The Monster Moment
An Exploration of the Mind in Addiction, feat. Mumford & Sons
Marcus Mumford has arguably one of the most beautiful voices of our time. And he’s just a beautiful man too. I kind of fell in love with him (in the way anyone does with their favorite singers) when I first watched the music video for ‘Kansas City’, performed by The New Basement Tapes. Mumford is one of five members of The New Basement Tapes, a British-American musical group on the same level as the Marvel superhero squad who are best known for their 2014 album Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, a production created from Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics that were discovered long after their authorship back in the 1960s. ‘Kansas City’ is my favorite track on the album, and it’s become one of my most-watched items on YouTube, not only because Johnny Depp makes a cameo filling in for Elvis Costello, but because of the raw emotion that Mumford brings to his singing. Watch it and tell me you don’t feel anything. You’re a liar or a monster if that’s the case.
On that note, we’re going to look at the song ‘Monster’. I got to thinking about this one when I heard someone’s share in a recent meeting. She was talking about the physical toll her addiction had taken on her and even cited a slash across the face as one of the consequences of a particularly bad episode of drinking. I haven’t had the face slash, but I’ve known other injuries and have experienced seeing my face in the mirror and not recognizing it as the one I was before things got so bad. There was even a year or so I tried to avoid being in pictures because I was so uncomfortable in my own body. It felt that something else was standing in for the person I truly was or could be, and I didn’t want visual evidence of the impostership. We really do become monsters in our addiction, unrecognizable to or loveable by even ourselves. It doesn’t mean we’re all terribly cruel and horrifying. It means we’ve become beings whose appearance, demeanor and values no longer align with the ones we know to be our best selves.
The monster experience doesn’t require physical deformation or ugliness. The horror of what we see as monstrous is an internal recognition of that trait in us, that parasite that has become so familiar and natural to the point that we can no longer separate who we were before from the infected person we’ve become. That parasite is our addiction feeding on our mind. And it’s not always an addiction to a substance that eats away at our sanity - it can be an addiction to pride, to a relationship, to anger, to consumerism. To anything that we’ve felt the need to hold onto to maintain control over our stories. When we begin to sacrifice the qualities that make us human for these delusions of control and security, we let our infected minds usurp our true selves and become monsters. ‘Monster’, by Mumford & Sons, explores this concept in a haunting, meditative way that touches on both the horror and seductive nature of the monster we create in our addiction.
‘Monster’ is the sixth track on the band’s third studio album Wilder Mind, and I’ve always experienced it as one of the darker, most tragic ones in the collection. Armed with a new sound and a collective song-writing effort, the band presented this album as a multi-faceted expression of the various voices and emotions that bleed out of a broken relationship. It sounds like a romantic relationship, but for ‘Monster’ we’re going to examine it as a reflection on this relationship between self and the mind that has been infected with this monstrous parasite of addiction.
The lyrics in ‘Monster’ escort me into a visual drama. I sometimes play out my own music videos as I listen to music - like listening to a story and seeing it in real life as it unfolds. When the song plays, I just see one person. And there’s a voiceover like the ones you see in movies when the dialogue just walks over the drifting mind of the person in focus, their voice floating without lips. You see it in Psycho at the very end when Norman Bates has completely tripped over the edge of sanity, and his voice is the disembodied mother-character that has possessed him. The effect is both jarring and more real than if the voice came from a mouth. It emphasizes the distinction between the mind and the self in a physical way that we don’t often experience; it’s as if the mind and self are contemplating each other in their separateness while excluding the body from the conversation. This is how I feel ‘Monster’ would be enacted. We see the contemplation but hear this dialogue between mind and self playing out, and I think the first person pronoun “I” is the true self, the one bargaining with the seductive promises of the mind that has given so much to addiction.
Mumford opens with lines that suggest gambling and danger: “So we were up, throwing dice in the dark. I saw you late last night come to harm.” This line implies the risk involved in addiction. Gambling and risk taking are not inherently harmful practices; they’re done with the hopes of an achievement or win. But the kind of risk we take in addiction is like playing at one of those carnival games that make it impossible for you to really win. We think we’re the ones in control because the dice are in our hands, but the dark hinders our ability to realize that we can never roll a win with this particular set. We roll again and again until we come to harm and no longer have a choice in entering into the game. The next line - “I saw you dance in the devil’s arms” - gives us an idea of the harm to which the mind has come. The language of dance implies some orchestrated cadence and relationship between the two involved in the choreography. This reminds me of a Black Swan sort of performance; a dance is an art form, not the real thing. It represents reality through a series of movements, of expressions. This dance with the devil is a delusion of connection, step in time to a flickering flame that may seem beautiful but are actually disconnected from the truth of the situation: a choral ritual moving closer and closer to the devouring flames inside us.
The speaker self recognizes this danger in the lines “Night kept coming/ Really nothing I could do/ Eyes with a fire, unquenched by peace.” He admits powerlessness over the situation here. Active addiction moves along as unstoppably as the night progresses, and even if the self can see this terrible progression, he looks at the damage from a position of helplessness. His eyes - the windows to the soul - reveal ravaging flames. This imagery of flames and darkness continues to develop in the song, introducing the idea of our addiction as a beacon of sorts in the otherwise black night. Fire provides both heat and light, but it flickers with inconsistency and burns with potentially fatal power. We think that we need fire because we are cold and directionless, so we take the fire without the peace we need, even with the knowledge that flames can flicker and burn out, leaving us in an even darker night than before. The speaker knows this reality as well as the risk of being burned, because he utters, “Curse the beauty, curse the queen.” The beauty is the appeal of addiction, and the queen signifies the power it holds over us. The queen also alludes to the gambling imagery of the first line, with the queen being one of the most powerful cards in the deck. The thing with the queen though, in most games (I’m not a cards nerd, but I know the basic hierarchy) is that the queen isn’t really the winning card. The queen is attractive because she holds a lot of power, so often we will settle for it when we should be holding out for the king or the ace. We hold onto the queen because we know she can win something, and we don’t have faith that we’ll find a stronger card if we have it in ourselves to give her up. In addiction, we have found a solution to our trauma, to our pain, to our discontentedness or restlessness, and even if we know deep down there must be something better out there, we’re hesitant to disentangle ourselves from this powerful solution because we fear the risk of never finding something better. Or we just don’t know how to find it. We’d rather dance with something potentially murderous because it offers temporary light in our darkness than walk in darkness until we find something that no other card can defeat.
