This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
The Monomyth, part two: Beyond Castles; or, Criminals and Conquerors
“Et tu, Brutae?” (source).
—Julius Caesar to Brutus, Julius Caesar (c. 1601).
Picking up from where “Hollow Knight, part two” left off…
Continuing with the larger healing process (re: developing Gothic Communism) as viewed through perceptive zombie eyeballs, we’re now going to consider the fall of various heroes orating dogmatic sex, terror and force as undead. To that, until Capitalism evolves into something that doesn’t decay by design—and furthermore can hug Mother Nature instead of Capitalism and its Cartesian enforcers—a given cycle of decay is forever occupied by some dead-giveaway variant of the zombie tyrant preying on others; i.e., while returning from Hell to rape empire as a historical-material matter of unfinished business, of undead revenge inside a widening state of exception (not liberation): “A king has his reign and then he dies” is followed by “Behold, a pale horse!” To conquer death, they become it, then pursue a world already mapped from conquest they conquer again from the outside in (the foreign plot being a myth, of course—hence the name of the game we’ll look at with Myth: the Fallen Lords): Capitalism in decay.
“The Monomyth,” part two shall aim to examine that decay differently that we already have. So far we’ve already examined futile revenge per the heroic quest, followed by the man of reason through the monomyth, as well as tyrannical indoor spaces (castles) that serve a modern Promethean function (reversing power towards nature): Metroidvania closed space per the Archaic Mother. And while the Gothic castle is a formidable means of defense and assault, as well as cataloging older histories through motion, they’re far from the only ones.
For the rest of the “Monomyth” subchapter, then, we’ll consider several older (and less scientific) variants that emerge inside the circular ruin as less castle-like and more open; e.g., cities and battlefields (versus combat inside strictly closed spaces); i.e., Cartesian hubris is a bubble that, when the Imperial Boomerang comes back around to burst it in other forms of architecture, withers and exposes the illusory homestead as: currently (and always) in ruin, but also run by zombie versions of manly paragons having their revenge on Rome as having not only forgotten them, but abandoned them after a great sacrifice in the name of empire (Caesar’s ghost haunting Brutus).
The two reprobates we’ll consider are the crime lord and Zombie Caesar (and Caesar’s armies); i.e., as beings to paralyze by showing them the truth of their own blindness with our perceptive zombie eyeballs. In other words, when the Man comes around, don’t follow him; show him your Aegis!
We’ll examine one of each, starting with
- “‘Ruling the Slum’; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)” (included in this post): Explores crime lords, in The Crow, as setting up the basic premise; i.e., of paralyzing the monomyth zombie tyrant as something to perform—by looking into the film, but also similar kinds of “punk” performances (e.g., cyber, steam, etc) that historically incur sell-out tokenism and police violence on and offstage, our example being Steam Powered Giraffe.
- “‘A Lesson in Humility’; or, Gay Zombie Caesars When the Boomerang Comes Back Around (feat. Myth: the Fallen Lords)“: Explores queer aspects to the undead warlord/Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords (and his token, anti-Semitic servant, in Myth II: Soulblighter); i.e., by diving into the game’s DARVO-style, empire apologia, effectively describing how empires-in-decay endlessly recolonize themselves in between monomyth fiction and non-fiction—not just with the raw mechanics of colonialism (chiefly armed conflict) stuck in a self-destructive loop, but spearheaded by past historical figures who, as current genocides committed by the good guys are abjected, return as fascist bogeymen to colonize empire from the outside in.
“Ruling the Slum”; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)
“I did not hit her! It’s not true! It’s bullshit! I did not hit her! I did not! Oh, hi, Mark!” (source).
—Tommy, The Room (2004)
A legal notice about the historical, factual elements of this piece; i.e., those featuring both Steam Powered Giraffe and their own involvement in alleged pedophile Michael Reed: This piece falls under Fair Use according to statements of criticism, education and critique regarding literary material and matters of record about survived abuse; i.e., public statements the band has made about Michael, including claims of privately owned evidence to his indefensible actions—e.g., “The evidence presented to us in private is not something the band can turn a blind eye to. The band does not condone his actions” (source)—and testimony from anonymous sources involved with the abuse itself. None of these claims have been retracted, and you can find them easily online yourselves from the source links I provide.
To it, the point of this piece is not to say anything that is not already a matter of public record, nor it is to harm any of the parties involved purely for its own sake; it is to educate people about past historical events, prevent further abuse in the future, and educate my readers about the harms of Capitalism through Steam Powered Giraffe as a salient real-world example that ties into The Crow and my literary analysis of its own Gothic themes (rape, exploitation, murder, etc). This piece is not libel, meaning its statements have been written as true to the extent that I understand and have made them; it is neither unfounded, negligent in terms of research or information available, nor written in bad faith for the purposes of defamation, but rather serves pointedly and deliberately as literary criticism and activism made to raise awareness about sexual health and abuse in and out of fandom communities. —Perse
This section won’t just look at The Crow, but the relations of power orbiting about such characters (and their performances); i.e., as things that go beyond the larger themes expressed, in-text, bleeding into real life through the same kinds of costumes and architecture as half-real; e.g., the cyberpunk and steampunk decayed to become “the future of one moment that is now our own past” (source: “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” 1982). To the latter, we’ll likewise look at sell-outs/tokenism here in regards to investigating conventions, theatre and fandoms to get to the bottom of sexual abuse as a matter of class character and activism stymied by profit: the case of Steam Powered Giraffe and Michael Reed. All of this occupies a shared performative space, one that connects between me, the band/Reed, and The Crow (exhibit 40k2).
