“Sense of menace”: The Hollywood legends who inspired Garbage
Garbage were as cinematic a band as you could get in the 1990s. I mean, any band with Shirley goddamn Manson up front is bound to be as much of a visual feast as they are an auditory one.
However, the band played into the cinematic side of being rock superstars more than most. Their music videos were genuine short films, their live shows were spectacular, and to them, Hollywood directors were just as much of an influence on the band as any other rock group were. Take the music video for an absolute banger of theirs, 1996’s ‘Stupid Girl’, for example.
The whole clip is an extended tribute to the opening titles for David Fincher’s Seven. The director, Samuel Bayer, wanted to achieve the same distorted, atmospheric effects akin to the credits of Fincher’s masterpiece. So, he took the film negative the band were shot on, cut it, soaked it, and scratched it. While the video itself was thrown together as the band’s label were convinced that ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ was going to be a bigger hit, ‘Stupid Girl’ was a smash hit, in part due to its video.
Butch Vig, drummer of Garbage and a production legend, said that this video summed up not only the band’s image, but their sound too. In a documentary about the band, Vig said, “Some of it looked beautiful, some of it looked distorted, and kinda fucked up, and it sorta described some of our music visually.”
That, theoretically, should be the idea for all music videos, but not everyone goes that extra mile.
Garbage, though, are absolutely one of those bands, and that’s not even taking into account the director who most inspired the band. The visionary director, whose aesthetic blend of shiver-inducing beauty and horror they sought to put in every note of their music, who defined his generation of peers the same way that Garbage defined theirs.
Which director was Garbage inspired by?
In an interview with Spin conducted in 1998, writer Peter Murphy talked to the group about those cinematic influences. After comparing the band with the gang of outlaw vampires depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1988 masterpiece Near Dark, Murphy compared them to another venerated director of that era. He said that they share a fascination surrounding the futility of existence and the incurable human condition with David Lynch, a man responsible for moments of cinematic beauty that always have an “insidious sense of menace”.
Guitarist Duke Erikson found this funny and said, “Sense of menace sounds good”, before Vig confirmed that the band are at the very least die-hard fans of Lynch’s work. He said, “We share a certain sensibility. For one thing, we love dark pop songs, and I think maybe being from the Midwest, there’s a sense of being isolated. Like in Blue Velvet, there’s this veneer of everything looking really normal, but under the surface it’s not.”
This makes perfect sense to me. After all, Lynch wasn’t just a master director; he also had exquisite taste in music with an almost supernatural ability to find the right song for every scene in his filmography. While he never used Garbage’s music in his work, their paths did cross in 2019. Garbage played a show at New York City’s Brooklyn Steel as part of the Lynch-curated Festival of Disruption, making for a genuinely heartwarming moment of knowing that the admiration that Garbage had for David Lynch was absolutely requited.
