Ever since I read the book, I have always hated the English translation of its name.
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, while being a fitting title for many adaptations of the story (including the Disney film and subsequent musical which I am about to discuss), is not at all a good descriptor of a book in which Quasimodo is arguably a supporting character at best. Needless to say, this is not the original title of the novel. In 1831, Victor Hugo published a novel simply called “Notre-Dame de Paris”, or in English, “Our Lady of Paris”. Having read the book, I think that this is a perfect title for this piece. Not only does it refer to the dozens of pages dedicated to describing the monumental cathedral, but it also refers to Esmeralda. Referring to Esmeralda as “Our Lady” not only puts her in the spotlight as the central character of the piece, but it also beautifully showcases how the narrative treats her just as a character: not as her own person, but as a MacGuffin of sorts that each of the male characters wants to gain in some way; she’s our lady.
As much as the story of the musical changed from its original source material, Esmeralda’s role in this regard is one thing that is conserved perfectly. Alan Menken is a composer who is known for his use of leitmotifs, a word which here means “a melody that is associated with a character or place in the story”. Most of the main characters have their own leitmotifs that they sing themselves throughout the musical; Quasimodo has his melody at the start of Heaven’s Light, Phoebus has Rest and Recreation (a melody that exists purely as a leitmotif without text in the original film), and Frollo gets pretty much the rest of them. When one looks at Esmeralda’s songs, there doesn’t really seem to be any common link between them; even Esmeralda’s most famous song, “God Help The Outcasts”, wasn’t used as any kind of basis for any of her other songs. The “Someday” motif, when it is sung, is mainly used to represent innocence and hope more generally rather than Esmeralda herself, hence why we see it most often sung by the choir rather than any of the cast.
However, Esmeralda does have a leitmotif, it’s just not sung by her. The Esmeralda motif is first shown in Rest and Recreation, in an otherwise forgettable section of the song where Clopin welcomes her to Paris. The relevance of this motif comes back in full stride in the finale of Act 1, which is itself titled “Esmeralda”, and this time, the melody is sung angrily by the soldiers (including Phoebus himself!) and then later by the soldiers with Frollo. At no point in her own song does Esmeralda actually sing anything. The next time it occurs, just before the finale, it is sung by Frollo, further cementing this idea of Esmeralda being ours; at this moment in time, Frollo still believes Esmeralda to be his, as a feat that he has to reckon with, and that he is better off having accomplished this “feat”. The Esmeralda motif never appears after this moment. Esmeralda is a much stronger and better written character in the musical than she is in the novel, but her role as “Our Lady” still shines through. It is worth mentioning that the Esmeralda motif is sung by every character who falls in love with her (and also Clopin), with the notable exception of Quasimodo. This is because Quasimodo’s affections for Esmeralda are deliberately painted as differently as possible from Frollo’s lust for her; there is a very good reason why Heaven’s Light and Hellfire happen in immediate succession from each other (and of course, the names of the respective songs are no coincidence). I would not say that the musical’s choice to retain some elements of the book and some elements of the film is always done as well as possible. However, the decision to have the Esmeralda motif always be sung by her suitors and never by Esmeralda herself is the perfect addition to this story. The motivic complexity of the musical, along with the precision of the choices made in this leitmotif specifically make Menken’s score a true work of art, and a perfect embodiment of Esmeralda’s role in the story.
It’s the first beer garden type evening of the year, but not an inch of me regrets spending it in the brick and buzz of The Grove. Pentire, the up-and-coming indie rock group from Herefordshire, didn’t come to play. Or, rather, they played in every sense of the verb.
From the moment that Pentire took to the stage, tellingly entering to Tubthumping by Chumbawamba (Google it; you’ll know it and chuckle), their set unravels into wit, electricity, and flourishing artistry. Launching into their 2022 anthem Watch Time with Me, it’s immediately apparent: Jack Morgan might just be the cheekiest frontman ever to grace this venue.
If there’s a fourth wall between Jack and the crowd, it’s there for him to obliterate. From the manneristic eyebrow raises adorning every song to a slapstick grimace after an on-stage stumble, Jack made every moment a conversation between him and the crowd. He had us spellbound, and vice versa: so attuned to the audience, it felt as if I so much as blinked for a second too long, Jack would catch on. He pointed at recording phones — sparse in a crowd too immersed — and gestured along to the strongest lyrics with a head point, a shrug, a growing smile. In an entrancing 90-minute set, Jack Morgan owned the room, intimate as it was, in a way that made you see Pentire headlining much bigger ones soon.
Jack may be the magnetic core, but the band around him are in no way peripheral to Pentire’s hypnotic act. Owen Seymour, perhaps the first (and not the last) cardigan-donned electric guitarist that I’ve seen, cruised through the gig nonchalantly. Yet the twangs of his riffs carried as the vital bedrock of Pentire’s nostalgic, coming-of-age indie sound. Throughout the set, Owen exchanged boyish grins with the bassist Jacob Beswetherick, whose basslines were the pulse powering every track, particularly in Get Up. Jake Weaver was the drumming dark horse of the set — quiet when the songs called for it, but every re-entry reminded you exactly why he’d been missed.
Together, Pentire make live music feel genuinely alive. Like the Cornish headland they’re named after, their music is the sonic equivalent of a summer drive to the coast: all warmth and easy rhythm, with the windows-down momentum of a sunny day. The bigger choruses carry traces of The Killers’ arena instinct; the quieter moments have something of Paolo Nutini’s soulful looseness. Pentire wear their influences lightly enough, though, that it mostly just sounds like themselves.
Much of the set drew from their January EP Love on TV. Standout moments included the witty lyricism of Fading Out (“Was there something else in my drink, or have I had a little bit too much to think?”), a longer-than-comfortable pause in the middle of I Won’t Waste Your Time — a characteristic tease from Jack — and the crowd’s sheer volume in Boy in the Machine. Even the setlist itself was opened to the room, with a surprise song voted for via QR code — proof, if any were needed, that the crowd are as much a part of a Pentire show as the band themselves.
To call the gig high-octane is an understatement: it felt as though Pentire would never tire. And yet, by the final stretch, there were glimpses of exhaustion in Jack — not that it ever faltered his on-stage fervour. If anything, it was the final tell-all: a Pentire gig is never half-hearted. Backed by BBC Introducing and festival slots at Truck, Y Not and Isle of Wight, bigger rooms are surely coming — but on Friday night, Pentire came to play with, not simply for, Newcastle’s crowd.
My father has always been my biggest musical inspiration. He has filled my playlists with bands and artists that have built my own taste and preferences over the years. For Christmas, it seemed only fair that I take him to see one of our shared favourite bands together. Belle and Sebastian are a Scottish band who released their first two albums, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, thirty years ago in 1996. Their concert at the Grand Rex in Paris was a truly intergenerational experience, not only for my father and I, but also for the many other parent/ child duos that filled the venue. It is a known fact that music brings people together, although it seems cliché it is an undeniable truth. As we took in every second of the show, it became clear to me that it was more than just a gifted experience, it was a moment of bonding through music and performance.
