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cureforbedbugs · 4 years

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Crash Test Dummies

Shared a thing I was writing about "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" over at FreakyTrigger on Tom's post about the song. (I've written a bunch of stuff like this over the last year but don't seem to have anywhere for most of it to go.)

I remember thinking a lot about the parents in “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” the song by the Crash Test Dummies that I sang to my sons as infants. My natural singing register is already an exaggerated croon so its melody fit my range and temperament (earnest and goofy). But I also memorized the lyrics as a child and never forgot them. Something about the story sparked my own imagination to fill in the many gaps. The story is a set of sketches, one or two details standing in for narratives that are somewhere between folk tale and after-school special.

There are three characters: a boy whose hair turns bright white from a car accident, a girl with birthmarks all over her body, and a boy whose domineering parents nonetheless let loose at church. The first two stories, about the car accident and birthmarks, seem to set the stage for the third, an almost confessional-sounding verse after two acts of God. That the song is about God seemed obvious to me, the absurdity of there even being one that I imagine is more acute with belief, not less, since atheism lends itself more naturally to dismissal and disregard. The name of the Crash Test Dummies album, “God Shuffled His Feet,” reminds me of a picture I drew as a kid in Sunday school of God dressed with a top hat and cane tap dancing with a nervous smile.

Most commentary I read on the song now takes the storylines to be more or less random, but to me there is a clear arc between the stories, outlining different genres of tragedy—sudden trauma, chronic irritation and insecurity, and a more deliberate dysfunction borne of parental projection and abuse.

That latter reading (of the third story suggesting abuse) is tangled in the video for the song, which gave parents to the literal protagonists in a school play depicting the song’s events. The third kid’s parents, in particular his impressively mustachioed father, are just the sort of killjoys the song imagines. The parents look offended at the play’s frivolity, even as they reluctantly stand to applaud at the end and their unshakable disappointment reaffirmed my sense that there was something categorically different about that story. Like the other two were trying to dress up the third in fairy dust as a distraction. Then again, the other two are pretty sad, too, if you read them more literally. (But in the bridge, those other two even tell you that the third kid has it “worse than that.”)

Three ways of experiencing trauma: two of them not ascribable to malevolent actors, whether sudden or chronic, and one the trauma of upbringing itself, the trauma in the mistakes everyone makes as they try to describe or shape or contain the world for their children.

In our family, trauma was hardly malevolent, especially you didn’t believe in God pulling the strings — it was frictionless, blameless, and I’m thankful for that in a way, not having some other person on whom to project a pain that has nowhere else to go. (My mom died when I was young, but we had a happy enough family life otherwise.)

Mostly I thought about the third boy, this boy whose parents made him come directly home right after school and when they went to their church they shook and lurched all over the church floor. How could this be worse than a car crash that turns your hair white or having birthmarks all over your body? (Not that there’s anything so bad about that, and in fact I like the way that no one actually says anything about the birthmarks; it’s not about the reaction to the birthmarks but the hiding of them, the fear that someone might say something.)

The sketchiness is strength here. The suggestion of something sinister is more affecting than a better-rendered narrative, which might tend toward something that more closely resembled a lesson or moral. The whole point is that you can only imagine (in fact, have to imagine) what’s happening with that boy. Something bad. But the song leaves it vague and unresolved, as in the end we all kind of have to when these kinds of things happen, especially when it’s not anyone’s fault but even sometimes when it is.

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