Of all the definitions of poetry and art that I've ever read, it's the architect Christopher Alexander's that I love the most: it is the interdependences of rhythm and concept, the ways in which every word or facet or sensation or idea informs every other, that create vast worlds within impossibly small spaces, capturing the seemingly infinite in an object so tiny you can hold it in your hands. When I taught poetry, briefly, I'd use Kobayashi Issa' famous haiku, inspired by the death of his two young children, to demonstrate how much can be said with so little:

Neatly chopping the already-terse form of the haiku in half, he creates such extraordinary longing, peaceful resignation mixed with agony and grief. The reflections and repetitions are necessary, not superfluous—and so is the repetition of the repetition, the twinning of the twinning, interlocking the two phrases, enjambing the image with the emotion, insisting that the two are one and the same.

Poetry and art at its finest is by necessity delicate, even when it's overtly tough or forceful or aggressive. Its delicacy is a byproduct of this interdependence: if you are unwilling to value its interwoven meanings, to appreciate how each facet adds a different inflection to all the rest, then it's easy to reduce a work of art to something simpler, cruder, stupider. Bad narratives about art can be infectious, because they're always easy—and their relative simplicity starts to overwrite the complexity of the initial art, lending such emphasis to one set of inflections that all the others seem to melt away.

Perhaps the most infuriating and delightful thing about Sparks—which, if you're reading this after reading essays #1 through #3, you know is a band—is their commitment to finding artistry within seeming banality. Some part of them never left the California beaches behind: they're fascinated with the dumbest of lovers, the cheapest of loves, and the simplest of all longings, which is the yearning of the undesirable. They are equally good at lampooning idiot lovers and sympathizing, wholly sincerely, with the dejected and lonely. Perhaps this is why they are similarly, and surprisingly, gifted at teasing out narratives of abuse: on some level, an abusive relationship is between someone who yearns to be seen and loved and someone who never intends to see or love back. On another level, the cruelty and pathos is that this is a two-way street: the ones doing the abusing want to be seen and loved too, but refuse to reciprocate, or even lash out because they don't feel seen or loved enough. And at times, in toxic situations, neither person sees or loves the other, and each yearns to be seen back.

What Sparks seemingly understands is that banality is fertile ground for poetry because it says so little, just as the most banal expressions of love capture some of its most contradictory multitudes. Does overuse of the word "love" devalue it, or is the problem that it overvalues love, assigning the idea of "love" so many definitions that it becomes hard to separate out each from the others? When Sparks sings "I want you, and only you, and only you, my love," so many times that the words begin to lose their meaning, is the sinister part that cruel and manipulative people use these words? Or is it that sweet and genuine people use those same words, too?

Love, for Sparks, is captured in the broadest of strokes, with the crudest of binaries: are you ugly, or are you beautiful? Are you rich, or are you poor? Yet these binaries complicate more than they simplify, because each one adds a new layer whose meaning may or may not be trustworthy. In their song "Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls," the narrator sneeringly insists that the ugly men, who he insists are also dull and unaccomplished, only attract beautiful women because of their riches. He knows this because he, too, lost a woman to a rich, ugly, dull, and unaccomplished man. Is this a lampoon on the rich? A lament for the ways in which money fouls romance? Or is this a satire of the kind of man who blames all his romantic problems on money? The song doesn't make it clear which way it's supposed to be read—and its intentional ambiguity, not any of its possible interpretations, is where it finds its meaning.

The band's genius is that it takes what should be novelty songs, joke ideas so good and so transparently silly that they inspired Weird Al, of all people (whose song Virus Alert is his tribute to the "Sparks sound") and transform them into deep, challenging, and thought-provoking songs—not by contradicting the banality, but by embracing it. The challenge of the banality is that it's too obvious to mean anything; the challenge of the interpretations of the banality is that each one only captures one possible layer of meaning, while rejecting the others. And the trap, if you want to call it that, is that these interpretations can't be dismissed outright, because each one holds a piece of the truth. "Every interpretation is equally valid" stops being an easy way out, because each interpretation wants you to dismiss all the others, insisting that its validity cancels out the rest. So what does it mean if they're all true at once? Only that each must be handled gently, not with dogmatic fervor but with quiet contemplation, if you want to find any meaning there at all.

Take any of their songs too seriously, and you'll miss its ironies; don't take it seriously enough, and you'll miss its sincerities. Which happens to be the way most pop songs work anyway: they're enjoyable because you can't take them seriously, and it's because they're so enjoyable that you can buy into them so seriously, when life circumstances require you to belt them and believe in them. Sparks' music just takes that a step further, and write songs that contradict themselves. To belt them is to believe and disbelieve them all at once, no matter which angle you're coming at them from. (I think of the way that actors like Bryan Cranston and Brian Cox, in interviews about their famously terrible characters, often sound like they're earnestly sympathizing with their characters' worldviews, even as they're wholly aware of how terrible they are. It is because of their complete empathy for, and brilliant understanding of, those worldviews that their rejection means anything at all—to reject what you don't fully understand isn't worth much of anything to begin with.)

