All of these — the comics, the Springsteen and Bon Jovi concerts, the cult bands, the punk 7-inch singles he was starting to collect — would provide important cues for Way when he started making his own music in his late twenties. By that time, Way was living in his parents’ basement, trying to make it as a commercial artist. He interned at DC Comics and pitched an idea to the Cartoon Network, which they very nearly picked up, about a flying monkey who talked like Björk and could make breakfast foods appear out of nowhere. But he was unhappy. He drank too much, he popped too many pills, and occasionally thought about suicide.
Then, driving in to Manhattan on 11 September 2001, Gerard had an epiphany. ‘I’ve gotta get out of the basement,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ve gotta make a difference!’3
At this point, Gerard Way’s story really does begin to resemble the superhero comics he devoured so eagerly as a young man. Way’s response to global catastrophe and personal meltdown was…to form his own superteam. He, his brother Mikey and neighbourhood friend Frank Iero banded together as My Chemical Romance. Their mission? ‘To deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder of 9/11.’4 In the beginning, the band’s role was therapeutic. Gerard thrashed and howled and let off steam, and felt much better for it. But he also realised that he had created art. Art had healed his bruised psyche and given him a reason to live. Might it not be able to accomplish the same task on a larger scale? The world was in crisis, society was falling apart (again), everybody he met seemed so loaded up with stress that they might explode at any moment. Could art make a difference?
The answer was almost irrelevant, since Gerard and the band felt as though they had no choice but to do what they were doing anyway. But after the adrenaline rush of those early gigs had worn out, Gerard began to think more carefully about how to do it. The clues turned out to be in his own childhood and adolescence — in the music, comics and movies that had shaped his imagination. The gothic gloom of The Cure, the horror business of the Misfits, the Old Testament morality of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the high romance of Queen, Bowie and Springsteen, the cosmic allegories of power and responsibility in the superhero comics, and the medieval escapism of D&D. These were the myths that had sustained him, that had given his life meaning and purpose in his darkest moments — and these became the raw materials for the great multimedia art project that would be My Chemical Romance.
Role-playing games and comics have never really been cool, exactly. But they got a boost in the early ’90s from the patronage of Rivers Cuomo. Weezer’s song ‘In the Garage’ describes the place the singer goes when normal life drives him round the twist. Here no-one can tell him what to do — he’s got his Kiss posters, his X-Men comics, and his twelve-sided die. But we wouldn’t know that he’s into any of that stuff, the singer tells us, because we’re not allowed in here. ‘In the garage where I feel safe,’ he croons, ‘no-one knows about my ways.’5
With ‘In the Garage’, Cuomo made himself a martyr to geekiness. Thanks to the Weezer singer’s groundwork in establishing such nerdy pursuits as part of the aesthetic of twenty-first-century pop-punk-whatever, the modern rock star no longer has to hide his Dungeon Master’s guide in the garage. The members of My Chemical Romance are not so shy about their obsessions. While all the other musicians on the 2006 Warped tour were getting loaded and chatting up groupies, Rolling Stone’s contributing editor Jenny Eliscu followed the members of My Chemical Romance around the local Wal-Mart as they looked for Spiderman pyjama bottoms and plastic racks to organise their D&D books. ‘They prefer to think of themselves as superheroes rather than rock stars,’ Eliscu noted, as the band climbed beneath their Teen Titans bedspreads and bid each other goodnight.
And, like any respectable superheroes, the members of My Chemical Romance get their own action figures later this year. ‘I don’t think that having a My Chemical Romance action figure will make a kid start his own band,’ Gerard says. ‘I like to think it will make him save children from a burning building.’6
This is about much more than merchandising for Gerard Way — more than music, even. It’s about finding a way out of the shallow materialism of his age. It’s about giving fans something to believe in.
Myths of the Near Future
THE PROBLEM WITH reason — as Rousseau realised — is that it’s essentially amoral. Logic, science and mathematics can help us figure out how to do things better, but they can never tell us whether the thing was a good idea in the first place. So a society that enshrines science and reason above all else is, in the end, guided only by the spirit of competition — the race to see who can build a more efficient mill, a faster steam engine. Progress can never tell us how to live or why we should carry on doing so. For that, Dostoyevsky believed, you need religion. But the new ideology of commonsense had rationalised religious faith out of existence. Here again Dostoyevsky saw the dubious legacy of the Enlightenment at work. A society based on rational principles can have no use for things that don’t make sense — and Christianity, like all major religions, is full of nonsense. A virgin birth? A man who dies and comes back to life? Three persons who are the same person? Enlightenment philosophers jumped through hoops to reconcile all this mumbo jumbo with reason — and what they couldn’t explain, they did away with.1
This, for Dostoyevsky, was the greatest mistake of the age. The empiricists and positivists had created a world in which behaviour was only tolerated if it was rational and useful. This left no room for tradition or faith, which are irrational and therefore useless. But again, Dostoyevsky asks, how did reason become the measure of all things? Myths, as Isiah Berlin points out in Against the Current, are not ‘false statements about reality corrected by later rational criticism’.2What’s important about mythology will never show up on the rationalists’ radar — so of course they’ll assume that it’s useless. But what if there was something wrong with the system? What if the most important element in our lives, the one thing that can give meaning to what otherwise seems like a brute struggle for existence, cannot be weighed on a scale or calculated by an adding machine? Dostoyevsky believed that the erosion of faith by science had created a world without meaning in which the spirit of competition and one-upmanship was the only rule. Now society, which had once been bound together by real values, was falling apart at the seams.