The enormity of time was evident, the band members were grey and their dance moves were stiff. The pure occasion, the thirtieth anniversary tour, was proof enough of the passage of time. Not a phone in sight, no opportunity for an Instagram story on my behalf, only a quick selfie could be captured before the show for the viewing pleasure of the family group chat. Some members of the audience even spoke up about having been in the very same room thirty years prior for the original album release tour! The atmosphere was fun, carefree, and truly magical. I was informed by my father later that this is what concerts used to be like… not in 60,000 person venues, with overly large, but necessary, screens in order for everyone to see, but in smaller rooms, with some background visuals, and nothing more. Even the level of security was shocking to someone who has only known 21st century concerts. As the show progressed, members of the audience were invited to join the band onstage to dance, without a barrier in sight, just one, slightly confused, security guard without a job to do.
The experience led me to wonder what has happened to the musical scene. Why is it that a live show now entails a soul-crushing digital battle on Ticketmaster, an impressive amount of savings, and months of planning in advance? The answer may seem quite obvious, with the rise of travel opportunities, the extensive marketing ploys and the consequent increase in competitiveness. But, does this greed for sales taint the magic of a live show? Having now experienced the typical modern concert and the more intimate, ‘retro’, show, I feel this may be a question with no answer. The perks of the larger scale of concerts are obvious: not only does it allow more people to experience live music, but the profits also enable the artists themselves to travel further and perform to a wider demographic across the globe. Nevertheless, discrimination persists, less so in a geographical sense (although still to an extent), but also financially. The laws of supply and demand declare that the more popular the artist, the more expensive the ticket must be. Live concerts are therefore a luxury, one that only a lucky minority may access without difficulty. Although economically this phenomenon makes sense, it remains saddening.
When my father tells me about his live experiences with bands such as Pulp, R.E.M, and Radiohead – to keep the list short – in Student Unions or gritty nightclubs around the UK, I find it
truly inconceivable. I believe that this is why seeing Belle and Sebastian and getting a taste of an old school concert, felt so special. While it may be argued that the stagecraft showed less creativity and extensive rehearsal than the modern showcase, and that the average age of 50
pretty much removed all chances of a moshpit, the music was truly the main focus. Overall, the show was a celebration of musical legacy and a clear representation of its appeal to both older and younger crowds, that I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed.
When you hear the word ‘Brazil’, what do you see? Racing driver Alain Prost correlates the country with a sequence of fond images. He remembers the sun, the sand. He remembers the smiles of the locals, their welcome, their character. He remembers the churrascarias and the beach and the grandeur of Rio de Janeiro. ‘And then’ – he speaks wistfully in an interview, mouth pulling askew – ‘there’s Ayrton.’
It is an invocation spoken like a prayer, a name that rests heavy at the base of Prost’s skull, brought forth and splayed bitterly across his face. It is both wound and salve. Match and mirror. ‘When you talk about Senna you speak about Prost and when you speak about Prost you talk about Senna.’ It is arguably the greatest rivalry in motorsport history; two near-divine beings rocketing through Formula One’s golden age, galvanising it with their animosity, their obsessive competitiveness, their tragic humanity. Near-divine. Near.
Teammates, 11 and 12 – but never partners. Theirs was a war waged in millimetres, in fractions of a second, in the mechanical exhale of a V6. Senna drove with holy devotion, God behind his ribs and beneath his palms; Prost was secular, stringent, sharp. In no world were either clean. Haniff Abdurraqib speaks on that astringent flavour of intimacy enemies share: ‘there is a tenderness in knowing what desire ties you to a person, even if you have spent your dreaming hours cutting them a casket … it is a blessing to know someone wants a funeral for you.’ Senna’s monomaniacal fixation on Prost cannot be overstated; here was a teenage karter with Renault-yellow and a charmingly crooked nose plastered on his bedroom wall, all-grown-up and starving for approval. Idolisation through a jaundiced lens: gnarled into confounded resentment, gnawing at the insatiable void of a racing driver’s volatile ego. ‘Ayrton did not think about other people’, Prost would say, ‘he just thought about me.’
Suzuka was the crucible. 1989 saw a collision on the chicane: Prost turning into Senna, sacrificing the twin McLarens on the altar of the tarmac to strategically secure his success; Senna, furious and dogged as he hauled the damaged car to the finish line – only to have his win invalidated, the championship seized. 1990 saw a reflection, a retribution: Senna hurtling into Prost, abandoning his former teammate – now driving for Ferrari – in the gravel as he snatched the championship like a malicious, mean-faced baby-brother.
When Prost retired, the fever broke: ‘We came to terms … and we stopped trying to remake each other.’ For the first time, there was laughter. Prost describes the year between 1993 and 1994 as the time he and Senna were closest. ‘Why did we put ourselves through all of that?’ he would ask. There was ease. There were breakfasts and late-night phone calls and ‘my dear friend Alain; we miss you Alain’ – spoken by Senna on the morning of the end of all things. And then Alain Prost watched Ayrton Senna die from the commentary booth at Imola. Watched as Senna torpedoed at 211 km/h into a concrete cradle. How do you cope? How do you mourn your mirror?
‘Maybe all I can say is that I was having breakfast in the morning of race day and he dropped by and sat with me. I am glad his final breakfast was with me. Even though it was short, that was still time he gave to me.’ This is how Alain speaks of his only rival, his counterpart, his almost-friend for the next thirty years, voice cloyed with saudade.
‘It was a fantastic story, don’t you think?’ he asks. His words are quiet, hopelessly reverent.
Circa 2011, I was browsing the small film section of my primary school’s library. It housed the usual suspects – Barnyard, Open Season and, bizarrely, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (one for the mums, I suppose?). Even stranger was the sun-faded, garishly noughties DVD – bearing its title in big, bold Comic Sans; Thunderpants.
The synopsis was weirder still: a ten-year-old boy with incredible flatulence who dreams of becoming an astronaut is recruited by NASA to assist in a life-or-death rescue mission. Upon reading the blurb, a resounding wave of ‘what the fuck?’ washed over me. I had another read before opting for Coraline.
Thereafter, Thunderpants haunted a young Charles. I couldn’t shake the confusion, bordering on concern – how on Earth could they make a children’s film about something so puerile? Who would green-light such a thing? Why was a bespectacled Rupert Grint on the cover? My father claimed he’d once caught a portion of it on TV – calling it “one of those British films that’s desperate to be American”. I asked if he’d recommend it and, with commendable economy of language, he replied, “No”. The conversation moved swiftly on.
Morbid curiosity eventually got the better of me. I searched for Thunderpants in my father’s old RadioTimes compendium, where it received a scathing one-star review from Alan Jones. In an ingeniously subtle play-on-words, Jones hailed the film “an absolute stinker”, and “excruciatingly vulgar”. That clinched it; I had better things to occupy my mind with than a 2002 family comedy about farting – such as my forthcoming Year 2 SAT exams.
