You can’t see me through the screen, but if you could you would see a shaggy blue haircut with schwoopy blue fringe covering my left eye, an eyebrow and a septum piercing, an all black outfit, and sloppily applied black eyeshadow that circles my eyes. It should be pretty clear to you that I’m kind of an emo fella. Naturally, I am a fan of the band My Chemical Romance and I have been since I was in middle school like any other good emo kid raised in the 2000s-2010s.
That being said, I somehow had avoided listening to their 2002 debut album (that precedes me), I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, until 2024!!! I don’t know why, but I had only ever really listened to the tracks from the albums that were released after I was born with the exception of maybe 2 or 3 tracks. But, one day I was in school—the same school I am sat in writing this right now—doing some silent work in my math class and I needed to listen to some music while I worked, so I decided to finally bite the bullet (pun mostly unintended) and press play on Bullets for the first time.
I really liked the tracks at first, but the album has taken a long time to fully grow on me. Now, I’m at the point where I would say it might be my favorite album from the band. Recently, I have become especially partial to the 8th track, “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville.” The song is slow, but it builds to the point where the vocalist, Gerard Way, is screaming out the final (and only) chorus to the track in such a guttural and viscerally emotional way and it surges me with an indescribable feeling.
As much as I would like to gush about the sonic aspects of this album and the way it makes me feel on a personal level, I have another mission today, which is to analyze this track through a theoretical literary lens. As I was trying to decide what to do for this last blog post—movie? TV show? song? feminism? structuralism?—I was scrolling through my rolodex of media that I consume on my phone and it had suddenly struck me: My Chemical Romance! And what better lens is there to analyze an apocalyptic love song through than Queer Theory? So alas, I present to you, for my final blog post: How “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” uses the zombie apocalypse as a metaphor for queerness.
But first, as always, what is queer theory? Queer theory is multifaceted and contains a lot of different elements in its make-up. The most important aspects to me are, of course, cut and dry homosexuality, but on a broader level, deviation from the structural norm. Deviation, while not inherently a negative thing, is generally seen as bad due to the disruption it causes within the structural norm, which causes immense discomfort in people—people do not like anything that is unexpected. In Literary Theory: The Complete Guide, Mary Klages summarizes Michael Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and writes:
Dominant cultural modes of enforcement worked to imprison, correct, or “cure” the deviant side of the binary opposition in hopes of eliminating it. Foucault points out, along with other poststructuralists, that the structure of the binary opposition requires that both terms be present: the concept of “normal” requires the concept of “deviant” for each to exist. The discourses and practices that tried to “correct” or eliminate the deviance of homosexuality actually construct and reify that deviance.
This quote essentially sums up what I interpret the crux of Queer Theory to be.
Like I said previously, “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” is a song about lovers finding shelter in a mall during the zombie apocalypse. The track is actually based on the film Dawn of the Dead, but I have not seen that film, so I will not be referencing its connection to the plot any further than this, as I am unequipped to do so. The lyrics’ speaker seems very wracked with anxiety about their impending doom and not letting the zombies attack and transform their lover into one of them.
If we look at this track through a queer lens, we can read it as the speaker is hiding with their same-sex lover in plain sight and is overcome with anxiety about the way they will be perceived by the brain-dead homophobes (zombies). The speaker feels they must cling onto their lover as the “zombies” come near them, otherwise their lover will succumb and become one of them, but in doing so it will kill them and no one other than the speaker will care.
Let’s break it down by the lyrics.
The track opens up by establishing the relationship of the two lovers in the lines, “Then holding hands, and life was perfect / Just like up on the screens.”
Then, we move into the first hint of the apocalypse, “Counting your face among the living.” Here, the speaker is signaling to us that their lover is one of the good ones still and hasn’t been taken over.
Where the track starts to get interesting is in the second verse, with the lines, “Running away and hiding with you / I never thought they’d get me here.” This signifies that their romance is one that is not able to be seen by the public. The speaker takes their partner somewhere where they didn’t think anyone else would be able to see them. Yes, they are at the mall, which is a public space, but malls are generally always very crowded, so the couple were in more of a “hiding in plain sight” type of situation; in a crowd of many people, no one can be differentiated, thus no one will truly be seen.
This trope of running away and hiding with a lover is one that is typically associated with queer romance, as queer romance has for a long time been forbidden and illegal. Queer couples were not allowed to be seen in public settings, or even private settings and had to, instead, pretend to be just friends or act like they didn’t know each other at all.
