You’re Never Too Old To Be A Psychotic Ex-Boyfriend

I once meticulously crafted a revenge mixtape, entirely dedicated to an ex who had hooked up with a friend I had introduced her to. It had some Helmet, some Tool, some standard mean and bitter type stuff. I never gave it to anyone, but it helped me laugh a little, and move on, quickly.

I think I had just turned 20 around that time, and it was one of a few silly little emo spasms I’ve had in my life. There was also this one time when I was about seventeen, when I told all my friends my girlfriend had killed herself, just to avoid having to explain the breakup.

As much as it pains me to think back to those totally lame moments in my life, I take solace in the fact that I never produced a six and a half minute snuff film starring an avatar of some chick I had plenty of good reasons to get the hell away from anyway. Like Marilyn Manson has. At 40 years old.

The clip for Running To The Edge Of The World is mostly a webcam style shot of Manson mourning in anguish into his drapes, but then at the end, we’re led into a room where Manson is seen violently beating an eventually naked caricature of ex-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood. To death.

The clip is totally safe for work, as long as you’re unemployed.

In a Q&A with TIME, Manson said: “I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost love. I’ve lost money. And this record is really about loss. The last album had a lot of romantic, Shakespearean ideals attached to the music, like ‘The world doesn’t understand us. Let’s die together.’ Now? This record is more about, ‘If you say you’ll be with me until I die and then you change your mind, you should run very fast. Because I’ll kill you.’”

If you’re a teenager in (or freshly out of) Love, that’s a fuckin’ righteous quote. In context, it’s a little harder to swallow. But as easy as it is, there’s just no point in making fun of Marilyn Manson for being Marilyn Manson. We don’t need to go there. It’s like making fun of Tom Cruise for worshipping Xenu. Yeah, he’s totally nuts, but it’s not like anyone’s ever going to make him feel dumb about it, it’s his fucking religion. You’re laughing at a wall.

We’ve always tried to take the high road as typical scumbag critics, focusing instead on the grade of Manson’s music. And while this new single is not the strongest track by any means, his latest album outshines the shtick for the most part. With that said (and we don’t want to presume too much about what was surely a complex relationship between Manson and the young actress), if we let everything else slide, we have to ask: What grown ass man takes a 22 year old girl’s pillow talk as a binding contract?

Well all’s fair in love and war they say, and it’s great that Mr. Manson still has strong emotions to artistically express, unlike some other 90s survivors. We just hope we’re just taking the video a tad too seriously, and that it’s just an extravagant version of that silly mixtape I made ten years ago. We hope Mr. Manson is in a comfortable place somewhere, laughing at the puzzled looks on all of our faces, and moving on with his life.