Thunderpants was co-written and directed by Peter Hewitt, whose resume is a diverse roster of light-hearted 1990s films, from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey to The Borrowers. The film was shot over the summer of 2001 on a modest $7 million budget, though it ultimately failed to recoup even half of that at the box office. Its production company, Pathé, must have had some faith in Thunderpants – as the film boasts a baffling all-star cast:
Paul Giamatti of Sideways, Ned Beatty of Deliverance (responsible for the titular quote), Stephen Fry of supposed ‘national treasuredom’, Simon Callow of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Rupert Grint of a little-known multi-billion dollar franchise about an adolescent wizard, and a young (uncredited) Keira Knightley. The lead, Bruce Cook, retired from acting following the film’s release in May 2002.
My first viewing of Thunderpants came in the advent of the first national lockdown. I can’t quite remember why I sought it out – probably the urge to extinguish the spectre which burned in my psyche for the preceding ten years. Within the film’s opening five minutes, something becomes abundantly clear: the blurb on that sun-faded DVD does no justice to the debauched lunacy that is Thunderpants’ plot.
Here’s a fun little exercise for you. Of the following, which do you reckon is a genuine Thunderpants plot point? Bear in mind, the British Board of Film Classification awarded the film a ‘PG’ certificate – citing “some crude humour”.
I.) A newborn baby quite literally flies out of his mother’s womb – as the doctor exclaims, “We’ve got a flyer!”
II.) A young boy’s flatulence becomes so unbearable, his father permanently leaves the family home – and his mother turns to chronic alcoholism.
III.) A young boy, named ‘Patrick Smash’, accompanies an opera singer on a world tour – producing an unattainable high note with his “unique gift”.
IV.) A young boy is placed before a firing squad after accidentally murdering an Italian man with his flatulence.
V.) A young boy is strapped to a methane-powered rocket thruster. The resulting flame prompts Paul Giamatti to punch the air and yell “hot dog!” for some reason.
Your suspicion is correct; they are all, indeed, real components of Thunderpants’ plot. Like young Charles, you are likely questioning how – and to what end – this made the journey from Hewitt’s ‘lively’ imagination to national cinema screens. Having had fifteen years to mull this over, I feel well-equipped to answer. Despite the feeble special effects, the unsavoury green set-design, and the off-putting inappropriateness of the whole thing, you’d be hard-pressed to call Thunderpants
a “bad film”.
Thunderpants treats its audience with respect – developing its juvenile premise with surprising restraint. In careless hands, Hewitt’s central, crude conceit would wear thin very quickly. And yet, in a film about a young boy’s inability to control his flatulence, the wind-breaking becomes almost incidental – a vehicle for an earnest message of overcoming adversity and pursuing your dreams. It’s just as schmaltzy as it sounds, but only the most cynical could fault the ambition.
The central performances are similarly earnest, though they effectively serve their purpose. Cook plays ‘Patrick Smash’ with a perpetually gormless gaze, as unperturbed by his school bullies as he is by appearing before a firing squad. Grint echoes Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor in his role as Cook’s only friend – a child prodigy who lacks a sense of smell. None of the all-star cameos phones it in either – revelling in the material’s Viz-like absurdity.
Most striking is Thunderpants’ no-bars approach to cruelty. Under the guise of a Beano comic strip brought-to-life, the film is relentlessly bleak. The lead – a ten-year-old child, mind – is mercilessly bullied, neglected by his parents, insulted by a criminal barrister, and exploited by questionable NASA officials. Hewitt’s message – ostensibly “life is shit, so do what you can with
what you have” – is refreshingly honest, and seldom posed in children’s media.
Despite my modest praise, I find myself in agreement with young Charles. A children’s film with such a puerile premise should probably not exist. At risk of sounding puritanical, there’s a myriad
of subject matter Hewitt could have used as a crux for the ‘follow your dreams’ moral. Equally, I must concede, Thunderpants is as good a film about farting could possibly be.
Thunderpants was met with widespread critical derision and quickly fell into DVD bargain-bin – and school library – obscurity. It performed so poorly at the UK box office that Pathé released the film straight-to-DVD in the US, several years later. The US poster prominently features a much older Rupert Grint, bearing little resemblance to his appearance in the film; a desperate attempt to cash in on his Harry Potter fame.
For years, Thunderpants remained a barely-visible stain on the memories of those who saw it as children. However, recently, many have taken to TikTok and X to express their glee that Thunderpants wasn’t just a bizarre fever dream – and defend the film as a childhood favourite.
The cast seems similarly fond of the film. During a press junket for The Holdovers in 2023, Paul Giamatti was visibly delighted at an interviewer’s reference to Thunderpants. He states, without a sliver of sarcasm, “Thunderpants is one of the most remarkable movies I’ve been in… It is a brilliant movie.”
In a sea of AI-generated slop – functioning solely as cheap babysitting under the misnomer of ‘children’s entertainment’ – a film as humble, unpretentious and charming as Thunderpants is well worth reevaluating.
A gangly, quasi-spectral figure in a pale grey suit walks onto an empty stage. The camera clings to his feet – white plimsoles against a black floor – as he wanders purposefully into a light. He, placing a jukebox on the ground before him, proclaims quite calmly, “I’ve got a tape I want to play.” As the opening chords of Psycho Killer are violently strummed, the camera pans up to reveal our lead player, David Byrne. So begins the greatest record of human creativity ever put to screen.
In 1984, Talking Heads– the great pioneers of the 80s new wave scene – had found themselves at their commercial peak: Speaking in Tongues had produced their biggest hit, Burning Down the House, and Remain in Light had assured their place in the highest order of musical talents. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a peak to which they’d never quite return. Their next two albums, Little Creatures and True Stories, were hits but failed to reach the sonic highs of their earlier work. The tour recorded in Stop Making Sense was to be their last. As such, the resultant film feels like a lightning-in-a-bottle crystallisation of unstoppable talent, a consignment to screen of a moment in time at which these musicians were not only the best band of their generation but, probably, the greatest of all time. Fresh off his Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs , director Jonathan Demme approaches Stop Making Sense less as a concert film and more as an argument for the expansive possibilities of human creativity.
As Byrne is revealed to the audience in Psycho Killer, he immediately establishes himself as scene-stealing leading man. He jerks around the stage, as if attacked by his own chords, and maintains, in his steeled expression, a look somewhere between deathly shock and religious epiphany. He gambles towards the camera as though his actual audience were mere spectators to a world entirely his own. Behind him, stagehands assemble the sort of apparatus that would look more at home on a construction site than a concert stage. The deliberate exposition of this work – Demme makes no effort to shield the stagehands from view – is central to the argument that underscores the music. Art is, unavoidably, a collaboration. David Byrne is doubtlessly the central figure, but his efforts are nothing without those working around him.