The next line I want to look at are not the next ones in the song chronologically, but I feel it holds significant weight to the queer interpretation of this track. In the chorus/outro of the song, the speaker says, “And there’s no room in this Hell, there’s no room in the next.” Obviously, since the misinterpretation of religious texts taints the majority of the world, most people are of the belief that being gay is a sin that will damn the sinner to Hell. Specifically mentioning Hell in this track, I think, is both a reference to the whole “gays will go to Hell” idea, but also can speak to the fact that living in this world as it currently is (being gay in secret) is just as hellish as living without their partner, so regardless of whether or not their love gets taken away from them, they will never be allowed to be happy. There’s no room for gay people in the homophobic society in which they reside and there is no room for gay people to live without their soulmated partner.
Unfortunately, the speaker’s lover did get changed by the homophobic society. In this context, I interpret getting bitten by a zombie as the same thing as being whisked away to conversion therapy. Society is not receptive to anything other than what it knows, it is mindless and zombie-like. They try to force conformity and make everyone like them, much like how a zombie has the imperative to bite humans and change them. It’s forced assimilation. This change is told to us in the lines, “Not knowing you changed from just one bite / I fought them all off just to hold you close and tight.” The speaker did everything they could to protect their lover, but it was already too late and they got “bitten” and dragged away. Maybe the speaker thought their lover would be more resilient than they were, which is why they didn’t think that just one bite, or hearing homophobic remarks from just one person would be enough to make them renounce their own queerness.
The most heartbreaking and damning lines come in the final chorus/outro/lyrics of the song.
But does anyone notice? But does anyone care?
And if I had the guts to put this to your head
But would anything matter if you’re already dead?
[...]
And in saying you loved me, made things harder at best
And these words changing nothing as your body remains
[...]
But does anyone notice there’s a corpse in this bed?
The speaker is begging for people to notice the harm they are causing to the lover. If we stick with the whole conversion therapy theme, which we will because that is what makes the most sense to me under this framework, we can read this as saying, “don’t they notice or care that by putting this person into conversion therapy, that they are literally killing them!” The speaker feels they must take it upon themselves to put a gun to their lover’s head, or in this case, break up with them formally as they are getting taken away, even though it doesn’t really matter because this person was already killed, they already renounced their identity. If they are in such a state of “accepting” conversion therapy and renouncing queerness, it wouldn’t matter to them whether or not they get formally broken up with because that side of them has already died, as has that relationship with it. Next, it seems that the lover had once formally declared their love for the speaker, signifying the depth of their relationship, making this whole forced separation all the more heartbreaking. It doesn’t matter to the lover anymore that they once believed they loved the speaker and that they were in a relationship, they’ve changed now. The last line echoes that sentiment of no one noticing or caring about killing the lover. Now, they’re not even a living undead, merely just a corpse—their old self, and maybe every aspect of themself, is gone forever. We could also interpret this to be some sort of homophobia-induced suicide as well.
Circling back to the more theoretical aspect of things, queerness is seen as a form of deviance, as we’ve already covered. Something else that could be considered deviance would be becoming a zombie, or, in the case of a zombie apocalypse, not becoming a zombie and staying human. Another form of deviance (which was covered in my Sociology course this semester) is suicide, which is very common amongst queer folks in harsh living conditions. The whole concept of deviation from the norm is present throughout this track and I think that really sums up the crux of queer theory. The Genius annotations of this song claim it is about a man’s woman lover (and maybe it is, I don’t know), but to me it will always be about an MLM or WLW relationship. I think looking at it this way raises the stakes of the song and enhances the emotional core of the track.
All in all, I find that looking through this track through a queer lens is not only a fun way to re-examine the text of the song on a strictly literary level, but I also feel like it deepens and enhances my personal connection to and understanding of the track. In general, actually, I feel that the challenge of analyzing texts through theoretical lenses is a really solid way to broaden your perspective and understanding of a given text and perhaps even recontextualize its meaning and I think that is something that everyone with the means to should explore.
As for me, I think I will go listen to this song about 500,000 more times and scream really loudly during the end. BUT DOES AAAAAANYONE NOTICE???? BUT DOES AAAAAAAANYONE CAAAARE????
Comments
Post a Comment