Marilyn Manson’s music videos have always been characterised by their aesthetic impact and iconographic richness. And ‘As Sick As The Secrets Within’ is no different. Manson, together with his collaborator Bill Yukich, recovers some of the visual motifs from famous clips from his career such as ‘Sweet Dreams’ or ‘Tourniquet’ and reinterprets them in a sinister key. Less sordid but darker.
In addition to the classic blasphemous and Satanic imagery (figures of virgins, fallen angels, Manson drinking from the sacred chalice, writing with a skull at his side like Saint Jerome), there are also images of cephalopods. A visual motif that is reminiscent of both the eroticism and tentacled terror so common in the Japanese eroguro genre, and the Lovecraftian creatures represented as large cephalopods in comics and film.
Another prominent element is the kind of placenta or second skin in which the singer appears trapped. Throughout the video we see his attempts to get out of it, to break out of that “cage”, as the lyrics say, in which he is locked. Can this sequence be interpreted in a personal sense, as a symbolic representation of the attempts to be “reborn” by a singer who has fallen into the hell of musical irrelevance and public rejection?
