On "These Things" by She Wants Revenge

On These Things by She Wants Revenge

The song "These Things" , in the same way as "Tear You Apart" by the same artist, can be aesthetically placed in the vicinity of Nabokov's "Lolita" and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice". It is obsessive, obscure, yet somehow beautiful in its obscurity. It is deepest, yet most entertaining track on She Wants Revenge’s eponymous debut. "These Things" is vague. Neither is indicated what "these things" are, nor do the events depicted allow to pin down from whose POV they are told.

The 'you' standing in line, the 'I' and the object of obsession are all centered on a somewhat schizophrenic narrator who addresses people in the crowd, envisions how the girl 'pleasures herself' in the toilet and makes fiendish plans of arson with his alter ego. The girl has a Popsicle, clearly a phallic reverence - At least that's how the obsessive character interprets it. The nymphet has an irresistible attraction for him, he understands that she is trying to seduce him. But she 'locks him out', prefers to masturbate instead. That implies that she actually "needs it" or "wants it", in the eyes of the person who can't take the refusal and, consequently, sets fire to the building she's in.

However, he is not really guilty in his own opinion: The lines "I'm not a bad man, I'm just overwhelmed" direct some guilt away from him. It's not him, it's "because of these things". Yet, "these things" seem somehow self-explicatory. A vague apology for which there is little or no rational explanation - Solely unsurpassable obsession; reminiscence of Peter Lorre's depiction of a pedophiliac in the film noir "M" in which, too, desire is 'overwhelming'.

Apart from the aspect just mentioned, there appears to be another theme
in the song, that is: is futility of relationships. Lovers want to numb their pain, yet they are "gripping tightly to something they will never own". Those who are alone are so by "choice" or " some reward"; both terms with a positive connotation, not the negative ones commonly associated with solitude. Hence the advice is that just a moment of boredom should not drive you
to commit yourself to someone else.

"This is the time of your life you just can't tell" suggests all happiness is within the own self, not 'out there'. And most certainly not in attachment to something or someone you can not own anyways. It might be noteworthy that the setting of "These Things" seems to be in front of a club: a 'crowd walks by' and the 'you' is standing in line and the girl is in a bathroom. However, if the location 'bathroom' is considered in a British English sense rather than the usage common in AE, the element of privacy of a private home is introduced. The 'line' mentioned earlier, in this context, could be seen as a reverence to the inevitability to escape loneliness. A 'joke' - or happiness- can not be shared with anybody, "you have to laugh by yourself"."