All of which is to say that Sparks writes a lot of seemingly-dumb songs about definitely-dumb lovers, often taking a stance akin to: "This person is pretty shitty, but wouldn't it be nice if he could fall in love?" Not that love would redeem the shittiness—oftentimes it explicitly would not—but that shitty people still feel pain, still feel heartbroken and lonely and fear their own worthlessness, and still do things that, to their own minds at least, are not only understandable but even inevitable. They are trapped by themselves, doomed by themselves, and they will trap and doom others in the process, but they are not unthinking or unfeeling or remotely unaware. It is their knowledge of all these things that makes them truly tragic and genuinely monstrous: tragic because they see everything coming even as it happens, monstrous because they are nonetheless wholly responsible, and allow themselves to wreak destruction with the self-pitying excuse that they never had a choice, poor them, woe is them. Even their sympathy for the ones they destroy is a form of self-pity: weep for me, for I was human enough to weep for them, even as I ruined their lives.

On some level, all of this is very funny. The excuses and rationalizations are funny; the inevitability is funny; the ironies are funny; the sincerities are funnier yet. Which is why this all can be wrapped up, glibly, as a joke. The pithiness doesn't mean it's lost its roots. The pithiness reveals the roots. It's the place where every contradiction cancels out, every binary reduces itself to nothing, and all that remains is the banality that everybody can agree upon. Which makes the banality itself kind of tragic, the byproduct of a struggle that left no survivors but the dumbest possible takeaway, too ambivalent to even be taken as a moral. But Sparks does not write amoral songs: they write songs whose morality doesn't resolve to a simple equation. An overt moral would be more banal than no moral whatsoever, because it suggests a simple truth to a situation whose only truth is conflict and opposition.

Fate, in drama, is inevitable, not simple. Its inevitability has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with the idea that there is no way out. In Greek tragedy, this meant being part of a contraption that the gods had set in motion, less for reasons of parable than because the gods, conflicted beings themselves, simply used us as cogs in their gearworks; the great sin of Greek tragedy is hubris, which simply means the belief that you are somehow exempt from this truth, and your punishment is merely that you will be shown to be wrong. In Shakespearean tragedy, fate is more circumstantial and more human—I love Harold Bloom's idea that every Shakespearean protagonist could dismantle every Shakespearean antagonist except for their own—but the idea still stands. People will attempt to take every way out of their own fate, and every attempt will fail. Whether or not a Shakespeare adaptation is good comes down to how brilliantly, and how convincingly, it gets you to believe that this could not have happened any other way.

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There are several curious and difficult statements in Annette that are somewhat tricky to resolve.

First, there is the declaration, repeated near the beginning and towards the end, that "True love always finds a way—but true love often goes astray." The trickiness there lies in the phrase "true love," to describe two lovers who don't seem to successfully convince us that they're in love. ("We love each other so much," they sing, to themselves and to us—a phrase that guarantees nobody believes them, including one another.) Are we meant to take this phrasing as ironic? The way the songs are written suggests that, no, this part is maybe serious.

Next, there is Annette's declaration, of her parents, that "both of you were using me to your own ends." A bit unfair, given that Henry led her mother to her death, murdered her possible father, and exploited her musical talents for personal gain, and that Ann mostly... told Henry that she'd haunt him through his daughter's voice. Is this a case of blame-the-victim? An attempt to take Ann's operatic curse as seriously as a far-more-realistic depiction of spousal abuse?

Finally, there are Ann's words to Henry in the number he sings after he's convicted of murder:

While Ann sings those lines, are we meant to see these as words Henry's putting in her mouth, or words that she would genuinely speak were she alive? Is this how we're supposed to think she'd feel about the man who killed her and another man and exploited her daughter? Would Ann be so sympathetic, so sorrowful? Or are the words her ghost sings to him later, about haunting him in prison, the "true" words she'd be singing? (As a counterpoint, is the ghost we see really her? Or is this the part where Henry's guilt and sorrow projects a version of her that isn't real, as a vengeful spirit who will possess him with his own grief?)

Before he kills her, Henry delivers a "comic" monologue on-stage about murdering his wife; when the police question him about this, he snarls at them, insisting that his acts are "full of provocation." The police also ask him whether he was truly faithful to Ann, to which he responds: "That is an insult! I loved Ann, was always faithful!" It is uncertain whether this second line is a lie—uncertain, and possibly important, because it informs whether his wife's death was genuinely a drunken accident or pre-mediated. After Ann's death, we see Henry freely working his way through scores of nameless women, but it's not infidelity at that point. Before her death, we are treated to a song about six women accusing Henry of abusing them—but the film makes it unclear when these incidents happen, and whether or not these accusations are real or just a terrible dream of Ann's. It is equally possible that Henry has abused multiple women while married to Ann, that he abused multiple women before he married Ann, and that he has abused no women, but has shown enough signs of dangerous instability that Ann's anxious dreams are warning her about her own impending demise.