Against his degraded present, Dostoyevsky opposed the image of a specifically Russian Christian tradition, rooted in the soil of the nation and flowing through the veins of its people. This, as Alex de Jonge points out in his book Dostyevsky and the Age of Intensity is closely bound up with his idea of the ‘living life’ — a Rousseau-ish vision of human beings connected to their natural impulses.3 The underground man is envious of the natural men and the men of action precisely because they seem to be in touch with this ‘living life’. He, on the other hand, is unnatural — a test-tube man — the inevitable result of the fragmented and meaningless world created by reason and enlightenment.
Dostoyevsky was not alone in voicing his discontent with modern society — nor was he the only one to posit national folk traditions as the remedy for its ills. Richard Wagner, like William Morris, advocated a return to the artisan’s communities of the Middle Ages, and found the materials for his dramas in medieval folklore. He believed these indigenous traditions could provide German people with the kind of spiritual satisfaction that the modern world, with its flimsy material consolations, could not. And Wagnerians — following the composer’s lead — loved Wagner’s music in a completely different way to that in which, say, the French concert-goer of the eighteenth century would have enjoyed Mozart. Wagner was not entertainment, his operas were, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it in The Age of Empire, ‘all-purpose providers of spiritual content’.4 And Wagner was not just a composer, he was — as he was the first to insist — a maker of myths.
This new role for the artist came to seem more and more important as the world created by money and business proved to be not only immoral, but far less stable than the positiv
ists would have you believe. The Great Depression of the late 1800s, as Hobsbawm points out, seems like a barely perceptible blip compared to the financial crises of the twentieth century.5 But it was enough to shake people’s faith in economic progress, and it certainly lead to a great deal of ‘I-told-you-so’-ing from the nineteenth-century’s discontents. In his study of turn-of-the-century culture in Vienna, Carl Schorske explains how this new instability gave extra momentum to the Wagnerians’ cause. ‘The crash of 1873’, he writes in Fin-Du-Siecle Vienna, ‘made particularly attractive [Wagner’s] glorification of the Medieval Artisan community against modern capitalist society.’6 Addressing a meeting of Vienna’s Wagner society in 1875, August Sitte told his audience that ‘[t]he essence of the modern condition being the fragmentation of life, we stand in need of an integrating myth’.7
Showing how these unifying myths could be created by artists was, Sitte argued, Wagner’s great achievement. Just as Wagner’s Siegfried forges a new weapon from the fragments of his father’s sword:
So too must the modern artist generate, by the example of his art, the strength to overcome fragmentation and provide a ‘community life-outlook’ for people as a whole.8
In a meaningless and chaotic world, a world in which social relations have broken down and the old faiths have disappeared through neglect, it was the artists’ job, the Wagnerians believed, to heal society’s wounds.
Gustav Klimt
TOWARD THE END of 1895 the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was commissioned to paint three pictures for the great hall of a Viennese university — one for each of the university’s three main faculties: medicine, philosophy and law (jurisprudence). The board of trustees wanted something inspirational, something that communicated in every possible way that the combined forces of knowledge, reason, and intellect would, in the fullness of time, lead humankind out of the wilderness and into the light. Something modern as well — that went without saying — but not too modern. What they got was a shock — to say the least.
Klimt’s first effort, ‘Philosophy’, was an overwhelming avalanche of human joy and tragedy — birth, death, agony and ecstasy cascaded past the viewer, springing from nowhere and, it seemed, going straight back there. As Schorske says, ‘The ideal of mastery of nature through scientific work was simply violated by Klimt’s image of a problematic, mysterious struggle in nature.’1 The university politely asked for its money back.
A painting that represented the thing-in-itself as imagined by an Enlightenment philosopher would be harmonious and elegant. But Klimt had decided to give them Schopenhauer — so it’s little wonder the thing turned out looking nasty. For Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself, the world as will, is senseless, destructive and evil. The university’s trustees worried that, faced with such a heavy dose of romantic despair in the great hall, students would simply throw their books in the air, turn around and go back home — there to spend the rest of their days in contemplation of the suffering of the world. This is actually not too far from Klimt’s intention, and very close to Schopenhauer’s idea of redemption — the one piece of good news in his otherwise gloomy philosophy.
Schopenhauer insists that as long as we’re pursuing our interests — food, shelter, sex, material possessions or power over others — we’re being driven by will, which can never be satisfied. For this reason, he dismisses the Rousseauian idea of a ‘natural’ state to which modern people can aspire. For Schopenhauer, our natural state is the problem — we’ve complicated matters by becoming as self-aware as we have, but the source of our unhappiness is the sheer pointlessness of life itself. We must pursue our interests, knowing that they must leave us unsatisfied.