At the end of Psycho Killer, bassist Tina Weymouth steps out to accompany Byrne on Heaven. Demme holds our view, for the most part, on a side-by-side of the two artists, their vocal and physical harmonies kept in gentle balance. As the song runs out, yet more stagehands crowd the two performers, assembling pedal-boards and drumkits. The camera follows Chris Frantz as he makes his way to the newly assembled drumkit, capturing a momentary glance between him and his bandmate-cum-wife, Weymouth. During a brief pause after the next song – in which David Byrne makes his second announcement to the crowd: ‘thanks!’ – Jerry Harrison arrives on stage, rounding out the quartet. By deconstructing the band – revealing the specific importance of a vocalist, bassist, drummer, and guitarist song by song – Stop Making Sense becomes a narrative thesis on the joys of communal music making. After Found a Job, the band is joined by another drummer, two more backing vocalists, another guitarist, and a keyboard player – Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry, Ednah Holt, Alex Weir, and Bernie Worrell, respectively. By this point, as the expanded group starts performing Slippery People, the performance has become an orgy of sound: ‘Lord help up, help us lose our minds’ sings Byrne. Taking their time to construct this massed ensemble, the band shows us that they could do this with one player, or two, or four, but they choose to do it with the whole troupe. It reminds us that music isn’t just some auditory phenomenon that arrives pre-constructed into our ears, it is something that people DO together, to entertain, to have fun. The stage is built, the band is built, right before our eyes to remind us that human hands made it. The little moments and looks between members of the band are just as magical as the performances. It reminds us, perhaps, that we’re all just animals, looking for a home, to share the same space for a minute or two.
For a film so delicately choreographed, it is the space it allows for spontaneous human moments which elevate it to its note of all-conquering tenderness. During Burning Down the House, Demme’s camera is distracted for some time by Alex Weir as he, evidently caught in the throes of the music, begins jumping around the stage. Immediately after, we watch as Harrison joins in an awkward shuffling dance with backup singers Mabry and Holt, eliciting a noiseless chuckle from the latter. Talking Heads, then as now, were a band renowned for their mystical inscrutability. Stop Making Sense is replete with that impenetrable charm – David Byrne wiggling through Life During Wartime; the quasi-nonsensical words that appear on screens behind the band, e.g. ‘BEFORE DINNER TIME’; the massive suit, of course – but they are buoyed throughout by the unimpeachable humanity of their performance.
The stage becomes a church; Byrne becomes a new-wave evangelist. His sermons reverberate through the audience, whose reaction Demme offers us only sparingly: ‘watch out, you might get what you’re after’. He, like any great prophet, understands that he is not the centre of the universe and briefly cedes the stage to Weymouth and Frantz’s side project Tom Tom Club for a section in which the sonic wizardry of Genius of Love is only somewhat marred by Frantz’s barrage of ad-libs, including but not limited to ‘the girls can do it to, y’all’ and ‘James Brown!’ Reclaiming the stage and, having guided his flock through the spiritual journey of Stop Making Sense, Byrne leads us to a final baptism with Take Me to the River: a sweaty, noisy, beautiful absolution. Rounding off with the frenetic Crosseyed and Painless, we are finally treated to a view of the audience in their convulsive, magical reverie. A small child holds a stuffed unicorn, two sound technicians stand arm-in-arm. Byrne waves for the stagehands to join the band on stage, providing a final tableau of massed creativity in all its myriad forms, before the concert wordlessly ends, subsumed by applause.
Talking Heads make a friend out of time’s passing, out of the knowledge that all experience is fleeting and all moments will be lost. When spent well, when spent with the right person, the dispensation of life’s transient currency is a gift gladly given: ‘You’re standing here beside me, I love the passage of time’. Such is the revelation at the heart of Stop Making Sense. A song is a few minutes, a concert is an hour and a half, this time will never return. But this is no cause for concern. We are the masters of time, and of life, because we spend it how we care to. The suburban paranoiac who narrates Once in a Lifetime feels that, in modern America, he is quite unconsciously ‘letting the days go by, letting the water hold me down.’ His life has been folded together, he has found himself unknowingly sat ‘behind the wheel of a large automobile ’ – beset with wife, job, and house, wondering, understandably, ‘how did I get here?’ His mistake is resistance. As David Byrne howls in the final chorus, his oversized suit wibbling in the darkness, ‘time isn’t holding up’. Equally, however, ‘time isn’t after us.’ Time is no predator, clawing at our lives. It will never stop, but it holds no grudges. Forty years later, the 90 minutes of Stop Making Sense remain as potent as ever, drawing crowds together in ecstatic movement as surely in the screens of London’s Prince Charles Cinemaas it did in Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre. We live life as we choose and, if someone asks, this is where I’ll be.
An incidental post-script:
I first watched Stop Making Sense with one of my best friends in a packed-out BFI IMAX, a week or so before starting university. About a month later, I performed This Must Be the Place in a since-closed cocktail bar at my first open mic night with a newfound friend who would later become my housemate. One particular lyric stuck out to me in that moment, as a frightened fresher taking his first flight out of the nest, uncertain of his place here or anywhere: ‘home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.’
Spoken under the drizzling lights of a quiet bus shelter, Fleabag and the Hot Priest’s confession is one of soul searing heartbreak. Throughout the season we see their compatibility, and yet the show concludes with them all the more in love and all the more impossible. Upon rewatching this scene amidst the heart-shaped paraphernalia of Valentine’s Day, I found myself reflecting once more on the Hot Priest’s words.
He is so certain of love’s transience.
It is something that can fade, a bruise that, with enough time, will recede into the skin and exist as a mere memory. Media often assures us of love’s indomitability, its steadfast existence that – when you have found the allusive ‘one’ – will never fail you and carry you into bliss forevermore. There is a hope in this kind of love, it is a parachute catching you as you plummet into the heady wonder of ‘falling’.
But in Fleabag we are presented with an alternate narrative.
With Fleabag and the Hot Priest, we realise that we can stumble upon a soulmate and still let that person go. Love, quite simply, is not an immediate guarantee for a long-lasting relationship.
Throughout the second season, the Hot Priest alludes to a past of sexual and alcoholic indulgence and estrangement from his parents and paedophilic brother. The church gives him structure, and although we still see lingering struggles in his hidden G&Ts and swearing, it is clear he is overall much happier. He tells Fleabag that “celibacy is a lot less complicated than romantic relationships”. It gives him someone to hold him accountable and, in doing so, takes away the torment of decision making. He has found the person who tells him how to live his life, just as Fleabag whispers in the confessional, and to pursue a life with her would be to throw away his peace.
He may love Fleabag, but that love isn’t worth a life in chaos.
I think this is, in part, why Fleabag stayed with so many of us, to the point that I am writing about it ten years after its TV premier. Waller-Bridge respects the values and realities of her characters’ lives, understanding that to have the Hot Priest and Fleabag end up together would be a cliché and a disservice both to the characters and the audience. Not every love story ends with forever, in fact few do, and the media we consume should also recognise this. We engage with these narratives not just for hope, but for a reflection of ourselves.
This reminded me of Bell Hooks’ All About Love, a thought- provoking book discussing love, its role in our lives, and its treatment in the media. When recounting a meeting with her “true love,” she describes a dinner with a man and explains that it felt as though they had always known each other, despite the fact that he was already in a committed relationship. Regardless of this ‘soul connection’, their story ended with this dinner, just as Fleabag and the Hot Priest’s ended at the bus shelter. For Hooks, however, this isn’t tragic, but rather a testament to the commitment, timing, and devotion it takes for a relationship to last. We shouldn’t see fleeting love as a reflection of its futility, but as a reminder of the dedication long-term love requires.
Hooks also discusses at length the impact of childhood in shaping our understanding of love, and how the love exhibited by our family serves as the blueprint for our adulthood. Waller-Bridge illustrates this dynamic perfectly through Fleabag and her emotionally distant father.
