“Michael Myers Resplendent” (Mountain Goats Week part VI)

“When I wrote this I didn't know that they were remaking Halloween. I have a real love for slasher films, probably because when they were a new phenomenon I was so terrified just by the newspaper ads that I avoided the hell out of them. As a child I was pretty easily frightened. The world seemed like a place where all sorts of random devilment could just pop out from the woodwork at any second. This song is like Sax Rohmer #1 if the narrator had given up on ever actually getting home…”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

Sax Rohmer #1, of course, contains this triumphant refrain: “And I am coming home to you / with my own blood in my mouth! / And I am coming home to you / if it's the last thing that I do!” (The music video is pretty sweet, too.) If things have gotten so rough that you're spitting blood, it might be a little much to hope that you're going to make it home, but you do need that kind of hope if you're going to get anywhere at all.

And so we come to “Michael Myers Resplendent,” the last featured song of Mountain Goats Week '08. There is no doubt in my mind that John Darnielle does not endorse the sort of violence that Michael Myers visits upon the poor teenagers of Haddonfield. Rather, he's all about that one flash of humanity we get towards the end of the movie, and the joy with which the audience inevitably greets the killer's demise:

But when the house goes up in flames,
no one emerges triumphantly from it.
When the scum begins to circle the drain...
Everybody loves a winner.

The narrator—not a “winner”—knows that the world doesn't love him, and that there will be no triumph for anyone like him. You see the movies, you know that Michael is a messed up guy. Dr. Loomis tells us that he's pretty much pure evil. (I can't help thinking of the locked treatment facility for adolescent boys from All Hail West Texas.) This character is too far gone, and he knows it. Yet again, we have a case of extreme role acceptance, a readiness for the close-up shot preceding doom, a sort of internal nobility that looks, from the outside, like insanity. This is resplendence, this is desperation, this is heretic pride.

And that's really it for the series on Mountain Goats songs. In a few months, I will probably realize that I have missed huge elements of these songs, and I'll want to write about them all over again. But I will try to hold back until the next album comes out, at which time you can be ready for another round of fumbling, fawning, sub-essays on the wild world that has been given to us by that singular lyricist, John Darnielle.

(Heavens, I hope he never reads this…)