the secretary’s presence in the halls of the great dictator offers such a swerve in her reading. she’s fascistic. she’s complicit. she, like the dog, is an arm of power, an agent of rule, a technology of authoritarianism. she’s not liberatory — or at least, she cannot so easily be rendered as such. my chemical romance is a band of always unfolding surprises
like what does it do for us (as fandom, as listeners, as readers) when we learn that the object of our erotic desire is a character whose presence signals the ways that apparatuses of rule can be beautiful? can be titillating? can capture our attention? what does it mean when the character we’ve been so easy to project liberatory meaning onto actually shows up in mcr/gerard’s text as handmaiden to the great dictator’s fascist decade? where does that take us? how does it change our own readings of these performances we had (and still have) limited context to? can we recoup her? must we disown her? does it matter? will it ever? is it, in the cynical parlance of our current apocalyptic age, really even that serious?
more importantly, would gerard (and frank and mikey and ray) play with this imagery if they thought that it wasn’t?
it’s clear in her (visual; symbolic) staging that the secretary (if she is even that) can never be “equal victim” of the great dictator as are repressed citizens, as is the black parade, as are those dead and buried — she’s symbolic not of the capacity for fascist redemption but of fascism’s seductiveness, of fascism’s ill-gotten gains, of the ways that fascism very well benefits some people and populations (yes, even women, yes, even queer people, yes, even marginalized group xyz here) at the bloody, violent, earth-shattering expense of others. her capacity to sit beside the great dictator in comfort is not evidence of her victimhood. it’s evidence that she, too, will happily wield power at the expense of the rest of the world. at the expense, perhaps, of the end of the world. my chemical romance is not a subtle band