COMMENTARIES V: Turn the Page

It is a widely currencied observation that those males who are Macho in their Masculine spirits and looks can never trap a girl but can only bewail the plight of women in particular or general. This is highly significant to Metallica since their heavy metal numbers remind me of something hyper-masculine tinged with the traits of a complete if not perfect Macho. One of their most popularly watched No. “Turn the Page” strengthens the foundational validity of the earlier notion. Here they present the pathetic conditions of a woman as revealed in her lives as a mother, strip dancer and sex worker. The Macho face of Lars Ulrich and the masculine tone of   James Hetfield turn out to be elegiac vignettes looking onto a canvas where the chiaroscuro of cruelty, violence, pathos, affection and helplessness are light/ly unfurled through a series of shades sliced off from the peripheral territories of the so-called “life”. Sometimes she affectionately embraces and smothers her daughter with kisses and in other/s times she lasciviously and “vulgarly’ enacts out the roles of a nude dancer-cum- prostitute. This naturally leads to a Male Chauvinistic question; Ulrich and Hertfiled do all their drumming and singing simply for the sake of forging affinity with a poor woman whose “life” is wreaked into vulturous slices for the Capitalist Market Economy? Yaa… again that shit, life, comes out of our mouth through our brains… Yaa… Life is a shit without which we Malayalees cannot live on. The Steel rodded wenches of Lexincton Macho can never be a piece of life. And the bewailing tone of the Metallica also disagreeing to be a slice of life. It’s a construct. Yes… Life is a construction. Even a multi-voluminous auto-biography can never represent or portray the life in its entirety or totality. No one has seen how Oscar Wilde led his wild life adventures in the gay forests of the nineteenth century Dizzy Lands of Ireland. Even Wilde might not have seen it. What we see as life of any-thing is a constructed narration. So, for me, Metallica’s “Turn the Page” offers A Thousand and One Frames for deconstructing the desire for Life… Of course it may be a newly repertorised symptom of desire and may not be a desire at all. However, at least for me, it simply means ‘stop living on life and simply go on living for the sake of living itself’. Please leave our Life to the im/Polite- bureaucrats of Progress and Reform.     

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