Drunk by the doorsteps of her family home, the door halfway closed on her, Fleabag tells her father, “I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.” The silence stretches between them, her brows creased as she pleads for recognition, but all he can bring himself to say is “Well. Um… You get all that from your mother.”
By attributing their daughter’s struggles to his deceased wife, Fleabag’s father deflects responsibility, treating his daughter not as an individual who needs him, but as someone who has inherited issues from her mother and can thus be placed in the realm of graves and dismissal. This rejection is reinforced by him calling a cab for Fleabag and banning her from going upstairs… his emotional distance mirroring a physical one. Ironically, in the following scene, Fleabag fulfils her father’s claim by stealing a statue made in the likeness of her mother’s body. By taking the statue, Fleabag quite literally carries a piece of her mother with her, removing it from a house in which both of them have become unwelcome under her godmother’s influence. Fleabag is excluded from her family, just as her mother is, if neither of them can belong, they will at least leave together.
Yet, even her thievery is met with apathy from her father, who simply says “Well you’ve said no, so now I can go” after Fleabag denies her actions. He shows zero interest in truly understanding his daughter, content to stagnate their relationship in non-conversations, where they talk around topics in stop-starting sentences, with little to no connection regarding what the other is actually saying.
Waller-Bridge contrasts this with Fleabag’s confession to the Hot Priest, echoing her fears in Season One, when she says, “I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.” Even beyond the appeal to a “Father” in both conversations, Waller-Bridge parallels the two relationships by having Fleabag express her fear that she is a terrible person making all the wrong choices. But, unlike her father, the Hot Priest meets this vulnerability with affection and kisses her, pulling Fleabag close rather than rejecting her.
Similarly, earlier in the episode, the Hot Priest tells Fleabag “I’m just trying to get to know you” in the same cafe her father so desperately tried to escape conversation. These echoes in setting and conversation, though driven with opposing intentions, reveal to the audience how the Hot Priest begins to rewrite Fleabag’s understanding of love. He seeks intimacy where her family distances; he accepts where they reject; and, most importantly, he loves where they criticise. For the Hot Priest, she doesn’t have to “not be herself.” Instead, she can make poorly timed comments at Quaker meetings: she can be vulnerable, she can be broken, and scared, and witty, and honest, and caring. She can love. And he will love her in return.
Through the Hot Priest, she not only learns that she is capable of loving another person, but that they can also love her back. She is not the unlovable child whose flaws and jokes make her unbearable to her family, but instead someone worthy of being seen and adored.
This is not an easy process for her to learn, however. Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she “doesn’t want” him to get to know her, and she freaks out when he acknowledges the fourth wall. As much as she craves love and validation, she is nonetheless scared of being truly seen.
Hooks too experiences this fear, writing that she was “afraid to be intimate.” Not physically, but spiritually. To be seen without all the masks, into that secret, private sphere we keep for ourselves. But to love someone is to allow them to see these hidden parts of ourselves, and for them, in turn, to acknowledge and accept us. For Fleabag, this private sphere is the audience, we are her witnesses, her companions of the inner self. The Hot Priest’s recognition of her disassociation, therefore, becomes symbolic of him seeing her true nature. Her acceptance of such is allowing him to look at the camera and see her soul, her audience.
Maybe Fleabag’s love for the Hot Priest will pass, maybe it won’t. This is, in fact, of minimal importance. Instead, it is Fleabag’s learning that she can find connection and embrace vulnerability with another person, without being met with rejection. But amidst this love, she cannot fully possess the other person. They too have their own internal world, and sometimes this means that you cannot stay together. Even so, to have known and been known by that person for a short while, is still a beautiful thing. To bear witness to their love, however temporary, remains a blessing.
We may not have one, true cinematic love story. But in the loves that we have and the lives that we touch…we can heal ourselves again.
Cheap booze and melancholia drip from bedframes. Heady cocktails and bodily fluids spill on weathered velour quilts. There are a lot of breasts, but not in an erotic way. At least not for the most part.
This is Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, forty years on from its original publication. Magnum opus of the Boston photographer, TheBallad depicts the beautiful spectre of Free Love in 1970s NYC. Enchanting yet poignant: the Gagosian’s (13 January – 21 March 2026) display of 126 photographs had me mesmerised.
Goldin’s Ballad is a world where the line between friends and lovers blur. Trust is ubiquitous and judgement is distant. The sordid passion of 70s underground New York is hard to ignore. It sparked much thought as I left the exhibition and stepped back out into the manicured streets of Mayfair.
Couple in bed, Chicago (1977). Credit: Nan Goldin / Gagosian
Much of the collection challenges heteronormative structures in both subtle and overt ways. Goldin figures this volatility into the collection’s titular ballad form, also derived from Brecht and Weill’s 1928 The Threepenny Opera.
The sex-fuelled ruminations of the Couple in bed, Chicago (1977) are raw. Their gazes are melancholy.The couple may as well be Marianne and Connell in Normal People. Though these ones aren’t paid actors, nor actors at all for that matter.
Goldin’s ‘actors’ are friends or lovers, or both. Had she even wanted to pay her subjects, it wasn’t an option financially. Indeed, she once exchanged a sexual favour for a taxi ride to develop her spool of film (All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, 2022).
Nan One Month After Being Battered (1984) is a visceral confrontation with domestic abuse, in self-portrait form. It is an act of survival. A vulnerable yet defiant rejection of shame. Her striking red lipstick echoes her bloodshot eye. This image helped stop Goldin from returning to the violent relationship. It’s a deeply personal exploration of the complex interplay between love, violence, unsuitability and dependency.
Nan one month after being battered (1984). Credit: Nan Goldin / Tate
Dependency rules over these scenes. Fair to say dopamine is unlikely to be the only thing the subjects are addicted to. Addiction either to love or drugs. Likely both. They’re indecipherably intertwined. TheBallad was first projected onto walls in downtown New York. These early slideshows were accompanied by a not very ballad-like soundtrack. Think more Femme Fatale by the Velvet Underground. The installation places all the images in proximity on three walls. I had anticipated this curation to dissipate the rawness of Goldin’s photography. Instead, it intensifies its intimacy. The viewer is overwhelmed by the searing mix of desire and pain.
Installation view with Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1973-86). Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd / Gagosian
Such impassioned emotion mustn’t be overly glorified, however. Living in a far freer time than that of the 1970s, we are free to pursue love with far fewer barriers to self-expression. The more melancholic images also remind us of the fearful uncertainty that surrounded the early days of the AIDs epidemic, and the love that was to be lost to ravaging illness. The image titled Greer and Robert on the Bed, New York City (1982) depicts a lovers’ tiff, rendered in the blurred ghostliness of a waif-like Greer Lankton.
