The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
b-side
Thursday, October 31, 2019 — 3B

We all have that pair of friends who, almost-
siblings in forbidden love or not, decide to 
dress up as Margot and Richie Tenenbaum 
of Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” 
for Halloween. She wears a pinstripe Lacoste 
tennis 
dress. 
He 
wears 
a 
shaggy-wig-
headband combo that falls over shoulders in 
a Fila tee. Their costumes are a hit, though 
nobody at the party knows who they’re 
supposed to be. After they spill the beans, 
the party-goer nods and smiles like they’ve 
“maybe seen the end of that one on HBO,” 
and the one guy they’re mutual friends with 
who never stops talking about Wes Anderson 
grins at all the poor uninitiated souls. When 
the 
Richie-and-
Margot-for-a-night 
pair 
get 
home, 
they post a picture 
of their ‘fits on 
Etsy and get added 
to 
a 
government 
database 
somewhere of all 
the people to call if 
our alien invaders’ 
one 
weakness 
is 
the inability to see 
humans dressed as 
quirky 
characters 
from 
early-aughts 
indie movies. 
These 
two 
outfits, along with 
Chas Tenenbaum’s 
iconic red Adidas 
jumpsuit, 
make 
“The 
Royal 
Tenenbaums” 
one of the most 
thematically 
costumed 
films 
in Anderson’s catalogue. Not only do the 
three 
individual 
outfits 
feed 
into 
the 
characterizations of the siblings who wear 
them, the presence of the outfits, and how 
they exist as tokens of the characters’ 
traumas, plays into the film’s atmosphere of a 
childhood disaster that will never end.
Going one by one, the outfits Richie, 
Margot and Chas wear are all tied to the grief 
each of them are trying to beat. Richie wears 
the remnants of his tennis ‘fit, but he hides it 
under a camel-hair coat and trousers. He even 
hides his face, covering it with a beard and 
long hair, searching for a way to free himself 
of the embarrassment of his past — both 
athletically with tennis and romantically 
with the adopted Margot. Chas’s red jumpsuit 
(and the identical jumpsuits he makes his two 
boys Ari and Uzi wear) signal a father on high 
alert. Terrified of the dangers he and his kids 
face at every moment after their plane crashes, 
killing his wife, Chas forces the whole family 
to pack light, to wear clothes that make them 
ready to run or fight at a moment’s notice. 
Though Margot is never seen participating 
in any athletic activities, she too wears a 
sporty ‘fit, usually a Lacoste dress covered by 
a lush fur outercoat. Her outfit’s incongruous 
link to the passion she’s never hinted at can 
be explained by her lost, repressed, forbidden 

love for her stepbrother, resident tennis star, 
Richie. And whew, man, Wes could have done 
better on this last one. Not great, giving your 
one female lead an outfit that characterizes 
her as being all-encompassingly hung up on 
a guy while Richie and Chas’s costumes are 
so individually and vocationally driven. Too 
bad. 
In a film about “getting over it,” everything 
links back to trauma. The house on Archer 
Ave. is as much a character as any of the 
Tenenbaums in the film, and the way it’s 
decorated (the house’s “costume”) plays a 
big part in illustrating how the incidences 
of the Tenenbaum’s childhood has forever 
come back to haunt them. The walls in the 
Tenenbaum house are covered with moments 
of success from the children’s childhood. 
Karate medals and trophies hang next to 
colorful watercolor 
paintings of family 
and 
friends. 
In 
Richie’s 
room, 
joyous 
little 
pictographs 
of 
his father and his 
family fill the space 
between a pulsing 
green 
and 
blue. 
Everything in the 
house is a reminder 
of what should have 
been, of how things 
should have turned 
out, of the successes 
of old that never 
translated 
into 
the future. These 
moments 
exist 
frozen in time in 
the 
Tenenbaum 
house, and as the 
movie 
progresses, 
we see it takes all 
three 
characters 
returning 
(“That 
night, Etheline found all of her children 
living together under the same roof for the 
first time in seventeen years”) to the scene 
of the crime before they’re able to exorcise 
those demons, to be able to finally beat what’s 
been holding them back for their entire adult 
lives.
What I love most about a meticulous 
director like Wes Anderson is that, with 
everything in his movies so hyper-specific 
— every lamp, rug, Sharpie mark on a polka-
dotted rat seemingly chosen by him — there 
are these opportunities for totally tangential 
meaning-making (the whole reading into the 
costumes of the characters and the house 
above) that might not have anything to do 
with what Anderson was thinking when he 
made the choice. I find this misalignment to 
be incredibly exciting. To make an artistic 
decision off of pure instinct and to have 
it still wrap around into some theme or 
characterization you’re not aware you’ve 
been building along the way has to stand 
as a great testament to the artist’s gut. In 
the director’s commentary for “The Royal 
Tenenbaums,” while talking about why 
each of the characters dresses how they do, 
Anderson pauses when he gets to Chas. “The 
red jumpsuit, I’m not sure,” he says, “I guess I 
just thought it was funny.”

Enough with Richie: Let’s
all dress as Chas this year

STEPHEN SATARINO
Daily Film Editor

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / LOMA VISTA RECORDINGS

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In theory, performance should be based on 
ability and ability alone. In practice, however, 
there are many other factors at play. For example, 
appearance often has just as large an impact on 
performance as ability does. As the great Deion 
Sanders once said, “Look good, feel good. Feel 
good, play good. Play good, (they) pay good. Pay 
good, live good. Live good, eat good. Die good.” 
He’s right: If you look the part, you’re most 
likely going to perform better, which will lead 
to improvements in all areas of life. That is, in 
everything but metal.
In metal, you have to look the part to play the 
part, but that does not mean you end up rich in 
the end. In fact, it often means that you have 
to work a real job in addition to performing in 
a metal band. But do these acts really care? Of 
course they don’t. They’re in the business of 
metal music to make art, not make millions, and 
the best way for them to make their art is to get 
into costume.
Costumes, whether the artists want to admit it 
or not, are a crucial aspect of metal. Hair metal 
relied on it (you really think these guys dressed 
like this when they weren’t touring?). Black metal 
relied on it (it really sells the image that these 
guys might actually be the dead reincarnate). 
Nu-metal relies on it (if the music is going to 
suck, they have to make it interesting somehow). 
Whatever this kind of metal is relies on it (words 
cannot describe the favors these costumes do 
for the music). Despite this, few bands lean as 
heavily into their costumes as Ghost does.
For Ghost, anonymity is key. The members 
want to release as little personal information 
as possible and focus solely on the music, and to 
do so, they all adorn costumes to maintain their 
namelessness. What’s more, Ghost uses their 
costumes to create their own mythology, a sort of 
storyline surrounding the band and their music. 
Their live shows take themes and rituals from 
the Roman Catholic Church and reinterpret them 
through a Satanic lens. The typical crosses are 
inverted, white is converted to black and rather 
than praise the Holy Trinity, the band worships 
Satan.
Every member of Ghost has their own 
character. The lead singer and guitarist assumes 
the role of Papa Emeritus, a mysterious figure 
shrouded in face paint meant to resemble a skull 
and dressed in Satanic “Papal” garb. The other 
four members — the bassist, guitarist, keyboardist 
and drummer — are part of an ensemble known 
as “A Group of Nameless Ghouls,” a group of 
underlings dressed in dark robes and metallic 
masks subservient to Papa Emeritus. They 
assume no individual identities, distinguished 
on stage by an alchemical symbol — when one of 
them speaks to the media, the quote is attributed 
to “A Nameless Ghoul.” Nothing more, nothing 
less.
The lead singer, on the other hand, is a whole 
lot more interesting. He has undergone several 
transformations as his Papa Emeritus character. 
In fact, there have been four incarnations of 
the character: Papa Emeritus I, Papa Emeritus 
II, Papa Emeritus II’s younger brother Papa 
Emeritus III and the much older Papa Emeritus 
0, each with their own unique and convoluted 
backstory and specific costume. For example, 
Papa Emeritus II was replaced by Papa Emeritus 
III because II was fired for lack of productivity 
in overthrowing churches and governments. 

Though the costumes were meant to conceal 
identities, one of the members was bound to have 
their identity revealed, and ultimately, it was 
Papa Emeritus. 
After being faced by a lawsuit set forth by 
former members of Ghost who claimed they 
lacked adequate compensation for their roles 
in the band, Papa Emeritus decided that it was 
time to oust himself. In 2017, after seven years of 
mystery, Tobias Forge, previously of Repugnant 
and Crashdïet, revealed himself to be the 
mastermind behind Ghost and all iterations of 
the mysterious Papa Emeritus character. Once 
the dust surrounding the lawsuit settled, Forge 
announced a new character: Cardinal Copia. 
Cardinal Copia is a figure once thought to be 
Papa Emeritus IV, yet he shares no relation to 
any manifestation of the Papa Emeritus lineage. 
He sports a plain mask with black eye sockets, 
complete 
heterochromia 
and 
blacked-out 
vestments, and according to Forge, has not yet 
earned his face paint yet. 
In addition to Cardinal Copia, Ghost also added 
several new members. In 2018, a third guitarist 
joined the “Group of Nameless Ghouls,” two new 
keyboardists known only as the “Ghoulettes” 
appeared, and, surprisingly, the artist formerly 
known as Papa Emeritus 0 returned and is 
currently known as the saxophone-wielding 
Papa Nihil. Forge plans for Cardinal Copia to be 
around for only five years, and after that, there’s 
no telling where the band might go next.
The 
elaborate 
costumes, 
innumerable 
characters 
and 
Byzantine 
lore 
may 
seem 
distracting, but they really add a lot of 
dimensionality to Ghost. It makes the music seem 
that much more real. Songs like “Stand by Him” 
and “Rats” are inhuman rockers, and if the songs 
are performed by blatant humans, a lot of the 
band’s charm would be lost. Consider lines like 
this, “Them rats! / Into your sanctum, you let 
them in / Now, all your loved ones and all you kin 
/ Will suffer punishments beneath the wrath of 
God / Never to forgive, never to forgive.” These 
lines wouldn’t pack nearly the same punch if, 
instead of a Satanic cardinal priest, an ordinary 
metalhead complete with a black tee, pasty skin 
and wispy, greasy hair said it. In fact, it would 
be comical, even farcical. The costumes are what 
allow the band to make the music that they do.
It may all seem like a gimmick, but Ghost’s 
act is more than a mere schtick. A quote from A 
Nameless Ghoul (presumed to be Tobias Forge 
himself) states that “(h)ad not the music been 
rocking, I don’t think that people would have 
gone gaga just about our looks. Had we not had 
the looks, I’m not sure we would have gotten the 
same attention.” This is to say that, regardless 
of looks, the music will always be good, but the 
costumes are what elevate and separate Ghost 
from the more pedestrian heavy metal acts of 
today. The costuming and lore allow the band 
to transcend reality, and, in a way, become even 
more metal.
Appearance 
doesn’t 
always 
dictate 
performance, but in the case of Ghost, the 
appearance of each members most certainly 
enhances their performance. Their appearance 
makes them that much more convincing, even 
when the band can’t be seen. The very thought of 
Ghost in full dress is enough to lure listeners into 
their Satanic world. When in costume, the band 
sinks fully into the music, unaware of the human 
world around them. 
If Ghost feels Satanic, they’ll play Satanic; If 
they play Satanic, they will make some of the 
most notable heavy metal out today.

Ghost: Anonymity matters

JIM WILSON
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK

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B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK

To make an artistic 
decision off of pure 
instinct and to have 
it still wrap around 
into some theme 
or characterization 
you’re not aware 
you’ve been building 
along the way has 
to stand as a great 
testament to the 
artist’s gut.

