Suffer well

I love every hammy minute of this video. I first heard the song when the band released Playing the Angel in 2005, a month or so before our equally hammy Qualifying Exam, for which I wasted a lot of energy very principally not preparing, more energy, probably, than if I had just humbled myself and read that terrible Mda book about gang rape and painting. But back to the song. The Frogger prelude, the crude swing in the rhythm, high theater in the bridge and the underworld trapdoor that follows the first chorus: it's a very careful song, clever and well crafted. Dave Gahan wrote the lyrics for it, too, which makes their relative lack of suck even more impressive.

But lately, and by 'lately' I mean every day for three months, I've played this song in my head, from beginning to end, until the refrain metamorphosed into a mantra. That sort of pop therapy can, and in my case definitely would, be moody and deplorable, real unmenschlich. It's the video, and in particular Dave Gahan's unconditional cartoonism, that shields me from castration by a late Auden sneer. As he whoops it up with a phallic triumph that rivals even the moon landing, Gahan goofs his way right out of parody and into something desolate and sober. His performance gets away with its jokey fit because the frame, before our eyes, deteriorates into real world ugliness, degrading his frivolity.

The video opens with an inventory of stock decadent tropes and gestures--stolen jewelry, New Jersey hair, neon--and we know soundly where we stand: mock-allegory, a sort of middle-schooler's redux of Piers Plowman. But as Gahan, Chaplinesque, careens from self-possession into ever less believable rakishness--he would be Gluttony, if you're curious, in that teenager's Langland--his decline--not its look but its purpose--turns authentically vile. As his character plunges deeper into caricature, the dirty, ordinary, vapid lostness of the sin paradoxically surfaces. As Gahan the person disappears into spoof, his absence lends ache to the lyrics. And that, I guess, is what pantomime is for. Clownish delivery disinfects the content, burning it like wilderness. No one wants to live in that. So the very things that signify humor--the exaggeration, New Jersey, angels--heighten our discomfort and refuse our laughter. And as they do, they become dimensional, tactile, sensible. From the cabaret debris we taste and smell and touch the noxious grime. Out of illusion comes sordidness. Reality arrives, and although we can't quite say when, we're not happy when it does. What's more, through all the plastic acting we never saw it coming. But by the end of the song, when Dave Gahan's dissipated reject from Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh speaks them for a last reprieve, those lines mean a hell of a lot more than they did at the start. Sometimes it really is hard to tell.

Auden called history a "squalid mess" and declared irreverence "a greater oaf than Superstition." "Oaf" may not be exactly the right word, and we're listening to music much less historical than transient (even if lovely). But I think the common terms apply. What "Suffer Well" offers is Weimar culture in a Crackerjack box. And if you know your caramel candies, you know what comes after the glut. Squalid mess will do nicely to describe that specific gravity of inner grossness and five-year-old's remorse. Sin is, after all, a defect of imagination. We're none of us very smart people.