Does it matter? Either way, Henry leads her to her death; either way, Henry murders the man who claims to be Annette's father. Either way, he is a monster who loses everything. If it matters, it's not because it's the difference between Henry's being a good or a bad person, or because it matters to Ann in any way. It matters, if anything, because maybe it matters whether this was true love. It's the difference between this being a story about a monster who never loved his wife, and its being a story about a monster who loved her deeply.

In a song that was cut from the final film, Henry laments the effect of his child's birth on his comedy:

It's more-or-less stated verbatim that the struggles in his marriage with Ann begin with the collapse of his career, and the ascendance of hers. Later, when he begins to exploit Annette for his own gain, he's explicit about his circumstances: "You know what my future looks like / from a money point of view. / With the income from performance, / she could have a future too." But while his wife is still alive, that issue's moot: his finances don't matter, because her finances are his.

Is this a simple matter of his resenting his wife for being successful when he isn't? This cut song doesn't mask the ways his anxiety revolve around his perceived manliness, or lack thereof: he's "lessened," he's made "impotent" by her "looming shadow." But is this really about money? "I'm less a man creatively," he says—not financially. And what about her is robbing him of his comic talents? Not her success, much as that line about "shadows" might suggest otherwise, but his love. Annette hasn't made him impotent because he has to be a gentle caretaker: she's made him impotent because he loves her. That's such a blunt, obvious line that it somewhat masks what a strange thing it is to say. Does Henry's creative success matter more than his wife and kids? Is the laughter of strangers more central to his life than his family is? You can't even ask whether he prefers the crowd's love to Ann's, because it's clear that the crowd doesn't love him, which is one of the reasons he despises them so much.

It's not a matter of jealousy, because Ann's love for him is unmissable—almost comically so. (The conductor only becomes Henry's rival after Ann's death, curiously enough, and even he makes it clear that, while he wished Ann would have loved him as much as she loved Henry, she never did.) It's not a matter of money or fame, if Henry's to be believed—though he laments his star being in decline, it's unclear why his star was dear to him in the first place. And while we see his career-ending performance, where he tries to make a joke out of fantasies where he murders Ann, his career begins tanking long before then, for reasons we're never explicitly shown. 

There's a hint of a reason in Henry's repeated claim that he has "sympathy for the abyss," a line the Maels found so important that they closed their musical with a song of that name, and made its penultimate line a plea from Henry to Annette to never gaze into it herself. But this is itself a statement so vague that its meanings, too, will have to be teased out. 

If there's an answer to be found, it lies in Henry's claim that he became a comedian "because it's the only way I know to tell the truth without getting killed." So what's he saying in the show that gets his act literally canceled? When he jokes about murdering his wife by refusing to fuck her, by instead somehow managing to tickle her to death? 

First, he implies that his initial cruelty is in not noticing her desire for sex. "I knew this shy smile meant she wanted to fuck," he tells his audience, "but this time, I pretended not to get it. And I kept on pretending and so she said it ever-so-shyly: 'Please, Henry, fuck me, Henry...' And I could see the effort in her smile, for her to ask that: to say those dirty words, to be wickеd and bold, so out of character..."

This, in and of itself, is not an explanation (though it is still very important, for reasons worth bringing up later). The explanation would be what Henry says next:

So instead, he tickles her, and he kills her. And to Henry's mind, this is the truth—and a truth that his audience kills him for daring to speak out loud.

Is the idea here really that love emasculates men, makes them weak? Is the idea that you can't fuck someone you love? Here, Henry's creative impotence seemingly becomes literal impotence—except that this, of course, is his creative work, the thing he's so terrified of losing his ability to express. And what is he expressing here? Not a physical impotence, for all the talk of sickness, but an emotional one. "Absolutely no desire left." But what does that desire stem from, if love poisons it? And why, moreover, is it so difficult for Ann to ask for, so "out of character" for her?

He can't desire her, so he makes her laugh—because Henry McHenry only makes people laugh when he despises them. And when he makes them laugh, he kills them. So he tickles Ann, and Ann dies. At the same time, though, he tickles her because he loves her—because, in loving her, he becomes unable to give her what she wants, this thing she struggles so much to ask for.

"I killed my wife," he says. "I didn't mean to... God knows, I didn't mean to." So why did he? Why didn't he want her, when he loved her? Why, when he didn't mean to kill her, did she die?

The implication, on some level, is that she died because she wanted him. She dies, in Henry's story, because she asks him for something he can't provide. But she's not simply asking for love: he can give her that. She's not asking him for family, because he can give her that too, and loves it, and loves Annette.

So the question becomes: what is Ann asking for? What does Ann want?

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The song which Ann becomes famous for singing is not her song. It is the song of her opera character, the song which runs throughout Annette in many guises, ultimately becoming the song Annette seems compelled, from infancy, to sing, whenever she is struck by light.