But if we can somehow become disinterested, we are no longer willing — and the result is a feeling of bliss. This, Schopenhauer believed, is what art does for us.
When an aesthetic perception occurs the will completely vanishes from consciousness…this is the origin of the feeling of pleasure which accompanies the perception of the beautiful…2
As we contemplate art, we are able to see life — with all its striving and willing — in a detached, aesthetic way. We are freed, briefly, from the desiring that takes up so much of our time, and leaves us so unsatisfied, as we look at life from the artist’s point of view. In this way, the suffering of the world becomes bearable, and art, according to Schopenhauer, becomes our most important consolation for the pain of life. It’s little wonder that, of all philosophers, he’s the artist’s favourite.
Schopenhauer’s formula for redemption through aesthetics explains, among other things, how it is that a song about how life sucks can make us feel good. ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, ‘Butterfly’, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ — these songs are full of bad news about the human condition, and all have the power to make us feel fantastic. Even as we recognise the sincerity of the artist’s view of life, and the honesty with which he’s portrayed it, the feeling we get as we listen to his song about how life is hell is not the same as the feeling of living in hell — quite the opposite.
It’s as though the singer, by giving us such an unflinching portrayal of the world as will, has shifted our position in relation to it. If life could be compared to a giant traffic jam, the song has the effect of lifting us high above the traffic in a helicopter. We can still see the chaos on the roads, but we’re no longer directly involved in the struggle — where previously we were interested (because we have to get to work on time), now we are disinterested — and from this new aesthetically detached point of view, the traffic jam becomes beautiful, a glittering mosaic winding its way around the city. We no longer experience the pain of the world as sufferers but as spectators.
The university trustees needn’t have been so worried about Klimt’s Philosophy mural after all. Far from spreading despair, a painting like that — in which the suffering of the world is presented as an aesthetic spectacle — would, if Schopenhauer was correct, become a means of redemption. This idea proved to be enormously popular and durable in the late nineteenth century. It formed the backbone of Wagner’s conception of music and opera as a substitute for religion in a fragmented modern world. And it gave a young philologist from the University of Basel — a man much admired by Klimt — the necessary foundation on which to build a career that would take romantic philosophy in undreamt-of new directions.
Nietzsche: ‘I discovered all these abysses in myself…’
Nietzsche
IN 1865 TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Friedrich Nietzsche walked into a second-hand book shop in Leipzig and purchased a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. This was good news for Schopenhauer (who unfortunately was dead by this point) because it’s safe to say that even if only two people had ever read his books, as long as those two people were Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, his place in history would be assured.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of disgust spoke to Nietzsche with a voice he was ready to hear, a voice that seemed to confirm what he already suspected — that the optimism of his age was a thin veneer over a meaningless abyss. He stayed up all night sitting on the family sofa, reading The World as Will and Representation over and over again. ‘Here where every line cried renunciation, denial, resignation,’ he later wrote, ‘here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in frightful grandeur.’1 Nietzsche was, by this point, extraordinarily well acquainted with his own soul, having written the autobiography of his emotional life at least six times (he would make it nine by the time he was twenty-three).2 He had already seen enough to convince him that the world was not an elegant system into which the individual could be inserted like a sprig in a barrel organ, but a dark, mysterious, violent struggle in which he must either fight or perish. Now, in the book he held in his hands, he had finally found a writer who was willing to admit this, and who seemed to offer a solution.
Nietzsche came to realise through Schopenhauer that he had sound reasons for being dissatisfied with life —
only a stupid man could find life satisfying, and Nietzsche knew he was not stupid. But, Schopenhauer insisted, the man of intelligence could redeem himself through music, philosophy and renunciation. Here was a man who could explain to the young Nietzsche why music had such a tremendous effect on him. Life is unbearable but music, incredibly, allows us to see it as beautiful. Thus, music becomes a consolation for suffering. The man of intelligence must take an aesthetic attitude to life. Finally, Nietzsche thought to himself, someone who understands me! For a period of two weeks, Nietzsche took this business of renunciation more seriously than Schopenhauer himself ever had. He horrified his mother by adopting a monkish lifestyle — keeping a very strict diet and depriving himself of sleep, human company and material comfort. He became obsessed with a certain atmosphere he’d detected in Schopenhauer, ‘the ethical air’, as he described it, ‘cross, death and grave’.3
Nietzsche loved Schopenhauer for the same reason that he loved Wagner — as a teenager, he’d spent hours at the family piano pounding out the chords of Tristan und Isolde.4 Both confirmed his instinctive belief that the optimism of the nineteenth century was a sham, and that tragedy and violent struggle constituted the true essence of life. And since Wagner himself was so heavily influenced by Schopenhauer it seemed only natural to Nietzsche to develop a system of aesthetics that incorporated the two. In any case, as Colin Wilson points out in his classic study of the artistic personality, The Outsider, Nietzsche had by this point consigned every other major intellectual figure of his century to the scrap heap — there was no-one else left. ‘Nietzsche stood alone,’ writes Wilson, ‘except for the two men for whom he still felt respect: Schopenhauer and Wagner. Three men against the world…but what men!’5
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