Stranger Than Fiction: Gothic Intertextuality in Shakespears Sister’s Music Videos

• Authors: Tomasz Fisiak
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The following article is going to focus on a selection of music videos by Shakespears Sister, a British indie pop band consisting of Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit, which rose to prominence in the late 1980s. This article scrutinizes five of the band’s music videos: “Goodbye Cruel World” (1991), “I Don’t Care” (1992), “Stay” (1992), “All the Queen’s Horses” (2019) and “When She Finds You” (2019; the last two filmed 26 years after the duo’s turbulent split), all of them displaying a strong affinity with Gothicism. Fahey and Detroit, together with director Sophie Muller, a long-time collaborator of the band, have created a fascinating world that skillfully merges references to their tempestuous personal background, Gothic imagery, Hollywood glamour and borrowings from Grande Dame Guignol, a popular 1960s subgenre of the horror film. Grande Dame Guignol is of major importance here as a genre dissecting female rivalry and, thus, reinterpreting a binary opposition of the damsel in distress and the tyrant, an integral element of Gothic fiction. Therefore, the aim of the article is not only to trace the Gothic references, both literary and cinematic, but also to demonstrate how Shakespears Sister’s music videos reformulate the conventional woman in peril-villain conflict.

Keywords

EN

Gothicism; intertextuality; Shakespears Sister; female rivalry; Grande Dame Guignol; music video

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 194-208

Dates

published

2020-11-24

Contributors

author

Tomasz Fisiak

• University of Lodz

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5514-1287

References

• Blase, Cazz. “Song of the Day: Shakespears Sister-‘Goodbye Cruel World.’” Thefword.org.uk. The F Word: Contemporary UK Feminism. 29 Dec. 2012. Web. 1 Mar. 2020.
• Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
• Cameron, Keith. “Queen Herald the Age of the Music Video.” Theguardian. com. The Guardian 12 Jun. 2011. Web. 17 May 2020.
• Cohan, Steven. Hollywood Musicals. London: Routledge, 2019. E-book. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351018746
• Detroit, Marcella. “FAQ. 5. Why did the band split up?” Marcella-detroit. com. Marcella Detroit 2016. Web. 1 Mar. 2020.
• Detroit, Marcella. “Interview: Marcella Detroit-‘I learned a lot about what it means to be an artist.’ By Michael Hubbard.” Musicomh.com. musicOMH 3 Aug. 2005. Web. 2 Mar. 2020.
• Fahey, Siobhan. “Siobhan Fahey Talking to Mick Brown on the Night Network.” Online video clip. YouTube.com. YouTube 1988. Web. 1 Mar. 2020.
• Fisiak, Tomasz. “Grande Dame Guignol and the Notion of the Aftermath: A Case Study of Robert Aldrich’s Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964).” Aftermath: The Fall and the Rise after the Event. Ed. Robert Kusek, Beata Piątek and Wojciech Szymański. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2019. 319–29. Print.
• Fisiak, Tomasz. “Hag Horror Heroines: Kitsch/Camp Goddesses, Tyrannical Females, Queer Icons.” Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture. Ed. Justyna Stępień. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 41–52. Print.
• Fisiak, Tomasz. “What Ever Happened to My Peace of Mind? Hag Horror as Narrative of Trauma.” Text Matters 9 (2019): 316–27. Print. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.19
• Graff, Gary. “Shakespears Sister Returns with Reunion EP Ride Again: Premiere.” Billboard.com. Billboard 24 Oct. 2019. Web. 20 May 2020.
• Grajter, Małgorzata. Personal e-mail communication with the author. 7 May 2020.
• Hanra, Hanna. “Shakespears Sister: ‘I’ve been trying to mop up grudges, but this was a major one.’” Theguardian.com. The Guardian 21 May 2019. Web. 2 Mar. 2020.
• Helmore, Edward. “‘I wouldn’t sit on her toilet . . .’ Screen Revival of Davis and Crawford Feud Sparks Sexism Debate.” Theguardian.com. The Guardian 19 Feb. 2017. Web. 3 Mar. 2020.
• Hennessy, Brendan. “The Gothic Novel.” British Writers. Volume 3. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. New York: Scribner’s, 1980. 324–46. Print.
• Khan, Imran. “Hormonal Rush: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Shakespears Sister.” Popmatters.com. Pop Matters 10 Apr. 2017. Web. 2 Mar. 2020.
• Martin, Philip. W. “Nightmare.” The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts. New York: New York UP, 1998. 164–65. Print.
• Parker, Lyndsey. “All’s Well That Ends Well: Shakespears Sister’s Epic Tale of Reunion and Redemption.” Yahoo.com. Yahoo! Entertainment 31 Jul. 2019. Web. 20 May 2020.
• Phelps, Gilbert. “Varieties of English Gothic.” From Blake to Byron. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. 110–27. Print.
• Shakespears Sister. “Hello (Again) Cruel World: An Interview with Shakespears Sister. By Jedd Beaudoin.” Popmatters.com. Pop Matters 22 Aug. 2019. Web. 4 Mar. 2020.
• Shakespears Sister. “Here to ‘Stay’? ’90s Pop Giants Shakespears Sister Didn’t Talk to Each Other for 26 Years. Here’s Their First Comeback Interview. By Gary Ryan.” Nme.com. NME 15 May 2019. Web. 5 Mar. 2020.
• Shelley, Peter. Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from “Baby Jane” to “Mother.” Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Print.
• Shore, Michael. The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video. Quill: New York, 1984. Print.
• Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation” and Other Essays. New York: Octagon, 1978. Print.
• Straw, Will. “Music Video in Its Contexts: Popular Music and Post- Modernism in the 1980s.” Popular Music 7.3 (Oct. 1988): 247–66. Print. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000002932
• Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Perf. William Holden, Gloria Swanson. Paramount Pictures, 1950. DVD.
• Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199766994.001.0001
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Dir. Robert Aldrich. Perf. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis. Warner Bros., 1962. DVD.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/2083-2931.10.12