Ann herself is only given two songs before her death, one of which is a lullaby to Annette. The other serves as her sole internal monologue, the only glimpse we see of her motivations, her struggles, her fears.

Predictably, and infuriatingly, it is banal.

"There was a girl from the middle of nowhere," Ann begins, "utterly plain, a little plump. She sang alone in her bedroom," but "she didn't want to be there." So she sings and sings and sings, struggles and struggles and struggles, "till her voice became her royal realm." And there she finds her only home: "She wanted just to be there, only wanted to live there[...] forevermore."

So she heads west, "no longer plain, no longer plump." And her success is heralded by the arrival of men, but isn't defined by those men: "Her voice had brought her beauty and set her free," a curious conflation of "beauty" with freedom or release, "but she never listened to those men who came and whispered 'You're a flame to me.'" She is desired, but doesn't yet desire back; the love others have for her frees her, but doesn't bind her to them, the way it seems to bind Henry to his audience.

She sings of meeting a king, and of that king putting "her brand-new palace in jeopardy," but that's almost all she says of Henry here. We get more of her feelings for Henry in that comic monologue of Henry's than we get here. We do, however get two other brief lines about him, and each says something crucial. One, "People adore me and I adore this man," draws a parallel between her audience's relationship to her and her relationship to Henry—suggesting that, just as she never responded to the men who were drawn to her, she too has a helpless attraction to Henry, and one that might not be reciprocated. Which is reinforced by the standalone line that ends the sung part of her number, explicitly reflecting her story of those men:

This image is used in an earlier song, the maybe-a-dream-maybe-real-life press conference where six women each accuse Henry of abuse, violence, and anger. One woman, in a solo, explicitly delivers Ann a warning:

This, too, is kept somewhat vague. We never see Henry with these other women, and we never see Henry with Ann before they're already happily married. We never really get a picture of his "charms." And when we see him on stage, he treats his audience with conspicuous contempt... so is that the charm in question? If McHenry "is not what he seems," what's the thing that he isn't? He certainly seems like an angry, violence-prone individual every time that we see him.

What is the "flame" that Ann is drawn to? Moreover, is the suggestion that Henry isn't drawn to her? It would seem that he is drawn to Ann neither the same way that Ann is drawn to him nor to the way that other men are drawn to her. Henry himself doesn't seem to understand why: "What I see in her is obvious. What she sees in me... hmm. That's a little more puzzling."

And wouldn't that line of his suggest that Henry is drawn to her in some way? Well, that's a little more uncertain. In that same monologue, he talks about how, the first time he fell in love, he "woke up next to the girl, rushed out to buy myself the biggest motorbike I could find, and escaped, fast and far." But Ann, he says, has "changed" him. "How? I'm still not sure. Time will tell." Is it possible to be changed by someone without desiring them? What does he feel for her, what does he "see in her," if not attraction?

Why do Ann and Henry seem to be able to escape every man and woman but each other? The only possible answer can be: they are drawn to each other's voices, each other's artistry, each other's methods of expression. Ann makes it literal, when she describes her voice as her "royal realm;" later, when the conductor drives Henry to a murderous rage, the trigger is the revelation that the duet Henry and Ann used to sing together was written by the conductor in the first place. That violation—that the "true love" was another man's words, another man's song—seems to matter more even than the possibility that Annette isn't Henry's child. And when Henry learns that the conductor has taught Annette his old song, he's furious before he learns that the conductor wrote the song: as if the song himself is his love, as if the song is love itself, a material manifestation of the most elusive shared experience.

(It's only fitting that, in an opera penned by Sparks, true love is literally the most banal pop song in existence.)

In this light, Henry's creative impotence matters more than physical impotence would. He perceives it as his flame: the thing that draws audiences and Ann to him alike. To lose it would be to lose Ann, even if he loves her—the same way that he blames it for the loss of his audience. And the story he tells about killing her—"I didn't to, God knows I didn't mean to"—feels like a love story to him, even as it feels like violent and murderous to them. In his story, Henry fears losing his ability to please Ann, fears letting Ann down, and responds with the most pathetic incarnation of "his talent" possible: physical tickling as a substitute for both comedy and intimacy. He isn't fetishizing her death, he's expressing a fear that his love for her will somehow make him unworthy of her. Why wouldn't he fear that, when she explicitly sings that she's avoided every man who ever admitted to feeling drawn to her, and when his own experience of love has been of fleeing it?

When Henry drunkenly forces Ann to dance with him in the storm, what is her plea to him?

"I'll kill my voice out here!"

What does she say to trigger his final rage?

"My voice, Henry! Is nothing sacred to you?"

"God knows everything is sacred to you," he snarls in reply, moments before her death.

