Trains of Thought
Cultural Theories of Speed and Solidarity

Running up That Hill and The Drama of Alienation

Is it true that the closer we are to someone, the greater chance there is for hurt? To become close in this way is to be vulnerable through the development of trust. I am all-too-well acquainted with those who speak of love as the state of someone having power over you. What is unstated there is that, in a reciprocal expression of love, you also have power over this other. And amidst the swells of such heady contradiction—great reliance that wields the wedge of extraordinarily reversibility where the strong give up everything for the weak (and thus become stronger—the noblest efforts are often fated to deal grievous harm. In speaking of her famous 1985 single Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) Kate Bush highlighted expressing this difficulty as central to her artistic intent:

“It seems that the more you get to know a person, the greater the scope there is for misunderstanding. Sometimes you can hurt somebody purely accidentally or be afraid to tell them something because you think they might be hurt when really they’ll understand.”[1]

But the question is: do we find this deadly hurt here delivered by a proximity to the other or to ourselves? There is no doubt it exists, but where does it arise? The communicative vibrancy of such close intimacy is seen to be a mirror between lovers: see this in the dialogical nature of the dance in the track’s music video. But the inevitable failures of communication here disrupt this stable dichotomy into a series of shattered Others—the network—ironically a replicating image of the lover in a crowd that swallows Bush. It is first the singularity of the You, the dialogical object that is consumed and, in her pained isolation and forced relation to the It, Bush begins to run and struggle. But is it a struggle to reconnect?

What’s it like to be me?
This is the question Bush’s singer asks her imaginative partner. In hurting me, do you know who I am? But it’s naïve to think this a question directed purely at her impenetrable and emotionally inflexible male other. Rather, it is a sustained supplication to the self. The act of questioning is largely coopted by a more frenzied pace, the hunting that recalls Artemis. Whether in stringing the bow or in fixating unblinkingly on the camera Bush seeks to transform herself in the act of inquiry. Surely this is a halfhearted nagging to a partner—put yourself in my shoes is the obvious extension of running up the hill/road/building. It’s but the level of exertion that varies. Yet it is principally Bush herself who is lost and in need of a transformation: see but fact of her hurt worn on her face in the video and expressed dynamically in lyrical form. We don’t know where it comes from; the repetitive drumline helps to regularize it as much as, sure as hunger. Hurt in Running is just as easily from this man as it could be from past traumas with loved ones.

Baudrillard remarked famously that the drama of alienation, the objective distance from pain and the authentic dislocation of essence from existence, was over.[2] Instead, we are lost in the ecstasy of communication: the ease of exchange, the absolute equivalence of signs, the dizzying speed of circulation, the replacement of the scene by the obscene, and the absolute disappearance of seduction. This last point is particularly important in speaking of the subject’s collapse into the object and the stable dichotomy lost therein…

But is this unequivocally a loss? Bush has been vocal about her intentions as an artist though, like all great productions, her song has been variously interpreted. She has also been notably proactive in endorsing various transpositions and extensions of her own meaning, in addition to endowing others the rights to showcase her music. And there’s two examples that come to mind from recent TV that complicate the drama of alienation variously—and perhaps not in accordance with Baudrillard as well.

The first comes from Running’s famous placement in the fourth season of Stranger Things (2022). The new season had a curious sort of reintroduction effect for Kate Bush: Running broke into the top five on Billboard Hot 100 and climbed to the top of the charts in eight countries. And while Kate Bush has never really lost her popularity, the Duffer Brothers have doubtlessly gained her a whole new generation of avid followers.

Stranger Things saw the drama of alienation played out not through dialogue, but in monologue. Captured by a malevolent entity who preys upon her self-doubt and inner turmoil, Max Mayfield must literally run to save herself. Here, just like Bush’s music video, is the self-centering work of physical exertion ironically in response to the other. If Running is intended to mean inhabiting another’s perspective let us interpret it firstly as the difficulty of trying to inhabit your own—the impossibility of weathering the flux of a being constantly becoming in a destabilized world. Max is unable to escape, neither physically to a lover whom she rejects nor imaginatively into her own memories which the Evil has also compromised. Instead, she is forced to confront the weight of herself and her own strong feelings: she wished her abusive was dead and secretly celebrated his loss. In this case, a deal with God must mean that only a Great Love from others can save Max from the extraordinary isolation that compromises her selfhood, from the pain which she inflicts on herself.

The second reinterpretation was Running’s presence as a queer anthem on It’s a Sin (2021). Both director Peter Hoar and Bush herself spoke about the track’s possible interpretation not merely as a desire for the active recognition of the Other but as a wholly transformative bid to canonically express—counter-transgressively—repressed elements of being. Hoar interprets the two partners’ switching places to understand one another (the Impossible Task, the ‘deal with God) as potentially relevant and empowering to various queer identities. Bush’s swapping, always temporally limited, sought understanding of self through the eyes of the other. This, I argue, has always been a veiled desire of the self to know the self, the I-for-I that seeks social recognition second. But perhaps this aspiration did not go far enough, in its assumption of a return to one’s original place?

You can’t help but see the great loss at the heart of New Pop’s crisp waves of synthetic high and its annoyingly optimistic beat. Max’s character most easily brings out the hurt underlying the track and argues that a basic transformation of the self is needed. See the fact of her hurt, as much we see Bush’s searching eyes fix on us before she disappears through the legs of her dance partner. Like Max’s compromised memories, this is hurt without home. We know not where it comes from, the trauma of Running comes just as easily from this man as it could from any number of past loved ones. It’s less that the capacity for misunderstanding expands with closeness to a lover, it’s our own necessary complexity whose speed, size, and sudden reversibility eludes us. And it’s such swiftness of being that necessarily challenges any canonized queer being through the pure fact of becoming: the lingering ‘+’ at the end of the acronym. The pitched-down, distorted tones on Bush’s outro recall Burial’s Rival Dealer (2014), with his trademark fuzziness and crackle. And their inviting call:
Don’t be afraid…

If one is to demand such a beautiful and terrifying transformation, such that one would make a deal with God, what a great shame to ask for but a modicum of understanding… of what we ourselves cannot own! Of what which befuddles us and intimidates us and tortures us! What pure selfishness to ask of the Beloved to know what we cannot and to pretend, no less, that it will not hurt us savagely!

Let us call upon not the bubbly, gilded sort of pain we feel today but the ecstatic, dizzying fear of what we might be tomorrow—what a dialogical other might affect in us, no less! Such is the real God with whom we deal, the Du which is everywhere one utters that sacred You…

“So if this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds, previously unimaginable…
(Who are you? You should come to me).”
[3]


9 July 2022


 
[1] Mike Nicholls, interview with Kate Bush: “The Girl Who Reached Wuthering Heights,” The London Times, 27 August 1985: http://gaffa.org/reaching/i85_ti.html

[2] Baudrillard, « L’extase de la communication, » trouve dans L’autre par lui-même (Paris, Galilee : 1987). His habilitation is published in English as The Ecstasy of Communication, different to an essay of the same title published separately.
« Nous ne sommes plus dans le drame de l'aliénation, nous sommes dans l'extase de la communication. »

[3] Burial, Come Down to Us (Hyperdub, Rival Dealer: 2013), https://genius.com/Burial-come-down-to-us-lyrics

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