(exhibit 40j2a: “He has power, but it is power you can take from him.” / “I like him, already!” Tokenism and police violence marry to rock ‘n roll counterculture, in The Crow. We’ll explore these recuperated [controlled opposition] elements not just with the film, itself, but the kinds of theatre it uses—namely Gothic poetics and music—to speak subversively about the regular abuse that workers [sex or otherwise] experience onstage and off.)
We’ll get to that. Keeping with zombie tyrants and the monomyth, our example for the crime lord is Top Dollar from The Crow, a man who—living in his ivory tower and passing down orders to his henchmen—burns Detroit to ashes year-after-year (the city seemingly never great, having been like all Gothic castles in decay “for too long” to remember such halcyon times). Doing so for his own sinister joy (the canceled future and death of the nuclear family unit), Top Dollar is very clear about this—making a speech about it, in fact: “The idea has become the institution; time to move on. […] I want you to light a fire so goddamn big the gods will notice us again, that’s what I’m sayin’! I want you boys to look me in the eyes one more time and say, ‘ARE WE HAVING FUN OR WHAT?'” He’s a gangster in a suit, lavishly adorned in the Gothic style of the day to entertain his guests going about their seedy business:
(exhibit 40j2b: In part, Top Dollar’s hideout stands for a demonic version of Trump Tower [which, itself, is simply a more boastful version of Capitalism in moderation—a vanity project advertising the owner]: the center of a dilapidated city bled dry. Detroit’s territories are divided up and policed, then fought over to coax money, drugs and weapons; i.e., towards the nucleus and through the giant structure’s vampiric throat, up and up to Top Dollar. It’s also a front, disguised as a club, whose musicians sport the countercultural façade of a latter-day speakeasy—the prohibited Satanic imagery and BDSM gear of a band playing with caged impunity on a stage ringed with security between them and the paying mob.
And directly upstairs, we’re shown the sprawling lifeblood of the city—converted into the usual merchandise and arranged along the same giant table like food. At the head of the table is a phone and Faustian business deals; i.e., the city’s central nervous system wired between its assigned underworld boss and his obvious-if-implied connections to City Hall and the police. The division between cops and robbers is a conservative myth, glorified by the movie’s nostalgic consumerism towards outlaw culture/music; i.e., as a school of disguise concealing the fact that all illustrate and serve capital until our titular vigilante—the movie’s outlaw folk hero, killer clown, Satanic musician—paralyzes the whole operation: by cutting the snake to ribbons with Top Dollar’s own supply [when the cops arrive, they threaten him in force: “That’s all she wrote! Move and we shoot!” Profit defends profit].)
In working for the state by climbing to the top of the trash heap, poor Top Dollar feels left behind. Marshalling the troops for another annual crusade (“The whole sky outta be red!”), he becomes caught up in his own DARVO-style mania and ability to outmaneuver his enemies, which eventually comes back to haunt him; i.e., destroying him through his own inability to confront and face the pain he’s caused: Eric.
(exhibit 40j2: To escape his pain, Eric struggles to return to the grave, only to be forced repeatedly back into the living world. At first eager for revenge, the act drains and tires him, making the climb towards Top Dollar more taxing and reluctant [facing predation a form of revictimization, one where Eric’s humanity makes him unable to fully handle Top Dollar’s apex-predator status]. The laying to rest of the wronged victim is a common Gothic trope, one predicated on the uncovering of systemic violence [usually aimed at women, in the classic novels]: criminogenic conditions, caused partly by Top Dollar [which is as far as the film goes with its critique of such things; i.e., the cops and he aren’t given an explicit connection—though they arrive rather fast when Top Dollar is under attack].)
From a dialectical-material standpoint, Top Dollar is a Gothic villain and Gothic villains represent capitalists or aspiring capitalists who are often blind to the true harm they cause others (and themselves) through the state; i.e., they, like the state, are functionally undead. The turning of displaced trauma back onto abusers, then, is incredibly traumatizing to them; i.e., reverse abjecting their own monstrous state of existence back at them, usually through sight.
For sex-positive workers, the black mirror is incredibly useful at transmitting messages that aren’t deadly for themselves, but turn their would-be killers to stone; i.e., “blinding” them with a lethal sense of iconoclastic shame they cannot recover from (or otherwise causing them to “glitch out” when seeing something that gives away their true intentions; e.g., cryptofascists). Once these villains’ mortality is exposed, a wider healing process can begin for the entire community affected by the villain’s widespread abuse through capital. Whether this abuse comes from fascists or neoliberals using capital, such mortality is often presented quite literally in Gothic morality arguments.
