Wood presents us with an amusement park as the very embodiment of the terrible place.

According to Manson, the album’s name is a reference not only to the Hollywood sign but also to the “tree of knowledge that Adam took the first fruit from when he fell out of paradise, the wood that Christ was crucified on, the wood that [Lee Harvey] Oswald’s rifle is made of…”² Thus, Holy Wood combines images that allude to the Garden of Eden (6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.7, 6.9, 6.13, 6.14) and to the cycle of celebrity violence and death highlighted by J.G. Ballard in The Generations of America (4.12), choices that inscribe the album in the genealogical tradition that stems from the tenth chapter of Genesis (1.12). However, in Holy Wood—a sacred forest if we are being literal—the gods and goddesses of fertility and death are no longer worshipped as in Bomarzo’s sacro bosco (6.11), the ideology of the city is celebritarianism, a cult in which dead celebrities are venerated as deities. In an openly Ballardian gesture, Manson compares the death of Christ to the Kennedy assassination; JFK is both modern Messiah and Lamb of God. The Zapruder film becomes gospel. Already in Mechanical Animals, his previous album, we see Manson doing a Way of the Cross carrying a cross of televisions on his back.

The album—an autobiographical parable written in the wake of the Columbine massacre (3.3.3)—tells the story of Adam Kadmon (the “original man” in the kabbalah) who arrives in Holy Wood from the Death Valley in search of a better life, but disenchanted and disappointed with the superficiality of life in the city/amusement park decides to organize a revolution. However, instead of overthrowing the system, this revolt is co-opted and becomes another product, Adam ends up becoming what he detests the most (5.5, 6.14). Above all that Marilyn Manson shows us in Holy Wood is a media amusement park, an accurate metaphor that highlights “[american] society’s hunger for violence and the media’s eagerness to dish it out.” As we will see in the ninth chapter, this media-tinged amusement park is exactly what our world has become under the regime of late-stage capitalism.

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1. Tom Lanham, “Marilyn Manson: Absinthe Makes The Heart Grow Fonder”, Alternative Press, 2000.  ↩︎
2. Richard Rushfield, “The Antichrist’s Cross,” CMJ New Music Monthly, November 2000. ↩︎