Drug dependency has defined much of Goldin’s work, in her material art and the art of her activism. Goldin herself, having recovered from heroin addiction in the 1980s, found herself in the throes of an OxyContin addiction in 2014. Being prescribed the drug after wrist surgery, she quickly became hooked. She then flipped the temptations of ruination into a force for advocacy. She has succeeded in overturning status quos in the art industry, campaigning against the Sackler family empire. The family have long financed galleries worldwide, all while covering up the evil source of their success: the ‘snowstorm’ of prescriptions. The 2022 film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed follows Goldin’s militant activism against the opioid crisis. Goldin’s P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) campaign has included making prescriptions ‘snow’ from balconies at the Guggenheim. Another: a mass die-in at the Met Museum, accessorised by prescription bottles in the central water feature. Her campaign sparked a momentous movement from museums to reject Sackler funding and begin removing their name from gallery wings.
The Ballad long preceded Goldin’s activism against the Sacklers. Confronting the romantic dependencies of her subjects led me to muse on how shallow the dopamine hits of the 2020s are. By comparison, we’re living in a time of chronic ambivalence- ambivalence to a fated suburban banality, knot tied and two kids in tow.
The neoliberal gamification of love is sweeping people up. This gamification of love, in turn, becomes the gamification of emotion. Indeed, reducing feelings to something swipeable felt like a useful shortcut to romance at first, but today’s generations see this reductionism as the status quo. There is no space for the melancholia of Kafka’s Letters to Milena. Instead, blue light dopamine obstructs the space for melancholy. Or ecstasy, for that matter. We funnel any of our remaining energy into ego-bruising and possessive electronic dating. In neoliberalism, every aspect of love is commodified, digitised and datafied. The apps facilitate a dangerous impunity. And so, we struggle to reconcile the paradox of possessive monogamy with intimate disposability.
Goldin (1986) underscores that men and women are unsuitable to the extent that they require each other. This captures the perils of interdependency, even as yearning outweighs the unsuitability. I think what I love about this description is that it helps us understand how irrational love is. In turn, it vindicates love. Dependency is unhealthy, but also sustaining. Limerence is both the peril of this unsuitability and the urgency of unrequited intensity.
This intensity of feeling is now the topic of scorn by TikTokers, who have co-opted the term limerence to demonise romantic infatuation. Originally coined in 1979 by Dorothy Tennov, the term is discussed in its dual nature. She likens it to addiction, while also stressing its fundamentality to human nature. She claims its force ‘to power the very revolution of the planet’ (Tennov, 1998, p. 33). Yet, co-optive self-proclaimed therapists online provide advice on how to purge and quash these feelings, seeking to rid people of their hopeless romanticism, while ironically profiting from it- encouraging an emotional anaesthesia. Like the gamification of love, people are attempting to formulate a rational response to romance- or worse, an apathetic response. The visceral passion of Goldin’s Ballad is being eroded by this digitalisation of love and empathy. You see, TikTokers urge us to fear this limerent state.
Bygone Ballads on unrequited love have been replaced by the demonisation of affect and melancholy. ‘Self-help’ in a playtoo hard to get era, instead pushes us to walk away. To shuffle towards a chronic ambivalence, leaving heartache to actors on big screens. Over-rationalisation of feeling is symptomatic of our world’s roboticization. After all, the only thing we will always have over AI is true emotional intelligence.
The perils of succumbing to a digitised apathy run far deeper than just repressed heartache. We face a wider risk: the tendency to anaesthetise affect by resorting to an emotional ambivalence. Goldin’s subjects so powerfully remind us that emotional tumult is fundamental to the human experience.
Bibliography
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed. 2022. [Film] Directed by Laura Poitras. United States: Praxis Films, Participant, HBO Documentary Films.
Goldin, N., 1986. Photographer Nan Goldin Interviewed by Aperture’s Mark Holborn [Interview] (Summer 1986).
Tennov, D., 1998. Love and limerence : the experience of being in love. 2nd ed. Lanham, Maryland: Scarborough House.
Featured Image: Greer and Robert on the bed, New York City(1982). Photograph: Nan Goldin / Gagosian
I’ve been thinking a lot about Brian Friel’s masterpiece, ‘Translations’: a story of the anglicisation of Irish place names by the British government in the 1830s. I absolutely recommend reading this short wonder of a play, suitable for all journeys, such as my own on a dusty Transpennine to Manchester last summer.
Reading ‘Translations’ will not just imbue an intimate understanding of those of us across the Irish Sea, but communities across the world who have experienced similar numb erasure of their cultures, heritage, and identity. At a point in the play, a character named Hugh is talking to a British soldier and explains why he does not speak their language, saying ‘English […] couldn’t really express us.’
Why, apart from my deep-rooted Nationalism and unwavering resentment, did this line stick with me so steadfastly? My reason is not exactly what I feel Friel had in mind, and it is slightly ironic that I’m going to try to explain myself using English, but I really will try – just bear with me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult it can be to express ourselves, especially when it feels that language is failing us. It is noticed particularly when trying to cope with some sort of hurt or grief, how difficult (near impossible) it is to translate our own feelings. In Adichie’s ‘Notes on Grief’, she talks about how ‘glib condolences can feel’, and how much ‘grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.’ This failure, and grasping for something, anything that feels big enough. Some words large enough, massive enough, encompassing enough, to even touch the periphery of grief. Saying it over and over doesn’t help, saying it over and over doesn’t help. How can we truly express ourselves if language is incapable?
The ebbs and flows of our minds don’t always feel explainable by words. What I’m feeling in this present moment isn’t always able to be transcribed. How can we possibly convey the depth of our love for a friend, the joy or sorrow of a moment, feeling so frustratingly restrained by our words? English can feel so bland, so empty of all nuances. A feelings chart of choices staring back, suggesting mad, bad, sad, glad – how can we expect to slot ourselves neatly into such boxes, such maddeningly smug rhyming boxes?
For Irish people, at least, there seems a visceral reason for this weakness, which I can admit (humbly) was put more eloquently by Joyce than I ever could. He describes the Irish as a people, ‘condemned to express themselves in a language not their own’ (Portrait of the Artist in Exile). Following these meandering thoughts, it reminded me of something Woolf says in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (please observe a moment of reverence for this hallowed work). She talks about the struggle of female authorship for the Austens, Elliots, and Brontës who came before us, illuminating their struggle of translating their ‘female thoughts’, when the only tools they had were masculine novels. For this intrepid female author, ‘there was no common sentence ready for her to use’ and instead she had to make her own.
Could something like the loss of language be the source of our emotional impotence, perhaps the reason we communicate through dry wit rather than emotive phrases and ‘feeling’ words? All Irish people, and I suspect many non-Irish people, can recognise the sometimes stifling, suffocating inability to express our feelings, itself a feeling of such intense discomfort at the thought of even approaching vulnerability that we’d sooner keep it inside.
To turn back to Friel, and with a more positive spin than the gloomy picture I have been painting thus far, it is through art and literature, and music and film that we become able to translate ourselves. A poem or song can reverberate across the world, regardless of language. It is writers, like Woolf and Friel, who can translate our suffering and struggles into something that makes sense, that feels that it does us justice.
It is art, and language, that can bring us comfort in these times, a fierce reminder that we are not alone. — Particularly the Irish language, which Friel so lovingly depicts in ‘Translations,’ a language that certainly was not created for efficiency. Some Irish is wonderfully silly, such as Smugairle ron (smug-AR-leh ROAN)– the word for jellyfish that translates to ‘seal snot’ and Bunbhriste (bunya-vreesh-ta), which are trousers that are nearly worn out but still wearable.