To that, The Crow presents its hero, Eric Draven, as a) an undead vigilante “painted up like a dead whore” who is hell-bent on avenging his fallen bride, and b) the hero who restores the devastated land around him by reversing the monomyth; i.e., coming out of Hell to avenge Persephone, then returning to her waiting for him at their gravesite. Despite the rampant destruction present in every direction, his (and our) ability to remember is incessantly compromised—fragmented, but also painful, like splinters. Simply put, Eric doesn’t remember what happened to him and his fiancé before he died (“I need you to tell me what happened to us!”), and much of what he retrieves is ultimately gathered in service of reviving those memories before moving on. Without meaning to, they serve as a kind of last-ditch weapon against the film’s final villain—the silver-bullet magic wish needed to retire Top Dollar for good and presumably return the city to a better time before the crime lord existed.
It’s important to remember that, while being an effective killer himself, Eric owes his avenger status to skills he lacked in life. Presumably given to him “on loan” by his crow overseer (a symbol of death and revenge), Eric’s guardian angel—its avatar, the bird—is wounded during the penultimate gun battle inside a ruined church. Weakening his own ties to the living world, Eric is then beaten in a rooftop duel with Top Dollar. True to form, the rogue backstabs Eric, who collapses while the other man brandishes a knife in his face (a fang to drain him with). Seemingly invincible, Top Dollar boasts “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him,” going on to confess everything to the man who’s life he’s effectively ruined without having met or seen Eric before that night. He smiles, only happy when he’s hurting people, and—like Ledger’s Joker—he’s always smiling (a jester without the face paint, which he critiques Eric for using: “Nice outfit! Not sure about the face, though…”).
Furthermore, Top Dollar’s fang-like knife (above) reflects the light of the drawn blade back on the owner’s face, perhaps giving Eric an idea. To finally gain the upper hand, he hastily throws Top Dollar’s displaced abuse back at him: “Thirty hours of pain! I don’t want it anymore!” (next page, exhibit 40k1). Faced with a terrible trauma extending from himself in ways he normally needn’t confront, Top Dollar not only becomes blind; he bleeds from the eyes and mouth like a (soon-to-be) corpse (a parodic reversal of Catholic miracles/dogma, the vampire “throwing up” his food, his essence)! Stricken with grief, predator becomes prey and then falls from the chapel roof to his embarrassing doom.
By extension, workers in the real world can shame those in power by similar means; i.e., by using stories like The Crow to get their message across—an Aegis to turn against our enemies, forcing them to see the harm they normally cause being alienated from them by capital.
As they freeze, these banditti chiefs can be ignominiously absorbed into the cathedral stone, its gargoyles serving a grim, laughing reminder to their violent, stupid past spilling out of their bodies (“murder will out”); i.e., the bloodletting of the leech, releasing and redistributing their stolen power (and secrets) back into the community they harmed; e.g., like Father Schedoni’s grim confession, shortly before he dies, in The Italian. Let that be the bourgeoisie’s legacy as we move forward into a better future; i.e., their own abuses giving us the means to survive the material world (and canceled retro-futures) they rule from the shadows. In turn, our best revenge becomes our ability to develop Communism in spite of their doomed efforts to stop us. “You can’t kill the metal,” indeed!
(exhibit 40k1: Left: “Greed, chaos, anarchy. Now that’s fun!” announces the emotional stupidity of Top Dollar. “Just having fun,” he’s actually raping and killing people in person [“I think we broke her”] but also by proxy through his infantilized henchmen. On Top Dollar’s orders, the latter rape Shelly Webster and murder her fiancé, Eric, in cold blood on Devil’s Night [itself an aping of the Creature from Frankenstein being with Victor on his wedding night]. While this serves as a false flag for Eric to act on, his humanity prevents him from following through. By comparison, Capitalism has menticided Top Dollar so that he can’t help himself/can’t stop being stupid; i.e., driven vampirically by impulse through predatory positions of power until these inequities literally kill him: the drive for blood, for control, for rape. When he dies, it’s a relief, the laughing fool having killed and hurt so many people already in service of “the gods noticing him again” [the fascist appeal to the elite, in other words]. Of course, the movie frames the cops as the good guys, here; they’re not, and the basic principle of reverse abjection—the one that works so well on Top Dollar—also works on them, too. They’re not the invincible heroes they think they are!
Right: Metal lives on. BÜTCHER are a hybrid of many things that came before. As this reviewer from Osmose Productions puts it:
Metal in the sense of the absolute riffing madness that ruled both the airwaves and the underground tape-trading scene during the late ’70s, through the genre-defining ’80s, and well into the early 90’s, BÜTCHER’s unique blend of metal music is certainly rooted in both German and US speed metal, but owes equally as much to proto-metal, hard rock, South-American and Australian black/thrash, NWOBHM […] and the Scandinavian cult from the early ’90s […] An acquired taste in these modern times then, but surely to be savored by the legion of metal maniacs that have an affection for everything that made the older eras of heavy music so magical in the first place [source].