When we can acknowledge the futility and harm of choosing the queen, we’ve come to “a place of no return.” This place doesn’t mean we make any huge changes or lose the opportunity to save ourselves; it means that we know the truth of our circumstances and can no longer fool ourselves into believing that we have a chance of winning with the queen. When Mumford sings “Yours is the face that makes my body burn”, he returns to the fire motif and brings in the reality that the body is also tortured by this parasite that has taken over the mind. “And here is the name that our sons will learn” reflects on the generational trauma that addiction contributes to and exacerbates as it is allowed to live on in families. Just as the self does now, he knows that his descendants will come to curse the attraction and power of the addiction he sees in his mind. As he curses it, he utters “leave me.” It’s notably not a statement in which the speaker attaches any power over the situation to himself. He needs the parasite to leave him, because he cannot find the strength in himself to leave such a captivating monster, even if he can recognize the harm in staying. Even when he makes this request, he sounds passive, submissive and resigned to the fact of his demise.
He changes the tone of this dialogue with the lines “So fuck your dreams, and don’t you pick at our seams.” The intensity with which Mumford delivers this line is startling and emphasizes the anger and desperation of the speaker. I really didn’t know what to do with this line for a little while, but the word ‘seams’ finally sparked this interpretation of it. There’s a line in Hamlet in which this word (or a version of it) has special importance. When Hamlet’s mother basically says that his black clothing makes him seem depressed (she’s a little out of line here; his father has just died), Hamlet responds, “Seems, madame! Nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’ (I.ii). Shakespeare, king of puns, uses ‘seems’ here to emphasize the relationship between physical appearance - the seams refer to the clothing of the character - and reality. Hamlet assures his mother that his clothing does not present anything other than what he truly is. He does not merely seem devastated; he is devastated. He cannot even fathom pretending to appear otherwise. So when Mumford uses the word here, he alludes to that tricky, often deceitful side of addiction. The substance on which we depend in addiction can seem appealing, even necessary for our dream of connection and freedom from pain; but it is merely wearing the seams of that promise. There is no genuine substance to it. The true self speaking to the mind that is tethered by addiction tells it not only to let go of those dreams, but to stop pretending and playing with the seductive appearance it has adopted in its presentation to the true self. The mind in addiction tries to convince the self that if we appear happy and convivial, then we are OK, but we know deep down that this relationship with our substance, this message from our sick mind, is manipulative and deceitful. The self is confronting that reality here, expressing almost desperate anger at the tragedy into which the mind has brought them.
Mumford rides this intense emotion into the line that holds the song title: “I’ll turn into a monster for you, if you pay me enough.” As I listen with this perspective, I’ve come to see this statement not as an offer but as a devastating realization on the part of the self. He realizes that with enough incentive, he will continue in his progression into monstrosity. In finally uttering the term “monster” at this point in the song, the self admits the recognition that he is slowly losing his humanity in choosing to gamble with the queen. He is already accepting payments even as he experiences heavy losses, and he knows it will only continue the more he progresses.
I think the monster moment is the experience from which there is no return - it’s the moment when we realize we will either turn into a monster - the one we are already beginning to see in place of ourselves in the mirror - or we say ‘leave me’ and mean it. It’s a heartbreaking, terrifying experience because we have to acknowledge that we’re either choosing the familiarity of a relationship that will give us everything we ask at the price of monstrosity or we choose the lonely path away from the fire, the one that seems at first as if it will be lonely and dark forever.
The monster moment is different for everyone, and it doesn’t always spark a huge change. Often it’s a quietly devastating glimpse of the reality that the self we see looking back at us is no longer the self we thought we knew to be who we are at our core. I used to look at myself in the mirror and hate the face staring back at me. I’d repeat in my mind, “I’m an alcoholic” or “I need help”, but I couldn’t say the words out loud. I knew what I was becoming, and I knew if I continued to take the scraps of relief alcohol offered me, I would lose all recognition of myself. But I couldn’t do more than silently pray it would just leave me alone. Once you see that part of yourself, you’ve reached “the place of no return” that Mumford sings in the next line. We can’t return to a normal, harmless relationship with alcohol once we see the bargain we’re in the process of making every time we return to drinking. Still in the clutches of the monster who needs him to gamble for a chance at life, the self cannot save himself and knows it. He can only curse the beauty, curse the queen and repeat the devastating desire for some other force to save him from this dance as he closes the song with the repeated request “leave me.”
Here is the darkness in ‘Monster’ - the recognition and horror of the alien spirit enmeshed in our very being that we just can’t detract from ourselves. We can see the progression of our entrance into and entrapment in addiction, but we can’t see a way out because the monster has become part of the self we see in the mirror staring back at us. We don’t know how to not be a monster, and we cannot see that we are still a whole, true self in the darkness and flame-cast shadows that have become our world. Urging the addiction to leave us is not the winning play, but it is the beginning of surrender. It is the desire we need to stop that will set us free to walk in the dark until we find a more lasting light.