Then others can leave more of a mark, like one my brother ,Conall, shared with me recently – Aduantas (ah-dwon-tes), which is the feeling of being somewhere new, a light fear with a tinge of sadness. The idea that a language can describe something so familiar so perfectly, is encapsulated by the author Manchan Magan (man-han magan) who says the Irish language is not just ‘different forms of grammar and syntax, but different ways of seeing the world.’
How beautiful and comforting that someone before us has not only been through this same thing, felt these feelings, traversed the emotional landscape, but felt them to the extent that they needed a word just for it! I think this, for me, is the true beauty of Friel’s writing, every Irish word and phrase has SO much meaning in it. From our Irish souls to our history, conflict, and craic, it is a beautiful language that somehow says so much more than words usually can. It cannot really be translated because the words are a feeling and they are who we are.
So, whether you take from this that you should listen to more Kneecap (which you probably should), or learn more Irish (I definitely should), the language is closer than you may think. It surrounds us, and with words such as Saoirse (freedom) and Cara (friend) comes an ability to express something beyond words.
Grá mór.
(FOOTNOTE: Massive thank you to my dear friend Caleb for his recommendation of this play, and for all the books I’ve stolen from him since.)
Featured Image: One of the more unfortunate results of the anglicization of place names – from the Irish word ‘Magh’, meaning ‘plain’. / Flickr
On the night of the 20th of October, thousands of Madrileños gathered in the Plaza de Callao, milling beneath the overhead screens. They were followers of an artist whose career has moved unpredictably between flamenco, reggaetón, and experimental pop, anticipating the release of her new album’s title and cover. The moment was oddly subdued; there would be no spectacle, just the pause of a crowd prepared to read meaning into an image. Rosalía, having taken a three-year hiatus since MOTOMAMI, reclaims the spotlight with her monumental fourth album, LUX. This time, she collaborates with the London Symphony Orchestra for a record meshing pop, classical, and operatic influences, while nodding to her flamenco roots. She sings in thirteen languages (Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English, Sicilian, Hebrew, Mandarin, German, Arabic, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Latin, and Japanese), and blends almost as many genres.
CatalanNews, Rosalía’s Lux: A search for meaning in the doomscrolling era / Madrid’s Callao Square with thousands of Rosalia fans during the presentation of her latest album, Lux, on October 20, 2025 / Rafa Ortiz – Sony
LUX stands out as Rosalía’s most poetically and sonically ambitious work to date, but its stylistic multiplicity is far from self-indulgent; instead, it serves a singular theme: the collective longing for the divine. Critics’ year-end lists have placed LUX at the top of 2025’s defining albums, not for its ambition so much as for its rare candour in approaching faith and interior life without irony. Even the Vatican’s Culture Minister gave his blessing – “When a creator like Rosalía speaks of spirituality, it means that she captures a profound need in contemporary culture to approach spirituality, to cultivate an inner life.”
The album arrives amid a wider cultural moment in which the music industry routinely borrows religious symbolism for popular reproduction, while neglecting its theological meaning (Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God). It is a trend nowhere more visible than in pop music and its surrounding visual imagery, where narratives of the divine are handled with a flippancy rarely extended to other traditions (rock music tends at least to engage its source material with a degree of fidelity).
In practice, this produces a familiar cycle of provocation, most recognisably with Christian symbols: Madonna’s burning crosses and stigmata in the music video for Like a Prayer, Lady Gaga’s Judas released a week before Easter, or artists such as Lil Nas X masquerading as Christ on the cross, a figure whose appropriation now seems uniquely consequence-free. Most recently, Sabrina Carpenter’s Feather got a priest demoted. These popstars arrive primed for the inevitable, perhaps staged controversy, armed with a sassy clapback (“Jesus was a Carpenter”), but always sorry-not-sorry. Irony functions here as a safety net, allowing artists to touch the sacred without risking the accountability of belief or the vulnerability of transformation.
All hope is, as ever, not lost. It is into this landscape, saturated with religious imagery yet starved of its respective meaning, that Rosalía releases LUX. The album offers one of the most sustained engagements with faith in global pop since Kanye West’s Jesus Is King, a parallel underscored by common collaborator, Yeezus producer Noah Goldstein. Throughout LUX, Rosalía reclaims religious symbolism by striking visual and lyrical means.
CatalanNews, Rosalía’s Lux: A search for meaning in the doomscrolling era / Album artwork for ‘Lux’, the fourth album by Rosalía / Noah Dillon – Sony
On the album cover, she dons a white nun’s veil and hugs herself in a top resembling a straitjacket. But her expression reads more as ecstasy than pain. The image holds the kind of ambivalence Rosalía, like a good theologian, seems to have mastered. Perhaps she’s communicating the idea of self-love through spiritual discipline and self-restraint. Like many of the record’s songs, it echoes an all-embracing motif: the intimacy of being seen by God.
The title, meaning “light” in Latin, is echoed in the album’s fourth song Porcelana, “ego sum lux mundi” (“I am the light of the world”), quoting Jesus’ speech to his followers at the temple in the Gospel of John (8:16). Perhaps the title is also inspired by Simone Weil, whose quote from Gravity and Grace, “Love is not consolation, it is light”, features as an epigraph on the vinyl and CD editions. This book is one of many mystical works that influenced Rosalía’s lyrics, nestled amongst biblical passages and the hagiographies of female saints and mystics, including St. Joan of Arc and St. Teresa of Ávila.
Mystics, or those who have experienced mysticism, are classified by the rare, sometimes ecstatic and always transcendent experiences of the “immediate or direct presence of God” (Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God…The Foundations of Mysticism, Vol. 1). Rosalía cites the work of Clarice Lispector as a literary touchstone, less a mystic than a modern articulator of mystical intimacy, whose prose reflects the inwardness her lyrics seek to embody. She tells The Guardian, “I’m tiring of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities. I’m really much more excited about saints.”
The songs themselves draw faithful inspiration from age-old Christian theology. Relíquia (Relic) references the tradition of relics and their veneration, and Berghain’s lyrics touch on the Eucharist and the Communion of Saints. She was challenged in an interview with the New York Times, “Are you asking a lot of your audience to absorb a work like this?” Her response: “Absolutely, I am. The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite. That’s what I’m craving.”
The Guardian, Rosalía: Lux review – a demanding, distinctive clash of classical and chaos that couldn’t be by anyone else / Abandon preconceptions … Rosalía
Cortona Polyptych by the Italian early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico / Diocesan Museum of the Cortona Chapter, Cortona, Italy
Rosalía’s visual language refuses to ironize religious symbols by placing discipline above indulgence. In the album’s visual rollout, she appears with a bleached ring dyed onto the crown of her head, visible in each song’s Spotify canvas and in recent interviews. It’s a mark that reads as more than a contemporary halo, and instead evokes the tonsure historically worn by Catholic monks as a sign of submission and withdrawal from self-fashioning. Here, Rosalía’s specific style recalls the Roman corona, formerly worn by St. Cuthbert and St. Bede. These shorn crowns rendered interior discipline visibly legible on the body. Paired with gloves that evoke penitential or flagellatory vestments, Rosalía’s styling resists the theatrics of costume, gesturing towards the ascetic formation of the body rather than the body as styled for consumption.