The same troubadour holism applies to Eric, a rock ‘n roll musician whose own darkened output—his at-times humorous symphony of violence [“He winked at you? Musicians!”]—is generally set to music, in film. While his approach is generally of a dark ’90s revenge fantasy entertained by white middle-class men—i.e., the kind they either perform [e.g., in videogames] while listening to The Cure, Nirvana, and Bullet for My Valentine, or which they project onto media that demonizes crime by naturalizing it [the film’s dark impulses effectively a “tough on crime” narrative the original author, James O’Barr, wrote after his wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was 18]—the fact remains, these persons/auteurs don’t monopolize such theatrics; we can use them, too.
To that, the film doesn’t endorse blind revenge/revenge porn as nakedly as you might think. Yes, the movie is literally about revenge from beyond the grave: “People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it, and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.” Except, The Crow ultimately is about manifesting these feelings of revenge in a place where they can appear, before ultimately facing and letting them go: giving back through a kind of “charity vampirism.”
To that, Eric embodies O’Barr’s desire for revenge, but also his willingness to heal by processing grief as people so often do—by proxy and through monstrous scapegoats and personas. In an interview with Dike Blair, O’Barr explains the futility of revenge:
Basically, when I was 18, my fiancé was killed by a drunk driver. I was really hurt, frustrated, and angry. I thought that by putting some of this anger and hate down on paper that I could purge it from my system. But, in fact, all I was doing was intensifying it—I was focusing on all this negativity. As I worked on it, things just got worse and worse, darker and darker. So, it really didn’t have the desired effect—I was probably more fucked up afterwards than before I started. It was only after becoming friends with Brandon, experiencing his death, and seeing the film—perhaps 17 times now—that I finally reached what is currently called “closure” while visiting his grave in Seattle [source: “Shadows on the Wall,” 1994].
[source: Dan Heching’s “Eliza Hutton Breaks Silence 28 Years after Fiancé Brandon Lee’s Death,” 2021]
The best revenge—apart from acting out our abuse in ways we can taste and give voice to—is to remember the things we loved about ourselves as victims of capital [which Brandon Lee was, killed due to lax regulations (efficient profit) when working with blanks, on set: “There’s no such thing as a prop gun,” Eliza Hutton remarks, above]. Even if we don’t survive, these mementos will: “If the people we love are stolen from us, The way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. People die, buildings burn, but real love is forever.” That, not blind revenge, is the final message of the film. Closure is a choice when aiming for actions that help communities heal and expose their vampiric abusers [and systems] in the same breath.)
Such characters like Top Dollar are enabled by those around him—not just the henchmen, but also society at large when approaching the performance (and consumption) of such things. First, let’s unpack the dialectic-material realities present inside such stories that connect them to real-world conditions, then give an extratextual example (Steam Powered Giraffe, for our purposes).
In text, Eric defeats Top Dollar through the rememory process; i.e., a lost form of knowledge tied to death, trauma and the afterlife (re: “People once believed…”), but also a great sadness in the living world that survives him, once reassembled. Certainly the ghoulish goal of “re-excavating” the historical materials of the zombie/vampire (and other liminal gradients) is a worthy labor at all stages of development—its inception and execution.
This “corpse paint revival” starts with exposing our abuse as a matter of public knowledge known to Gothic stories that, just as well, give us room to confront our humanity from all angles—the good, the bad and the ugly. Feelings of vigilante revenge (the kind the elite want us to commit against each other) become something to disarm, while using our newfound vision to cultivate a more aware society critical of the actual bad guys; i.e., men like Top Dollar who look friendlier than he does (though nowhere near as cool as Michael Wincott, hamming it up in his vampire tower filled with swords): cops.
The sole purpose of the police is to defend capital, which leads to the kinds of criminogenic conditions (redlining) that Top Dollar only exploits after they’re in effect. This includes tokenism, which fascism relies on until it needn’t, any longer! Top Dollar’s the obvious dick (the incestuous nutjob who kills and tortures people for fun), but The Crow‘s true villain isn’t really the crime lord, but criminogenic conditions propping him up—especially those with a racialized character tied to profit, capital, and associate police structures (we’ll look at class and cultural betrayals with Steam Powered Giraffe, in a moment); i.e., people of color.
To it, the tokenism in the movie isn’t just Top Dollar flanked by cartoonishly evil sidekicks—i.e., his Zofloya-esque, black and towering right-hand man (a marvelously understated performance from Tony Todd) or wicked-witch, Orientalist-caricature sister—but Officer Albrecht as the token good cop. All are part of the same predatory system the movie, as copaganda, ultimately defends.
