Images of My Childhood #1: Marilyn Manson "Lunchbox" Video, by Adam Lehrer

A collaboration between an early icon of subversion and a video director that introduced me to a new world of media

One reason Marilyn Manson achieved such success is that his extremity was confined to his self-presentation and performance style. I first encountered him during the Antichrist Superstar era, in a 1996 segment of MTV News’ “Alternative Nation.” I can’t recall the name of the interviewer—just that it was the woman with the frizzy hair. (I remember Kurt Loder for his intellectual gravitas, and Serena Altschul and Ananda Lewis for awakening certain pre-adolescent feelings.) I barely remember what was said in the interview (linked here for reference), because I was hypnotized by Manson’s look and steely presence. The man radiated innate star power, and even at eight years old, I admired how fully he committed to being an absolute freak. His music, on the other hand, was deceptively accessible. Listening to it now, it hardly sounds any more extreme than The Stooges, who preceded him by 20 years. With that combination of easily-digestible glam rock anthems and avant-garde, brazenly shocking performative style, it was clear he was bound to be a star and a perfect starting point for a young boy wanting to someday make art and piss off his parents.

Manson was also intelligent, and on some pre-intellectual level, I sensed this was an artist who knew exactly what he was doing—what buttons to push, how to provoke, and how to command attention. It was, after all, the 1990s: for a brief moment, the world’s most famous artists were expected to transgress social norms so thoroughly that transgression itself became a new kind of norm, gradually diluting its power. I was already drawn to artists who pushed boundaries—Cobain smashing guitars in a dress, or the Wu-Tang Clan, clad in black hoodies and masks, confronting the camera like a fearsome mob in the “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” video. Yet my parents had no problem with my love of Nirvana, Wu-Tang, Nine Inch Nails, or the Smashing Pumpkins. But when I asked to buy Antichrist Superstar, they suddenly feared something might be wrong with me.

And who could blame them, really? The true brilliance of Marilyn Manson’s artistry lay less in his music than in his self-aware, Warholian subversion of mass media. While earlier generations of rockers made headlines in the yellow press—Ozzy biting off a bat’s head, Bowie’s fascist flirtations during the Thin White Duke era, Kurt and Courtney’s matrimonial chaos—Manson did it all deliberately. If Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch had their aktions, Manson had the tabloid press. Few artists before him—and only one after (Ye)—have managed to dominate the media so completely through pure shock and by terrifying well-meaning liberal parents. Songs like “The Beautiful People” and “Tourniquet” were accused of promoting violence, Satanism, and moral decay. Stodgy Christian conservatives warned that Manson was a bad influence on the youth—and he was! Look at me now; I’m hardly a model citizen. Manson seemed to feast on the outrage, lacing his critiques of organized religion and social hypocrisy with just enough truth to intensify the backlash—and, in turn, his fame and fortune.

Every decade seems to have its defining cultural form. Since the 2010s, it’s been memes—for better or worse. In the 2000s, it was likely video games. In the 1980s, commercial art and fashion design (probably). In the 1970s, Hollywood film. And so on. But in the 1990s, it was definitively the music video.

If you came of cultural awareness in the 1990s, songs and images are forever intertwined in your memories. I spent hours glued to MTV, eagerly awaiting Matt Pinfield’s and Carson Daly’s picks for the day’s best music videos. Who couldn’t be moved by the daring visuals in Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979”? Letting the music and imagery completely enrapture me, I doubt any art experience since has matched those Sunday mornings in front of my parents’ boob tube.

“‘The Beautiful People’ was the first Manson video I saw, and it scared the piss out of me. It opens with close-ups of Marilyn’s mouth and his eyes held open with specula, then cuts to macabre images of women floating like 20th-century trick-photography subjects, all rapidly intercut with the Spooky Kids in full regalia. The video perfectly captures the “confused nightmare that leaves behind a pang of horror upon its dreamer” from Thomas Ligotti’s “Alice’s Last Adventure.” The lead track from Mechanical Animals, “The Dope Show,” is equally seared into my subconscious—I even wondered whether my fascination with Marilyn in that prosthetic alien suit, looking so androgynous, meant I was gay. But it was an earlier Manson video—one I discovered retrospectively—that truly opened new doors for me.

The video for “Lunchbox,” from Manson’s 1994 debut album Portrait of an American Family, plays like a typical ’90s performance clip—until its disturbing twist. It shows a young Marilyn Manson tormented by schoolyard bullies, then frames his ultimate revenge: rising to generational stardom. As a chubby, awkward preteen nursing a serious chip on my shoulder, I found it deeply inspiring (full disclosure: I eventually got off my ass, started exercising and eating right, and that’s how you’ve got this fuck-truck typing at you today). According to a SPIN Magazine article, the video was directed by Richard Kern—a key figure in the 1980s New York “Cinema of Transgression” film scene.

By the time I got a dial-up internet connection, I was scouring the work of Kern and Nick Zedd—becoming a weird, off-putting, snobbish and degiantly culturally sophisticated young teenager. My adolescent humor and enduring taste for cheap shock were instilled long before, through Manson videos and magazine articles. Every time I say something naughty on a social media platform, on some level I’m winking and nodding towards Manson.