A Heavy Metal Fairy Tale

This week in class, we watched an interesting music video by the German heavy metal band Rammstein. The video's story line heavily referenced the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but with several...unique...changes. For one thing, the video focuses only on Snow White and the Dwarves and does not show the evil queen at all. Instead, the "villain" of the story appears to be Snow White herself, who seems to be oppressing and abusing the Dwarves, forcing them to mine gold and serve her. The Dwarves eventually rebel and (seemingly reluctantly) kill her. They place her at the top of a mountain in a glass coffin, but an apple falls through the top of the coffin, shattering it, and releasing an apparently (and perhaps understandably) angry Snow White. 

Image result for snow white rammstein halloI have now watched this video a couple of times and, to tell the truth, am still not completely confident I know what it is supposed to mean. The best theory that I've been able to come up with has to do with a detail that I noticed at around the two minute thirty second mark. In this scene, the Dwarves are crowded around Snow White, embracing and bowing down to her. If you look carefully, you will notice that the position in which Snow White is standing places her head right in the center of a circular window behind her, giving her what appears to be a halo (see picture above). This detail seems to imply some kind of connection between Snow White and the divine, so I watched the video again, looking for any more imagery that could be interpreted as religious.

Image result for nietzscheAs I was watching the video through this new lens, I was suddenly reminded of a particular feature of Fredrick Nietzsche's critique of religion. In the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche characterizes belief in God (and, before that, belief in an obligation to the ancestor) as a kind of abusive relationship, in which we try to do things to please a deity, but are never able to pay back the deity for what he/she has supposedly done for us, resulting in ever growing feelings of guilt and bad conscious. In the Rammstein video, a similar dynamic seems to be at play between the Dwarves and Snow White, with the latter taking offerings of gold from the former and yet still continuing to abuse them. The Dwarves in turn, seem to treat Snow White with a combination of fear, reverence, and desire, almost as if she is a god to them,


The ending of the video, then, can perhaps be seen as the Dwarves finally "killing God" in the form of Snow White, an act which seems to free them in some sense, but also makes them feel sad and guilty. When Snow White is freed by the falling apple (that's more possibly religious symbolism, though I'm not quite sure what it means yet), the Dwarves, unable to escape from their guilt, return to her. 

Now, to be sure, I do not know if the members of Rammstein are fans of Nietzsche (I do believe he was, at one time at least, pretty popular in some punk/metal circles), but this may not matter, since the critique of religion as a producer of guilt is not necessarily singular to him. Personally, I am neither an atheist, nor a fan of heavy metal, but I do find Nietzsche interesting, so I suppose I did enjoyed the video at least as a possible representation of these ideas, if not for its portrayal of Snow White spanking the Dwarves. 😬

Anyways, I will certainly be interested to see how everybody else interpreted this and hope that we discuss it a little more in class on Tuesday.


Picture Credits:
https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/496381190152953222/
https://www.biography.com/people/friedrich-nietzsche-9423452

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