I’m saying this knowing that many people love The Crow for different reasons. But I also know said reasons include the white middle-class fantasy of false rebellion, of vigilantism; re: the state abuses workers through its own victims. To it, the socio-material reality of The Crow is that power centers often recruit from policed communities to divide and conquer them, making the movie’s glowing, tokenized endorsement of the police—while simultaneously overlooking the conditions that might lead a mother to abuse drugs instead of caring for her rebellious child—platitudinal and flimsy.
If I had to guess, people are more united on the vigilante folk hero (thanks, in part to Lee’s boundless charisma/pathos and martyred status), but are less in agreement on the director’s blasé treatment of the police as equally fallen, thus somehow redeemable:
Finally, there’s the big confrontation between Lee’s character and the arch-villain, Top Dollar. As is customary, the villain gets the upper hand and seems sure to triumph but our hero suddenly turns the tables—in this case by summoning the memories of his fiancée’s suffering and giving to the bad guy all at once.
What’s interesting here is that Eric does this only after Top Dollar has admitted that yes, he was ultimately responsible for the double murder. He may as well have said mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. In fact, the fact that Eric is able to obtain those memories at all is another Catholic “tell.” Officer Albrecht stayed with Shelly throughout her ordeal—a corporal act of mercy. Albrecht also looks after Sarah, buying her dinner when they meet, which is of course an act of charity (source: A.H. Loyd’s “The Crow Is a Profoundly Catholic Movie,” 2021).
If we wanted to get really Gothic, here, we could consider the film’s regression to Catholic tropes through the mode’s schools of criticism in decay (originally being used in the Neo-Gothic period as Protestant-paid, anti-Catholic propaganda).
More to the point, ACAB, my dudes, the worst abusers generally being community leaders, not crime lords; e.g., cops, but also landlords and tokenized sell-outs; i.e., the sacrificial lamb, Shelly Webster (a possible portmanteau between Mary Shelley and John Webster, the latter being the Jacobean author of The Duchess of Malfi, a story about a murderer widow), being killed for fighting tenet eviction—a fact the movie puts on her shoulders: “A big kick-me sign for a very nice [white] girl who found herself a cause. The cause got her killed.”
The look on the black policewoman’s face says it all (“White girls, amirite?”), though she isn’t exactly quiet about it: “She was fighting tenet eviction in that neighborhood?” The two black officer’s shared incredulity is both resigned to the myth that things cannot change, and viewing actual activism (Shelly’s housing petition) as folly that only white people do. It erases decades of black activism, essentializing Detroit as a warzone waged between the good citizens and the criminals; i.e., a thin blue line that needs more funding and honest token cops to “make things happen.” It’s race betrayal in service to the elite, as usual; they want the city as it is so they can exploit it through cop and criminal alike.
Such synthesis in opposition to state force is an uphill battle, then, one that will take centuries to accomplish, and requires a willingness to invert the usual idea of terrorism and criminality (the binary of good/evil and the flow of power) towards police agents; re: the anisotropic nature of reversing power away from them by exposing them as community jailers (thus rapists) delegitimizing us; i.e., with Gothic’s theatre’s playing with revenge and criminal action, both amounting to a rebellious mode of expression the state cannot monopolize. Such policing isn’t just done by official police agents or vigilantes in or out of the text. Its controlled opposition also extends to sell-outs; i.e., content creators who look friendly and posture as “one of us,” but who in truth defend profit through their actions covering up abuse (which is what cops ultimately do).
Recuperation aside, the proletarian value in such theatrical territories like The Crow, then, is they are commodified, which means people in service to profit will make decisions that betray their vested interests; i.e., when selling out through such masks and music during a cop-like vampirism.
This brings me to Steam Powered Giraffe and my experiences with the band; i.e., while dressed up as Eric Draven and pumping fists with the members (exhibit 40k2, below), only going on to employ the same issues of betrayal and healing The Crow‘s larger narrative encompasses between itself and real life. Police aren’t just actual cops, and villains aren’t just at odds with them; policing amounts to colonization happening by marginalized parties defending those they view as being good, but in truth are abusing the community around them—fans, in other words.
To it, we must make ourselves legitimate vs the state delegitimizing us, standing up to them and their fans; i.e., as a matter of class war through theatrical means that combines with culture and racial elements to help us intersectionally solidarize against police forces. As the below exhibit will hopefully demonstrate, such investigations include mingling with people in costume and out, and whose intentions are generally obscured by the dualistic, cryptonymic reality of the situation:
(exhibit 40k2: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard, cosplaying as Eric Draven. At the time, I remained none-the-wiser about the person next to me and the sexual assaults they committed: Michael Red, former guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter still working for Steam Powered Giraffe at the time of the photo. Eleven years later, I would return to expose Michael in ways the band who hired him wouldn’t. Part of the Gothic’s proletarian utility, then, is suitably to dress up and mingle with people of interest, but also investigate them behind masks of different kinds [overt ones, but also general personas]. Doing so in order to hold celebrities like Reed accountable is, itself, an imperfect process.
For starters, at the time of meeting Reed, I didn’t know about his abuse at all, writing instead, “Awesome guy. Great guitar player!” I’d just met him and the band, but he seemed nice enough. Seven years later he would stop working with SPG and move to Europe, then be outted as a pedophile by fans of the band, not the band itself.
From what I understand, Reed’s departure wasn’t because he had been outted as a sex pest, but the truth of his sexual and racist abuse towards fans came to light shortly afterwards. While the original statements of abuse regarding Reed are still up on the band’s subreddit, r/steampoweredgiraffe, the extended details concerning Reed attached to the original Patreon post appear to have been removed [dead link]. Those statements appeared on July 10th, 2020, followed by a Tumblr blog post several days later detailing Reed’s abuses further than the band:
1. Michael is a pedophile who has a long history of actively and physically preying on minors and young women. Michael has preyed upon minors and young women, and has coerced minors (under the age of 17) into sexual activity—which is sexual assault and rape. He has calculatedly manipulated young women 5-10 years his junior to be his “friend,” often treating them and implying they were in a relationship, and lying to other people involved, creating an extremely toxic social circle of gaslighted young people being manipulated and abused. He cyclically pulled from this group of individuals one at a time and withheld attention from the others to maintain control and silence of the entire group. This is sexual abuse, in any context. He has used his fame and social capital and his brand of charming and kind dude to make excuses for his behavior and seem like he would never be the type to commit it. When called out on this—he directly lies. Lying about his behavior even when presented with evidence is frequent.
2. Michael is racist. He has made multiple racist comments to people of color who were close to him; over a number of years, he has sought out emotional support for his white guilt without addressing how he should personally fight against racism and white supremacy. He has fetishized people of color and fixated on them. Those who have gotten close enough to Michael know that despite his kindhearted exterior, he can be shockingly cold and lash out in very cruel ways unexpectedly. He has done this to every single one of his victims that I’ve known, including myself, and his victims are anticipating the potential that he will retaliate in response to being called out for his actions. Private and informal testimonies from sexual partners and friends of a variety of ages, forms of relationship, and gender indicate severe emotional abuse [source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 13th, 2020].
The poster goes onto to add, “This post is formed by input from victims, occasionally about each other, and occasionally through observations about themselves directly, that occurred over a span of roughly 10 years, informally through text and private messaging, as well as casual conversation at parties and during socializing. His victims should not be subject to more retraumatizing or identification due to fear of retaliation. Along this vein, I also do not wish to identify myself. Frequently his victims of abuse are non-romantic partners” [ibid.]. In short, discretion and optics are central to such investigations, walking the tightrope between outing ourselves and our abusers—an act that generally goes hand-in-hand. This isn’t just from the abusers, but those they work with also needing to be held accountable [with SPG hiring not just Reed, but Steven Negrete, who also took advantage of people through his position with the band].
To this, there’s a parasocial element to bands/theatre gigs, and values they brand vs values they stand by when profit is threatened [i.e., by us, grappling with them using the same aesthetics, above]. Throw in the desire of victims wanting to maintain some sense of control over their lives by handling things privately and you’re left with the sad, complicated reality that many won’t come forward for fear of reprisals; i.e., privacy is generally a casualty of those who do come forward, attacked by fans of the bands who hired the abusers. And while I can respect the band for wanting to maintain fans’ privacy in these matters—e.g., with the Spine [shown with me, above] saying in 2021, “Several months later people brought to us information about some of his actions in years past. They were creepy[1]; we made a public announcement distancing ourselves from [Reed], calling him out, and standing with the victims that came forward privately to us” [source]—the fact remains, there’s a world of difference between official statements and actual conduct that isn’t lip service.
What I mean by that is, since 2021, SPG has largely kept quiet despite having a larger platform that could raise awareness and keep things anonymous for their victims; and according to mprjanedoe, their own accountability is lacking insofar as their reticence to speak extensively on these matters [while turning a blind eye] goes:
I’d also like to address the unfortunate situation that David and Bunny maintain they had no prior knowledge of Michael’s behavior. Here’s the thing: while I 100% believe they did not know all of the details of all of the harm Michael caused, there were definitive patterns and red flags and there needs to be actual accountability around this. Bunny said that the band gave Michael the benefit of doubt multiple times. She also said that Michael was caught and reprimanded for kissing a teenage fan in 2011. […] While I was young and being manipulated myself and not in a position to prevent harm – I am saying this to state that I witnessed the public visibility of Michael’s predatory behavior. I take issue with the claim that there were no signs and that no one could’ve prevented this sooner. I’ve seen some fans say that Michael would’ve “always been this way” and found ways to harm other people had he not been in Steam Powered Giraffe. While this could be true, it cannot be denied that being a part of a successful band like Steam Powered Giraffe that gained a cult status online and in the local scene and had a significant YEARS of DAILY exposure in a family setting to minors, cultivating a fandom of a significant amount of younger fans, giving Michael the upper hand of minor celebrity and influence, travel, etc, cannot be divorced from this situation. This is not inherently Bunny or David’s fault. But it is a factor in the breadth of harm Michael was able to do, and it is a factor in knowing there were opportunities for him to have had the resources he gained and used to cause harm pulled from him much sooner than now, when he has already removed himself from the band as it stands.