His fixation on the word "sacred" begins with his first comedy act: "Wish that she could be here now," he sneers, "but she's at the opera tonight. The opera: where everything is sacred." But of course he loves Ann and loves her voice—so what about the opera does he so resent? Is it really about Ann's career, about some toxic male resentment of his wife's success? Henry suggests otherwise in that same performance:

His performances, strange as they are, are an attempt to express a truth. Ann's are embodiments of a singular show: the one song we hear from it is repeated ad nauseam, as if emphasizing that it's a canned piece of music, not an improvisation, not even something that comes from Ann herself. (In the movie, Marion Cotillard is dubbed over by a professionally-trained opera singer during this piece: she is literally embodying a song rather than so much as singing it.) Her audience loves her, but what they love is that combination of vocal technique and embodiment; the piece they see her in isn't Ann herself.

This fact is reinforced by the way that her one-time lover shifts from accompanist to conductor, taking on more explicit roles of fulfilling others' needs: he, too, serves the opera, serves Ann herself, serves the symphony. His talents are no different from Ann's, in that sense. But his early ambition, when he aspires to graduate from accompanist to conductor, is to be seen for what he's done, and to put himself into the role: "Every bar will bear my own signature," as he says, which is what Ann is already doing, which is why he loves her.

Ann dies every night, but Henry is the one who must kill or be killed. (That first show of his ends in a hail of simulated gunfire.) He's the one who must try and get away with telling the truth—and if he doesn't manage it, the audience will despise him for it, as much as he already despises them. For them, it's disposable entertainment; for him, it's his life. Ann may fear losing her voice—and losing her marriage—but Henry loses his career and his identity, and with it, the only obvious signifier of the flame that drew Ann to him to begin with.

Why his resentment of the opera, though? This is where money begins to play a part. Henry says, during that opening monologue, that he comes from poverty; success, for him, wasn't an escape from "the middle of nowhere," it was a financial necessity. And clearly he wasn't successful enough, even at his peak, to survive the collapse of his career, which means that, before Ann, his livelihood required him to perpetually cater to his audience, transforming his life into something for them to laugh at, taking what fundamentally should not have been theirs and making it only theirs—theirs more than his, even.

Ann's talent, which was developed in her bedroom and "inside her chest," is mutable: it takes the form of what she performs, and makes it hers. When she performs a "sacred" piece, the audience loves it and loves her, because the part of it that's her is beautiful and the form it takes is inviolable. Her star rises, because it has nowhere to go but up—unless she threatens her voice, of course. Henry's act, meanwhile, changes every time that he does. Which means that, when he says that Ann has changed him, his fear is that Ann has ruined his present and his future.

Does that matter? Shouldn't Ann's love be all that matters? Well, yes—except that Henry doesn't understand why Ann loves him, and fears that she loves him for the same reasons that his audience does. Hence the nightmare fantasy where he tickles her to death.

And is an audience truly that easy to get away from? We know that Henry struggles to escape his, and that it's a tragic flaw that leads to murder and imprisonment. But is that solely his tragic failing? Can Ann escape her audience?

Let's go back to what Henry says during that second show:

Which character is this? Her opera character's, of course. It's not like Ann is a stranger to sex: baby aside, we see Henry giving her cunnilingus right at the start of the film. This isn't a first date, this is a married couple. And still Ann struggles. Because whatever her character is—a goddess, a queen—she is, in her way, expected to be, not only passive, but a victim. Just as Henry is expected to be monstrous: "The Ape of God," as his show describes him.

So when Henry says that he can't feel desire for Ann, that love has made him sick, could it be that part of what he's describing is a sudden unwillingness to have sex with her as her character demands it? In her show, Ann plays, not only an embodiment, but a body: a corpse in the making. Her opera song is, ultimately, a song about her and Henry—about his danger, about her fear—but that suggests that, even in character, she exists to be betrayed and murdered. Henry's character, meanwhile, is of a violent, angry, and abusive man—a character that he fears love will rob him of. "That hard edge," as he puts it, is disappearing, thanks to Ann and Annette both. In his story, when he fears not being able to give her what she wants, is he referring to sex? Or is he referring to sex as her opera role and his comic role both define it—as an act of aggressor and victim, love and lust at their most possessive?

Ann has accepted that she must die for her audience, while Henry struggles to kill them instead... but ultimately, neither of them can escape their roles. Which leads to the irony that, when Henry's actions lead to Ann's death, they are both doing precisely what their roles demand. He needn't have bothered with the performance anxiety after all: the performance he gave is exactly the one that Ann was trained to look for.

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As I wrote about previously, Henry's moment of repentance happens in the courtroom, when he realizes that all Ann wanted from him was his love. Here is where he imagines Ann's sorrow, "that we both can't be who we ought to be." Perhaps it is empathy, not avoidance of his guilt, that lets Henry see that Ann, too, wasn't where she should have been. Perhaps, in seeing her as someone who struggled as he struggled, Henry is finally seeing her, not as the sacred goddess whose perfection he both loves and resents, but as someone who hoped that he would save her too.