In the mystical tradition Rosalía draws from, the body is disciplined to become capable of exposure to the divine, of being seen without disguise. That logic comes into full view in Dios es un Stalker (“God is a Stalker”). The song draws on a tradition of writing that confronts the intolerable intimacy of an all-seeing God, from the theological insistence on divine proximity found in Simone Weil, to a stylistic affinity with Clarice Lispector’s prose, which exposes consciousness at its most unguarded. Rosalía boldly sings from a God’s eye view, something she admits to France Inter is “absurd – [the song] contains a sense of humour.” Through this lens, she adopts the metaphor of a stalker who follows her and knows her every move, but… in a loving way.
That divine knowledge extends even to what we would rather conceal. When Rosalía sings “Lo sé tus deseos indeseables” (“I know your undesirable desires”), she confronts the listener with a God who sees beneath the layers of moral self-presentation. She continues, “Mi aliento es el viento que te roza el pelo” (“My breath is the wind grazing your hair”), indicative of a distinctly biblical intimacy. Psalm 139 gives this knowledge its theological weight – “O Lord, you have searched me and known me… Where can I go from your Spirit?” Rosalía allows the discomfort of being fully seen to remain unresolved, placing the listener inside that exposure. The effect recalls the interior pressure found in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., which dismantles irony entirely and forces her narrator into a consciousness so exposed it borders on annihilation.
Rosalía modernises the concept of omniscience through technological language. The image of God with an “exploding inbox” (“Tengo un buzón explotado”) reminds me of the scene in the 2003 film Bruce Almighty, where Bruce (Jim Carrey) gains powers from God (Morgan Freeman), and has to manage just that.
YARN, What a bunch of whiners. This is gonna suck up my whole life. / https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/b5ff545e-e029-49f7-bf10-267aea0e01ca
Rosalía attempts to communicate the impossibility of relating to divine characteristics, a notion underscored by the song’s most self-aware line, “Mi omnipresencia me tiene agotada” (“My omnipresence has me exhausted”). The exhaustion, of course, belongs to the metaphor, not to God. Yet Rosalía’s phrasing recalls the human struggle to imagine infinitude; we project our limits onto God because no other language is available. This echoes the concept of the analogia entis, in which every analogy for God’s identity both reveals and fails. Rosalía knowingly writes within this failure and continues to meditate on such contradictions throughout LUX. In fact, it forms the central motif of La Yugular: “you who are far and at the same time closer than my own jugular vein.”
The stalking metaphor’s greatest weakness lies in Rosalía’s simultaneous portrayal of divine pursuit as non-coercive. “Detrás de ti, voy” (“Behind you, I go”) is immediately tempered by “yo que siempre espero que vengan a mí” (“I who always waits for them to come to me”). This is the song’s central tenet – the paradox of God as omnipresent yet partially hidden. Were God’s presence unavoidable, human freedom would collapse into inevitability. In the Gospel of John, Jesus refuses to jump off the Temple roof and save himself miraculously to prove his divinity to surrounding crowds. Rosalía acknowledges this: “No me gusta hacer intervencion divina” (“I don’t like doing divine intervention”), conveying that love cannot force itself. Also explored in the film Bruce Almighty, Bruce can do almost everything with his divine powers except convince his girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston) to stay with him, because it’s against her free will.
Simone Weil speaks on the hiddenness of God in Gravity and Grace, insisting that He withdraws precisely to make room for human love. For Love to be real it presents a choice to accept it or to flee from it, a condition essential also to human existence: “There exists a ‘deifugal’ force. Otherwise all would be God” (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace). In Dios es un Stalker, Rosalía does not resolve the tension of divine withdrawal but renders it as waiting, marked by a presence that watches and loves without interference.
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini / Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Once such a divine gaze is acknowledged, Rosalía asks herself what must be relinquished. This forms the basis of Sauvignon Blanc. The song conveys how once irony is refused and intimacy faced, familiar understandings of pleasure and consumption are transformed. The song draws on the writings of St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), Spanish mystic, Patron saint of Spain and chess, and first female Doctor of the Church for her advanced spiritual writings. As a Carmelite nun she renounced her wealth for the convent. She is often recognised today from Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652) in Rome, depicting a vision famously detailed in her autobiography as her Transverberation. During the vision, she experiences her heart being pierced by an angel’s spear, a moment she describes as “a sweetness so extreme that one could not possibly wish it to end.”
In Sauvignon Blanc, Rosalía rejects the idolisation of material things, perhaps, like St. Teresa and other ascetics, denying material pleasures entirely. She even sings that she’ll burn her Rolls-Royce and that she doesn’t want pearls or caviar anymore: “To my God, I’ll listen / My Jimmy Choo’s, I’ll throw them away”. As Spencer Kornhaber says in The Atlantic, “Rosalía, like many of us, is asking herself what she’d be willing to give up to save her soul… Her autonomy? Her convenience? Her Jimmy Choos?”
Rosalía’s Savvy B isn’t about “making wine cool and fun again” for Gen Z like I’ve seen suggested recently. It’s worlds apart from Drake namechecking Moscato, Jay-Z on Cristal, or Taylor Swift’s many lyrical wine references. In an interview with Apple Music, Rosalía affirms she cited inspiration for the song from St. Teresa’s work, likely The Interior Castle, in which the saint describes her experience of “divine intoxication,” or spiritual ecstasy. Teresa used the metaphor of a “wine cellar,” where God invites the soul to drink “divine love” – a Love that Rosalía sings she would leave all worldly pleasures for. Teresa herself derives the image of the wine cellar from Song of Songs 2:4, which reads“He brought me into the cellar of wine; he set in order Love in me.” Wine is also evoked as a symbol for spiritual fulfilment in Psalm 23: “my cup runneth over”, meaning “I have more than enough for my needs”.
Diana Fountain in Lerwick, Shetland, by James Hunter
Sauvignon Blanc isn’t a wine of status, but poured abundantly for the soul. One of St. Teresa’s greatest quotes, “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing away… Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices”, has sure influence on Rosalía’s lyrics: “Ya no tengo miedo del pasado, esta en el fondo, de mi copa de Sauvignon Blanc” (I no longer have fear / of the past / it is at the back / of my glass of Sauvignon Blanc). In a cultural economy fluent in irony, religious symbols are safe because they can often be inverted and discarded without consequence for the artist. Rosalía’s LUX reveals that mysticism offers pop culture what irony cannot… a commitment to truth, whether understood ontologically, as fidelity to the moral and metaphysical claims carried by religious source material, or artistically, as the discipline of approaching that material in a way that maintains harmony with its origins rather than merely borrowing its surface. In doing so she opens onto a reordering of desire largely absent from contemporary pop music, exploring intimacy without irony, pleasure without detachment, and faith without spectacle. Amid a popular culture saturated with symbols starved of meaning, that assertion may be the album’s most radical gesture.