The past is the past. It cannot be changed. As David and Bunny both lamented that they’d go back and stop things if they could’ve, well yes, to a degree, there were opportunities to prevent further harm, but it’s too late now. Now is the time to make things right, and to prevent the potential for further harm.
Currently – there is absolutely not enough publicly visible and available information on the harm Michael has caused on Steam Powered Giraffe’s social media presence. This is made worse by the fact that consistent promo and every day band stuff creates a wider and wider gap between the leftover posts about Michael’s abuse on Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon. It is now becoming a game of chance whether a fan of Steam Powered Giraffe will know what Michael has done [source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 20th, 2020].
As such, the giving of persons in power the benefit of the doubt extends not just to Reed, but those enabling him as having a lot to lose if they took more accountability than they actually did. Privacy, in this case, isn’t just protecting their abused fans, but themselves [complicit persons in their paying fandom growing into a police role; i.e., seeking revenge by punching down against critiques and other victims] by arguably sweeping this under the rug with some paltry lip service. Rape is difficult to prove, and doing so generally goes against the profit motive.
In short, by making sure the written accounts of what occurred get lost in the flow of business-as-usual, the usual benefactors are allowed to “keep the peace” and play the good guys, all while historically turning a blind eye because doing so was good for business. Frankly the usual moral gymnastics try to reconcile these maneuvers with “finding a balance,” but the simple truth is, sooner or later, workers have to unite against the profit motive as exemplified by this kind of pro-capitalistic interference. Otherwise, history will only continue to repeat itself.)
As the above exhibit shows us, betrayal (class or otherwise) isn’t just literal cops, but businesspeople (and their indoctrinated fans) acting like the police to achieve the same bourgeois vampire function—Capitalism going so far as to convert former victims who, time and time again, are coerced into silence by those controlling the flow of information (with Isabella Bennett, below, deleting her own statements of harm concerning Michael Reed—itself arguably a statement of guilt scrubbing the Internet of her and the band’s involvement; source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 18th, 2020), but also their masked, nostalgic predation. Except, SPG aren’t the only mimes-with-a-platform in town. To it, there’s no time like the present to bring Communism’s construction about —to subvert our present exploitation by turning the elite’s weapons against them, reclaiming our Gothic imaginations, emotional intelligence, agency and labor in the process, followed by our dignity, identities, and power (re: me cosplaying as Eric Draven, back then, but embodying his pro-worker heroism now).
To encase the tyrant in glass, however, Gothic Communists must first remember what the state has made us forget—that a world exists beyond the illusion of profit; re: The Crow‘s dismal tide through an imaginary Detroit, but also SPG’s posthuman theatrics linked to the cyberpunk genre’s kissing cousin, steampunk. It’s literally in their name, but also their conduct as a matter of mime-like practice: masked, makeup-heavy conventions that, sure enough, showcase all too well what happens behind the scenes on the faces of those wearing the lipstick in bad faith—the death of actual people (re: Brandon Lee), but also of childhood innocence due to sexual abuse of a band’s fans (re: SPG), all in pursuit of profit staining the drinker’s lips red. It’s camouflage, the cop-like, sell-out vampire dressing like a vampire and playing the rebel. Such shameless endorsements of capitalism gives actual rebels (and their own clownish identities) a bad name.
(artist: Isabella Bennett)
Keeping with the Gothic mode, guilt and secret sins aren’t fully buried, but out in the open if you’re willing to look (case in point, mprjanedoe’s post is the first thing that comes up in Google); i.e., tokenism being a kind of disguise we have to look through to see what’s going on; e.g., Isabella “Bunny” Bennett being a trans woman (she transitioned in 2014, a year after I saw the band live), but one who remains actionably tokenized insofar as—according to public anonymous accounts of the band’s conduct, but also their own actions, ipso facto—she had more than a casual hand in enabling Reed’s behavior. Indeed, she was his employer and ignored the warning signs for at least ten years, only to effectively give him a slap on the wrist after they let him go for unrelated reasons (refusing to take things further than she and the other band members chose). And here I am, after all this time, feeling a bit like Eric: dredging up the past behind my own secret identity to put the wrong things right.
Except, that’s the paradox. I have my dead name, and who I am as a matter of fact. I wear it on my sleeve like Eric did his face paint, preferring to view my actions as speaking to open secrets done between different artists likewise performing on and offstage. Abuse isn’t just the primary actor, then, but those who—regardless of their professed reasons or intentions—run interference/cover things up while posturing as a GNC success story.
And that, in essence, is what Bunny and the rest of the band appears to have done. They’re not your friends; they’re content creators whose actions typically demonstrate how well representation translates to actual activism. Theirs is predominantly unironic, middle-class escapism devoid of traditional steampunk satire; i.e., something to sell to fans too young to remember said said—a comfort food we can purchase and say, “Good for them!” in the same breathe. Tokenism is tokenism, and I’d rather break the silence than have abuse continue under Capitalist Realism because the people with the most power in the situation chose to do as little as possible.
