"Wipe that mouth off your face"

"Wipe that mouth off your face", a lyric from John Squire's See You On The Other Side is strikingly Surrealist. This is Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989) speaking about his work, 'The Great Masturbator' (1929):

All the horror of this painting, for me, resides in the fact that the face has no mouth.

The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí

The Dalí connection led me to investigate whether the entire song could have a Surrealist theme; I propose that Squire has based all of the verses (and perhaps the chorus also) on 'Un Chien Andalou' , a film from 1928 on which Dalí worked with director Luis Buńuel (1900 - 1983). This was Buńuel's first film.

Un Chien Andalou Luis Buńuel Salvador Dalí

Here we see the origin of "wipe that mouth off your face":

At the start of this verse, Squire musically makes the sound of a siren, possibly to denote the abnormality developing in that particular scene. The above action, being seen to wipe away one's mouth with one's hand, is used by David Bowie, an artist strongly influenced by surrealist cinema (as I will touch upon later), in the 'Jump They Say' video (itself based on a film, Chris Marker's 'La Jetée'). Bowie uses this action as illustration of the line "They say 'he has no mouth'".

Grow a little beard

The woman's armpit hair attaches itself to the man's face

The man in the film is using ropes to pull two Catholic priests (two stone tablets are also present, representing the Ten Commandments ?) and two grand pianos containing the carcasses of two donkeys. Squire does not follow a chronological order in relation to the film (for example the 'severed hand' scene below is before the 'grand piano' scene in the film, yet the song has the two switched around in order). Squire is intentionally distorting any sense of 'order' in a film which itself is distorted; the on-screen details we are given of any sense of 'time' is attempting to defy any 'fixed' context: "Once Upon a Time...", "Eight years later", "At three o’clock in the morning", "Sixteen years before", "In the spring". Indeed, the aim of Dali and Buńuel was to expunge from their script any "idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation" (http://www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10003875). This is why Squire on See You On The Other Side is keen not to adopt a rational application to what itself is a notoriously irrational project; things are literally turned upside-down in this film:

These books, these pistols

Figure 1a:

While the film defies any ‘set’ reading, an oedipal reading can perhaps be applied here, with the man shooting at and killing an older (father ?) version of himself. The dying man then falls to a 'mother figure', with his hand clasping her shoulder:

Squire's proclamation that "mother knows best" is one that would be taken further by Alfred Hitchcock on 'Psycho', himself heavily influenced by Un Chien Andalou.

Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho

These thighs, these breasts

The breasts disappear to become a pair of thighs which the man kneads.

The doorbell or cocktail shaker

In Figure 1a (above), I see a crucifix shape formed by a tennis racket on a wall. I propose that the man's shadow captured on this ‘cross’ and the killing taking place gives this scene a biblical edge. Squire himself used this concept for a photoshoot (See Ten Storey Love Song video analysis), recreating Francis Bacon's 'Crucifixion' which consists of a shadowy image of Christ on a cross, by the careful positioning of Ian and John's bodies.

The chorus bears relation to the film in that the two figures see each other 'on the other side' (the scene changes abruptly from a house to a beach - "see" = "sea" ??) at the end of the film and die (“I feel so lonely I could die”).

The chorus may have partly stemmed from Jimi Hendrix's 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)':

Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (1968)

'Debaser' by the Pixies (a band that hit their peak at approximately the same time as The Stone Roses), from their 1989 'Doolittle' LP, is also based on Un Chien Andalou, made explicit in the opening line, "Got me a movie..". The still below is the origin of the "slicing up eyeballs" line, a defining image from the film (this segment of the film also features at the beginning of Shack's 'Cup Of Tea' video):

The Pixies, Debaser (1989)

Salvador Dali would use the imagery of slicing eyeballs again to good effect in the dream sequence of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (1945) (see the Ten Storey Love Song video essay for how this influenced Kate Bush).

During his 1976 tour, David Bowie used Un Chien Andalou as his opening act. He found inspiration for his 'Loving The Alien' video in the same surrealist era of cinema as Un Chien Andalou. The cardboard sets of the video resemble the Expressionistic sets of 1919's 'The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari' (Figure 2a), as does the storyline (the 'asylum' ending to each and the control which the veiled woman and Dr. Caligari have over Bowie and Cesare respectively - Figures 2b, 2c).

Figure 2a: