when i was very small i assumed this song was about some lady who literally kept a human face in a jar by the door and since father mckenzie buried her that meant that he also killed her and basically i thought eleanor rigby was about zombies until i was like 12 years old
YES!
This is the first time I’ve ever liked this song.
This is the best ever alternate interpretation of that song :D
Elanor Rigby is clearly a leviathan.
Given how many times I had to play this song in my college instrumental ensemble class, this had breathed new life into this for me. And imagining the look on my professor’s face if she ever saw this given her Beatles obsession is kind of making me giggle.
I’m not sure what my 13-year-old Beatle fanatic self would have thought of this, but now I think it’s a damm fine narrative arc.
I support this interpretation wholeheartedly.
I want so desperately for this to have been the intended story.
Reblogged for camwyn, who’s identified Father Mackenzie as MI# based on “writing the words of a sermon that no-one will hear”.
Yeah, I was never really very clear on what the face-in-the-jar-by-the-door was supposed to mean as a kid, but the idea of a priest conducting services for no one at all didn’t really jibe. And then somewhere along the way I read enough Tom Clancy or watched enough James Bond to realize that, y’know, some people just don’t officially exist… they might not be down on paper but spies have spiritual needs too. Or at least the need to talk to someone who understands, even if they don’t necessarily believe. Armies and prisons and hospitals have chaplains; why shouldn’t the spooks? Eleanor Rigby was a spy with a talent for disguise; Father Mackenzie was the only priest the intelligence agencies trusted.
If Father Mackenzie takes individual confessions I suspect he goes through an awful lot of brandy, because I can’t imagine having someone like 007 show up with something bad enough to actually weigh on his conscience can be an easy thing to hear about. And the seal of the confessional wouldn’t just be a religious/moral thing under those circumstances, but one that also came with the knowledge that if he did let anything out, there was a bullet with his name on it.
(I’m also reasonably sure that the funeral he conducts towards the end of the song is actually pretty jam-packed. It’s just that Mackenzie is the only attendee who officially existed; the others all came because nobody outside the agency even knew the assignment number, let alone the name, of the poor sod in the box. But the spies take care of their own.)
Tags:
#oh look an update #hadn’t seen the spy one before
Brinens and Things 