They Saved Hitler's Brain: excellent, totally retarded 1963 B movie in which Der Führer's sweetbreads rule on from their Caribbean home."They Saved Hitler's Cock": excellent, totally retarded 1982 Angry Samoans tune about guess what. "They Saved Hitler's Moustache": That must be the title of the upcoming tabloid TV exposé on Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor--how he cashed the fat check from Woodstock 2, funneled it through a Ukrainian black marketeer, and bought the lonely housepainter's facial hair right off the KGB shelf. It could almost be true, Trent's such a collector of the morbid. He records in the Sharon Tate house, signs a Florida death-metal band called Marilyn Manson to his label, consorts with Kennedy. Hey, who says you can't have it all?
Well, Trent does, on The Downward Spiral's despairing "Hurt." Axl Rose (give that man a paintbrush!) never sounded so daft as when he pledged allegiance to Elton John, but damned if the guy wasn't onto something, something Trent has followed up big-time -- "Hurt" is what it sounds like when the sun does go down on you. Nobody even tries to make ballads this intense anymore. Trent sings from deep within an inner bunker, his isolation celebrated as the birth and death of everything.
Unfortunately, on the video for "Hurt" Trent comes out of the fortress, and what was a private hymn becomes an all-too-public hissy fit. Film of an animal corpse rotting before a time-lapse camera runs backwards; the wounded from the world wars spatter battlefields; birds lunge savagely at fish. All is death and I am all, Trent weeps as a century of carnage piles up behind him.
"I," the hero croaks as a hydrogen halo rises above Alamogordo, "hurt myself today...." How? Shaving that cleft? "To see if I still feel." Disintegrating corpse, rotting critter, bleeding soldier. "I" -- who could stop now? -- "focus on the pain, the only thing that's real." The pain jump-cuts decades, shapes this mondo movie without narration, Natural Born Killers without those pesky actors. Yet I miss Tommy Lee Jones's crazy moustache. Suddenly we realize hell isn't other people, it's this one guy, the tormented soul mingling his agony with a ton of Time-Life documentary footage, his well-toned forearms eclipsing the scrawny girls of Belsen. "Everyone I know goes away in the end." Death camp, Christ, medieval viscera. This is what happened to the kid who never stopped doodling iron crosses on his school notebook.
A funny thing happened shortly after "Hurt" reached heavy rotation on MTV. Not that Oklahoma City thing, but an event tied to the subsequent arrest of Timothy McVeigh. According to a DJ in the Junction City, Kansas, bar Club Alibi, McVeigh is a major Nine Inch Nails fan. On one occasion, the DJ said, the black-clad McVeigh specifically asked to hear "Head Like A Hole." Hearing this, of course, must have made Trent's day. For whatever reason, right around the time of this report, MTV decided to downgrade "Hurt" from "stress" to "heavy" rotation. By now, it's in "active" rotation.
Maybe it's just a coincidence. But there's no disowning the angry young man persona that Reznor capitalizes on. He's a small-town boy cultivating his own near-millennialism, a faith that nothing will get better until it all gets blown away. He leathers up and flips out, powersurging forbidden fantasies and eroticizing his powerlessness. He can't sort out his parking tickets from his paralysis because they're all tied together, every indignity secretly linked down at a place that nobody on the other side of the looking glass can find. Meet John Doe Number Two.
Both McVeigh and Reznor say that modernism's gone too far, its technology turning consumers into slaves. Both rely on the communications web to wreak whatever havoc they can. (Don't leave a light on waiting for Wired to wrestle with how Oklahoma City may be the online "revolution"'s finest hour.) McVeigh and Reznor's reactionary modernism doesn't want to bring technology down, just fill the machine's hollow heart with myth and domination. Their freedom depends on someone else's slavery.
On The Downward Spiral Reznor's narcissism thrills, seems larger than life (give that baby a gun!). But as directed by Simon Maxwell, who put together the huge-screen projections for Nine Inch Nails' live shows, "Hurt" gets tinier the more it reaches. Maybe onstage, showered with lights and cheers, Trent seems smaller than the screen images projected behind him. But on the close-up video, which was made at a concert in Omaha, Nebraska, the agony tattoos him. Projected on his flesh, the pestilence is eclipsed by the petulance. Uneasy lies the head that wears this crown of thorns. From Berlin, Leni Riefenstahl beeps Oliver Stone, asks him to send a message to Trent: "You didn't tell me you were making a porn film, darling."
-- transcribed by sara c-ko linde