And perhaps there's no contradiction between this vision of Ann and the subsequent one of her as a vengeful spirit, vowing to haunt him for the rest of his life. Henry will be forever haunted by Ann, not purely out of guilt, but out of grief. And that will be true whether or not the final moment where he let her die was, in the moment, intentional—but more than that, the uncertainty of that moment will itself haunt him forever, because Henry is no more certain of his intentions than we are. That uncertainty, that lack of clearly-defined depth, doesn't make Henry simpler: it makes him more troubled, more complex. Often we conceive of depth as an answer to a question, something that clarifies, something that explains. But sometimes depth is lack of a certain answer: the inability to find clarity, because clarity lies too far down to be accessible. Sometimes depth is not clear water, but a storm.

As he's marched to the courtroom, the crowd chants one final song of their own:

Here is Sparks anticipating the reaction to their own opera, the simplification of moments that forever paints Henry as solely a villain, a wretched sociopath who destroys everything he touches. The convenience of simple interpretations is that, if one piece of a story is simple, then the rest must be as simple: nuance and complexity not only can be dismissed, but should be dismissed, because to look for nuance in the story of somebody vile is to do an injustice to everybody else involved. Who cares what the degree of murder was, when what really matters is the shared experience of despising someone who deserves their own despicability?
 

The grim joke, of course, being that they resent him not for taking Ann’s life but for taking her death. 

And the line that convicts and sentences him is his daughter’s—and the fact that she speaks it in front of the biggest audience of her, or Henry’s, life. “Daddy kills people.” Not murders, mind you, at least not necessarily… but he most certainly kills. 

The movie is named for Annette, it ends on her first and only genuine song, and it leaves Annette as enigmatic in her obviousnesses as it leaves everyone else. Before her accusation, she doesn't say a word—only sings, in what's clearly her mother's voice. After the accusation, there is only the one song, the denouement, the final judgment of Henry's character and his actions. And the strangest part of all is how she seems to waver between forgiving or forgetting, not Henry, but both Henry and Ann, as if her judgment of one must necessarily be the judgment of the other.

Henry breaks from his monologue about the abyss only once in this song, and it's to defend Ann: "No! Don't blame Ann! Annette, that's wrong." It's clear to Henry that blaming both parents equally is... well... more than a little messed up. So let's assume the movie understands that too, seeing as it said it out loud and everything.

Why would Annette implicate her mother in this? When she sings that "both of you were using me for your own ends," what is Ann's end here? Is it her spirit's haunting of Henry? Is it the moment when Annette speaks out loud and tells the world about her father's crimes? Or is it her voice itself, her "miracle" of a gift, which Annette pledges never to use again?

One possible answer: by gifting Annette her voice, Ann sets up the conditions that lead Henry to rely on the conductor, leads the conductor to teach Annette his old love song, and leads to Henry's far-less-ambiguous murder of him, leaving his body in a swimming pool where he can be easily retrieved by the police. Without that, there's no direct evidence that Henry did more than dance with his wife on a hazardous night—though it's unclear how much the court is swayed by "evidence" during the trial. But that suggests a meticulous design to Ann's ghost's scheme, one that somewhat goes against the movie's dramatic bombast.

Another answer would be that Ann's "haunting" of Henry only consists of reminding him of her. Not just of the fact that he's responsible for her death, but the fact of her existence, and of his love for her, at all. Perhaps she is a spirit of grief as much as of vengeance, one who lingers as love does after loss; perhaps Annette's resentment of her mother is that her father could not look at her without seeing the woman he loved and lost.

But a third option, which I am partial to, is that Ann's curse is just Annette's voice. The voice that Ann once thought would save her from obscurity, the one that led her to fame and an unhappy marriage, the one that brought about her demise.

This is a movie, after all, about art: about artists, about audiences, about how the line between creative work and life, between self-expression and love, begins to blur. Henry and Ann both seek salvation through their craft, through their performances, through their adoring fans. Each loses the distinction between their identity as an artist and their place in their own family. Their relationship is meticulously reported on by gossipy news channels, documented by photographers, treated as public domain. And while their talents may have drawn them to each other, it's also what leads them to destroy one another—Ann destroyed more definitely by Henry, and Henry haunted by the possibility that Ann is destroying him, even while she's still alive.

Henry's most obvious end with Annette is money, but is that enough of an explanation? It doesn't explain why he decides, after murdering the conductor, to retire Annette prematurely, to withdraw her from the public eye. It doesn't lend credence to his repeated, even angry, insistence that he's not exploiting Annette, at least to his own mind. And while he certainly does see Annette as an opportunity, he seems to see it as an opportunity for her, and maybe for her audiences as well: a chance for her to find the artistic successes that made him and his wife so very, very happy, and a chance for her audiences to witness the miracle of Ann's voice once more.

