Dead souls

I’ve rediscovered Joy Division. Probably like many folks, it was through their song Love Will Tear Us Apart. But while listening to their greatest hits album, I heard the oh-so familiar Dead Souls . . . and remembered it from The Crow. Nine Inch Nails did a cover of it for the movie.

Here’s Joy Division’s original:

And here’s Reznor’s cover:

Whole lot of sadness and pain in those lyrics. Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself not long after recording this song. He was troubled with major depression and poorly controlled epilepsy, and his wife Deborah (whom he had married as a teenager) had recently asked him for a divorce. He hung himself in their kitchen and was discovered by Deborah the next day.

As for Reznor’s cover, The Crow is, I think, one of the best comic book-to-movie adaptations out there. Intense, creepy, and poignant — too poignant, really, since it was Brandon Lee’s last movie. Lee died for stupid reasons:

Because the movie’s second unit was running behind schedule, they decided to make dummy cartridges (cartridges that outwardly appear to be functional but contain no propellant or primers) from real cartridges by pulling out the bullets, dumping out the propellant and reinserting the bullets. However, the team neglected to remove the primers, which, if fired, could still produce just enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel (a squib load). At some point prior to the fatal scene, the live primer in one of the improperly constructed dummy rounds was discharged by an unknown person while in the pistol, leaving the bullet stuck in the barrel.

This malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was later reloaded with blank cartridges and used in the scene in which Lee was shot. When the first blank cartridge was fired, the stuck bullet was propelled out of the barrel and struck Lee in the abdomen, lodging in his spine.

. . . putting a halt to what might have been a brilliant career. (Watch the movie. He has talent and screen presence to burn.)

The Wikipedia article on Lee goes on a bit about a quote Lee used, just a few days prior to his death, from Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. That quote is now inscribed on Lee’s tombstone:

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…

Getting back to Dead Souls, the name derives from the novel of the same name by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol’s protagonist hatches a scheme requiring him to “purchase” dead serfs from the local citizenry. The citizens are freed of a tax burden, and the protagonist acquires a stable of “dead souls” whom he intends to exploit in a get-rich-quick scheme.

The lyrics to Joy Division’s Dead Souls are by no means clear, but they do hint at a historical sensibility. I think the song is about not just the dead, but the victims of history, those who were abused by power. And the fact that souls keep on calling me suggests the restlessness we attribute to the ghosts of the unsettled dead.

D.

Walnut, November 1, 2010. Category: Music.

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