Sophie Santos
The Peril of Stan
—All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.- Oscar Wilde
This Aphorism focuses on the multifaceted layers inside any given art piece. If you asked any artist about their works, they would never tell you that it is just a painting, a poem, or a song, there is always a deeper meaning. Art is intentionally created to invoke emotion or a feeling and those who decide to find the deeper meaning are to do so at their advisory. Art can invoke such powerful emotion that Wilde advises you to search for these meanings at your advisory. I found that this Aphorism reminds me of the song Stan by Eminem and its story. The song details a story from the perspective of an Eminem super fan who reads so deeply into Eminem’s lyrics that he feels he has formed a deep, seemingly romantic relationship with Eminem.
The song details the letters that Stan, a fictional character, sends to Eminem. In the beginning, the letters seem tame and seemingly harmless, yet as time goes on Stan becomes more enraged at the fact that Eminem hasn’t written back. Stan feels a deep connection to “Slim Sady” who is an alter ego that Eminem uses in his songs. Slim Shady fictionalized caricature of Eminem, a character who is a sadist who lives a life of evil and torture. Stan addresses the letters to Slim and not Eminem, which displays that Stan is not a fan of Eminem yet a super fan of the violence-loving fictional character Slim Shady. Stan details how his girlfriend is pregnant and how he plans to name his daughter after “Slims” daughter, he discusses how he has faced some of the same struggles with self-harm as “Slim”, and he highly expresses to him how they are so alike that they must meet, and perhaps “be together too”. The rest of the letters written to Eminem detail how he is exhausted of feeling neglected at the hands of Eminem, so he takes action. The final memo he sends is a tape of him in the car on a stormy night. Stan expresses how he has taken drugs and alcohol and is driving on the freeway with his pregnant girlfriend tied up in the trunk. He proceeds to drive the two of them off of a bridge and sinks the car into the water, following the direction of a scenario that occurred in one of Eminem’s songs under the imaginary persona of Slim Shady.
At the end of the song, Eminem responds to all of the letters that Stan had sent. He assures Stan that he is not Slim Shady and that when he writes songs using that persona he is not doing the things that he sings about. He tells Stan that he is sorry for responding so late, yet his main focus is checking in on Stan because his previous letters were alarming. The letter from Eminem ends with him pleading with Stan to get some help before he does anything dangerous, he then realizes that a news story he had heard about a couple drowning in a car accident was Stan.
Eminem wrote this song because he was alarmed by the number of letters he had been receiving about people idolizing the behavior of Slim Shady. He used the song as a platform to remind his listeners that they shouldn’t actualize the behavior in his songs because they are fiction. Eminem wanted the world to know that he was just an artist who used storytelling as a way to create his art. This reads similarly to the Aphorism “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril”. Eminem’s fans and “Stan’s” had been reading into his words in the wrong way, causing themselves harm. After the release of the song, Stan, Eminem’s songs became constructed in a clearer manner to which the listener would be better able to understand real life from fiction. This contesting to the aspect of “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril”, that in though finding a deeper meaning within art is functional, and personal, it can be very dangerous to the beholder.