Yes, I remember that Promethea, and recall being particularly tickled by the choice of 'Moon River' as a title. I've nooo problem with comics being cited here, as I think it's all relevant to the mood and associations generated by the song.
Morrissey's cover of Moonriver (titled as one word?) is so heavy. Yes, heavy like water.
'Heavy' is indeed the word. Musically, it's repetitive and relentless, and there's the distinct feeling that the singer is being gradually smothered by the song - or drowned. Smothering and drowning are repeated motifs in Morrissey's work, often accompanied by a degree of ambivalence: as well as expressing claustrophobic misery there's usually also the suggestion that allowing oneself to slip away would be a welcome relief.
There's the seductiveness of death by drowning, then, but the positioning of Moon River within Morrissey's oeuvre is also suggestive - to me, at least - of finally giving in to, allowing oneself to be swept away, pulled under, by love. As GGM points out, Morrissey's always appeared frightened by and avoidant of the physicality of sex. Vauxhall and I marked the period when he seemingly 'let go' and succumbed to his own sweet and tender hooligan, Jake. Vauxhall and I is his swooning 'fallen in love' album, and the contemporaneous Moon River may reflect Morrissey's ambivalence about allowing himself to drown.
I finally managed to find Mark Simpson's Saint Morrissey (and find a good bit of his analysis reflects the discussion we're having here). It contains a quote from a 1995 (post-Vauxhall and I) interview with Les Inrockuptibles:
LI: When were you in love for the last time?
M: It's quite recent, but it's not a very realistic story, rather a sort of dream. Someone concrete, real, but an impossible romance.
Which makes me wonder at what point in that "impossible romance" (with, one assumes, Skinhead Jake) Morrissey recorded the sort-of-dreamlike Moon River.
That woman. She's not dead, yet. Is she dying? She's crying like Freddy or Jason just cut off her leg, but ends with an accusatory question, like there's another person in the fog with her. It's not Morrissey. It's not the character of "Moonriver" if were to believe ze is a character, and not a setting.
Extending my 'drowning as ambivalent metaphor for falling in love' theory, and acknowledging Morrissey's gender-ambiguity, one might speculate that the woman dying is '80s Morrissey, Sensitive Morrissey, Feminist Vegetarian Sex-Avoidant Morrissey. He certainly effected a major switch around this time, from seeming faintly contemptuous of the Ordinary Boys to admitting open envy and doing his best to become one of them - going from avoidance to enthusiastic identification with the (fetishised) aggressor. Perhaps, in letting the Moon River sweep him away (from bookish celibacy to bruised/bruising corporeal meatspace), he's deliberately killing - or at least crippling - his 'feminine side'? Slaughtering the pale, sensitive, gladiolus-wielding creature of old to be reborn as a Rusholme Ruffian?
"What you gonna do?" In this psychodynamic (or psychodramatic) reading, Morrissey's anima might very well pose the question. He's always appeared afraid that allowing himself to love - physically love - might prove his unravelling. What is he gonna do? Sink or swim? |