After Ann's death, Henry doesn't seem affected by the loss of his own career anymore. Annette's career becomes a substitution for his own. In a strange sense, he and Ann are united after her death: united around Annette, but united more specifically around sharing Ann's voice with the world. In his own way, Henry has become Ann's accompanist, devoted to her by means of his devotion to Annette.

And, in the process, Henry and Ann both rob Annette of her identity. Annette becomes Ann: the vessel for her mother's voice and her father's devotion. Annette, then, becomes a parable about a child star, whose talents form before she could possibly have anything resembling genuine self-expression, or self-directed, considered, artistry. (Which perhaps explains why another cut Annette song hints that baby Annette would have formed a rivalry with Toby Keith's daughter, of all people—and it is a delight that Crystal Keith recorded her song, which is a very, very strange thing to have exist.)

In this lens, Henry and Ann can each be seen as malformed artists: Henry the "loathsome" and "despicable" part of self-expression which is too antagonistic and raw to be shared except through a filter, Ann the "sacred" and "beloved" part which is, if anything, too palatable. And Annette's "miracle" is the worst of both worlds, beauty reduced to novelty act, talent without awareness or intent. Which might be why Annette so furiously insists that she will never sing again, "smashing every lamp I see, living in full darkness, a vampire forever." And why Annette sings that her two options are to either forgive or forget: to either reconcile the fact that her parents saw her gifts as an extension of themselves, rather than as a new miracle of a human being, or to forget them and her voice altogether.

I like this interpretation, in part, because it helps to make sense of Henry's "abyss," which he broods over endlessly, and spends his final moments trying to caution Annette away from. The abyss, here, is the source of those raw creative gifts: the ones which threaten, not only his adoring public, but everyone in his life. It's self-expression manifested as narcissism: the kind of obsession with death that suggests your own life is the beginning and end of all existence. So Henry can kill his wife while raging about some petty difference between her art and his, seeing her refusal to dance in a storm as a rejection of him; he can murder a man for accusing him of murdering his wife, or for suggestion that his wife should have loved somebody different. At the same time, this abyss made Henry who he was, not just for his audience, but for Ann herself: her "flame" is his "abyss." And, just as his abyss eventually swallowed him, not only destroying him but making him yearn for self-destruction, so too it brought Ann closer to him, moth to a flame, and burned her alive.

So Henry cautions Annette, like it's the only thing she'll ever have to fear—pausing only to tell her not to blame Ann, and not to reject her own voice, in the process. If, when Annette finally chooses to forgive rather to forget, she is also saying that she will allow herself to sing, then there is a hope that she will become the artist who neither her mother nor her father ever fully became. And in this world, where art and love are one and the same, this means that Annette still has a chance of finding love.

But that love will not involve her father. "Now, you have nothing to love," she tells him. "Can't I love you?" he asks back. "Not really," she replies. She never mentions not loving him—only that he will not be able to love her, not from prison, not from afar. Whether she sings or not, he will never know; whatever audience she finds, it will never be his. And for Henry, who leapt at the chance to have his wife's voice again, to love the pale reflection of her he found in Annette—and notice that Annette's voice is always likened to moonlight—the cost of his child's becoming human is the final loss of the one thing he ever loved.

All he has left is this: the freedom from an audience, from judgment and misinterpretation and scorn. "Stop watching me," he mutters—Annette's final words. He will never kill or be killed; he will never love; but at last he is free, from everything and everybody save himself.

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It could be said that Annette is as sympathetic a film as you could make about a man who kills a beloved woman, murders her ex-lover, takes advantage of his child, and winds up in prison for life. It's not that it shies away from condemning Henry, or avoids taking chances to mock him, or lets him off the hook. It's that it watches his every action, and holds him accountable for each and every one—at no point is his fate accidental or unchosen—and still sees a sorrowful man, a loving man, a man with demons, a man trying not to be what he can't help but be.

Perhaps there is a difference between having sympathy for the abyss and gazing deep into it. It certainly feels, at times, like that's the line the film's trying to walk: sympathizing with an antagonistic, bitter killer, without once making his actions seem forgivable or appealing in any way. Understandable, here, is not the same as okay.

But the movie doesn't seem interested in telling us how bad it is to murder. It seems just as uninterested in lending Henry any "moral nuance," in the sense that there is any aspect of him that seems contrary to his darkest impulses. No hints of "complexity" or charm. He is, very blatantly, what he is; if we are to sympathize with him, we must sympathize with this, and not with a man who shows us seven other sides, each of which is conspicuously more appealing than this brooding, hulking ape.

Likewise, there is no attempt to give us more of Ann than this story strictly requires—and it is the story's nature that Henry thinks of Ann, just as he thinks of Annette, in terms of himself. Is that a failure of imagination, or is it a commitment to telling a story whose leanest form requires it to be told this way? You can ask whether this is the story Sparks should have told—and really, their entire career is moot if you don't want to hear songs about hapless men being dejected and sinister in turn—but, given their choice to tell this story, there are reasons why they told the story this way.