Regardless if it’s fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between, then, everything sits inside the same forever ruin having since been destroyed and replaced by a copy of its own devastated state as something to play inside; i.e., the canonical cyberpunk as a neoliberal hauntology that tries to cover up hypernormal trauma sensations with hypercanonical copies in order to make them hyperreal (a form of corporate gaslighting that covers up decay with futurist “decay”): more real and popular than reality, but still somehow “off.”
For one, this ties to me and my own journey through life—i.e., in 2013, I was in the closest and still processing my own abuse; in 2024, I am out, have written multiple books on sex positivity and surviving sexual abuse (including my own), and worked with the kinds of people who are generally taken advantage of in situations like the ones explored above. I’m nowhere near as financially successful as Bennett and SPG, but at least I can look myself in the mirror and know that I didn’t enable a sexual abuser for the sake of fame and fortune; i.e., a perpetually broke trans detective investigating tokenized behaviors the likes of SPG and their token trans woman playing rebel jesters, but again, functioning as capitalist predators in the king’s court. Girl, do better!
To this, the proposition that your childhood heroes are bought-and-paid for is, of course, deeply horrifying; i.e., the revival of the zombie within us and the sudden, unromantic death of said heroes (cops, musicians, etc) as a) fixtures of our own vigilante selves, but also b) the world as we know it thanks to bourgeois propaganda’s vampiric interventions/façades: the city as dead, the streets filled with lost children/dead souls to harvest and exploit as usual. However, change when utilized in a Marxist sense, is not death at all, but merely turning into something else. Like Matheson’s vampire-zombies, you’d be surprised what remains, but also what you can accomplish after things have started to change—in artistic terms, for individuals, but also at the geopolitical, economic level once the Cartesian Revolution is dead and buried.
To use a macroscopic, oft-demonized example, the Soviet economy’s state-regulated Socialism vastly outpaced the United States from a production standpoint relative to the immense internal and external pressures they faced; e.g., war on native soil a concept relatively alien to living Americans. As Mark Harrison writes in “The Soviet Union after 1945: Economic Recovery and Political Repression” (2010):
Salient features of the Soviet Union after World War II include rapid economic recovery and the consolidation of Stalin’s rule. […] On the eastern front, World War II was devastating. In four years, fought mostly on Soviet territory, the war killed one in eight Soviet citizens, and destroyed one third of their national wealth. The country was full of displaced people and torn families […] Although the human losses from World War II were on a wider scale, Soviet recovery after 1945 was also more rapid. The economy was in far better shape than in 1921. Both wars were followed by harvest failure and regional famine, but the famine of 1946 killed a fraction of the numbers that died of hunger at the end of the Civil War. Average Soviet incomes climbed back to their prewar (1938) levels as early as 1948.
Apart from the usual flaws of state mechanisms, much of the USSR’s instability comes from external sabotage, including capitalist forces seducing the Russian heads of state to honor a Faustian sell-out bargain; i.e., betraying the Union for the efficient profit of neoliberal shock therapy (Second Thought, 2022) that assimilated Russia into the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: as their Rocky IV-style punching bag (the neoliberal myth of the American underdog in a clearly lopsided conflict) recycled in centrist narratives well into 2023 (for more examples, consider Hakim’s 2023 “Why Did the Soviet Union Fall?“).
In the case of The Crow, SPG or the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vampiric curse—of a punitive, nostalgic Cartesian cycle of zombie violence—won’t end without some horrifying (thus traumatic) reflection. Reverse abjecting the state’s traumatic abuse must happen if workers are to instill class-cultural and race consciousness; i.e., resurrecting the working class’ collective inability to imagine a more stable world beyond Capitalism. Rape, war and genocide are endemic to Capitalism and won’t shock the elite; to end their perpetual rot/epidemics, the goal is not debridement and palliative care, but exposure of the disease at a systemic level, a so-called “attack of the dead” the elite will scramble madly away from (on par with the terrified Germans during the Battle of Osowiec Fortress in 1915, when the chlorine-gassed Russians rose in a vengeful, undead state to battle with the enemy one last time; Unknown 5, 2023). Doing so, workers can solve the very thing that so many great men of history could not, breaking the “fever” of its vast history as an endless nightmare that sends the Imperial Boomerang sailing back and forth like a reaper’s bloodthirsty sickle, flowing like Dracula’s cape (the imperator cloak, a ghost of “Rome” and of Caesar): profit laid bare.
We’ll examine this boomerang effect next, looking at the third-and-final zombie tyrant, Bungie’s Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords, Balor the Leveler! Onto “Myth: the Fallen Lords (opening and part one: Balor)“!
Footnotes
[1] Spine, here, is both being vague (“creepy”) and playing dumb; i.e., “we had no idea until his victims—literally our own underage fans—told us about it.”