Because, for all its vivid imagination, Annette seems determined to tell its story as sparsely as it can, with every piece reflecting and echoing every other. While it's not as stripped-down as the average Sparks song, it seems similarly determined to stay focused on its singular theme, to keep all its parts almost rigidly adherent to its whole.

That can create a sense of flatness, because it runs so counter to how most filmmaking aims to create depth. Even its lushness and its bombast work against it in that sense, when sparseness and minimalism is how so many directors suggest an empty canvas waiting to be filled in. But that seeming flatness, that moment where banality not only sneaks in but abjectly refuses to be banished, has always been where Sparks looked for their stories. They look for banality, they find twisted and clever ways to keep it fun, and then they fixate for so long on that banality that you start seeing spots. Until, perhaps, it dawns on you that this was the story, that they held it for so long that you started to take it seriously, and that the part where your mind scrambled to figure out what interpretation, if any, ought to be applied is the part that suggests so many possible ways of looking that perhaps there was value in this to begin with. It takes ingenuity and talent to hold so unwaveringly to something so precise for so long—but once you do, you can get away with words whose subtlest variations suggest entire stories, the way Ann's one song offers just enough about herself and Henry to open up something vaster than seems possible.

The more I listen to Annette, the more I search for interpretation, the more compelled I am by the non-interpretations: the ones where this is a movie about art because it's about artists, about love because it's about lovers, about family because it's about family. The ones where all the pieces are the same piece, really: variations on a theme, riffs on a single melody, until there's no difference between creativity and love, audiences and sex, opera and real life, gossip and crime. The genius lies in the way Sparks hold all these pieces together, refusing to let them deviate, until they seem flatter than they were to begin with, because their harmonies begin to resemble a single, deceptive note.

Which also, I suspect, makes Annette unusually prone to misinterpretation, or to reductive analysis, than most movies or even musicals (or maybe even operas) typically are. It would be easy to reduce Annette to just a fable about toxic masculinity, or to take the opposite tack and accuse it of too much sympathy for men, too much reduction or objectification or possession of women. You can take the fact that Annette is a literal puppet as a sly joke about this flatness or as a feminist commentary or as a cheap misogynist joke. It either glamorizes and sensationalizes male violence or it’s so over-the-top about how vile Henry is that it becomes misandrist instead. Whatever reductive take you want to find, Annette will surely not resist you. But that’s not to say that your take on Annette will be its only truth. 

In a sense, what amazes me about Sparks is how their art acts almost as a stress test of language, of pop songs, of love stories. Can they tell a story about a relationship just by singing about a lawnmower? They sure can. Can they turn a banal call-center recording into a dramatic work? Absolutely. Can they turn a six-minute song about a man being “likable,” no less and no more, into a legitimately tense and engaging piece of music? Yes, although that song will also be ridiculous—with the trick being that, the more aware the song is that it’s ridiculous, the more its absurdity becomes a part of the tragedy too. 

Annette is, on one level, as straightforwardly and caricaturishly “operatic” as it’s possible to be: telegraphing its own events by showing the woman who gets killed by her lover getting killed by her lover in an opera, just as her eventual killer monologues about killing her before he kills her. The grand reveal of Henry’s crimes takes place at a halftime performance for a fictitious dystopian bigger-than-the-Super-Bowl event called the Hyper Bowl: literally a joke about hyperbole at the movie’s most hyperbolic moment, even as it’s also a joke about that word’s most common mispronunciation. Rather than showing you any dramatic evolutions in Henry and Ann’s relationship, the movie chooses only to tell you, by means of its ongoing gossip rags. In a sense, all this forces Annette to be exactly as daring and stylish and innovative as it is: every scene is a new study in just how many ways it can startle you into accepting the utterly obvious. 

Is there a point? You could say: the stellar performances are the point, or the wild directorial choices are, or the stunningly well-produced music is. Or you could say: this is yet another attempt by Sparks to eat their cake and have it too, producing something fluffy and trite and mocking its own triteness and insisting that it’s actually very, very deep. Or you could argue that the point is to put all these possible interpretations in one place, because there’s meaning in showing how none of these interpretations defies the other, the same way that this story can simultaneously be misogynist and misandrist and both and neither. Or you could say that, by presenting us with something either so easy to overinterpret or so difficult to find a resolute moral to, Annette forces us to confront our own need for easy answers, our desire to reduce situations or people or ideas into such digestible pieces that we can pop them in and shit them out and develop another anecdote to tell at another party, the sort where small talk and intellectual discussion hold approximately the same depth. 

Or you could find all this exhausting, and me exhausting, and Annette either exhausting or just empty, easy fun, in a way that’s not worth all this nonsense. There’s no such thing as a wrong answer. Because the beauty of art, and of talking about art, and of talking about talking about art, is that it is always about its own reflection. Your reflection on art is a reflection on you—and that’s the part that always opens up the world, just as the artist opens themselves by making their own reflection into art.