Halsey officially released her highly-anticipated album Manic on Jan. 17, and fans are already exploring the album’s pop culture references: specifically, film samples from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jennifer’s Body.
The two movies are excerpted in two different songs on Manic, and are clearly important to Halsey. On the album’s first song, “Ashley,” Halsey closes the track with Kate Winslet‘s monologue from Eternal Sunshine: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a f*cked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.”
If you haven’t seen the 2004 cult classic, the movie explores the relationship between Kate Winslet’s Clementine and Jim Carrey’s Joel, a broken-up couple who have their memories of each other erased, only to return to each other. Halsey has been vocal about her love for Eternal Sunshine in the past. In 2019, she told Rolling Stone it was one of the first movies she ever loved. “I basically built my whole personality off of Clementine,” she says of Kate Winslet’s character in the 2004 film. “It was really exciting for me to see a woman on film who was proud and liberated in her own weirdness and in her own non-polite, non-political, non-conformative, inconvenient self.”
The tie-ins to the movie don’t stop with “Ashley” — she also has a song appropriately named “clementine.” And coincidentally (or not), her collaborator on “Suga’s Interlude,” BTS’s Min Yoongi, produced a song last year for South Korean hip-hop group Epik High called “Eternal Sunshine.”
The other film Halsey samples on Manic is another cult favorite, 2009’s Jennifer’s Body. The horror film stars Megan Fox as possessed teen Jennifer on a revenge streak against the boys in her hometown, and Amanda Seyfried as her best friend Needy who attempts to help her and is scarred in the process.
Halsey ties in the film at the beginning of her song “killing boys.” In the sample, Needy tells Jennifer, “you’re killing people.” Jennifer responds, “No! I’m killing boys. Boys are just placeholders. They come and they go.” Needy says, “You’re my best friend and I wanna help you but I won’t let you kill again.” Jennifer scoffs, “That’s a lose/lose.”
The placement of the song is important: on the track list, “killing boys” comes after “Alanis’ Interlude” (featuring Alanis Morissette), a song that’s explicitly queer, with lines like “your p*ssy is a wonderland, and I could be a better man./It doesn’t matter to me.” The legacy of Jennifer’s Body, meanwhile, is one of queerness. As them. writer Sarah Fonseca explains, “The friends’ storied, passionate relationship (deemed “totally lesbigay” by a classmate early on in the film) is the emotional crux from which Jennifer’s Body’s biggest feminist statements, most of which are skillfully cloaked in fake blood and late aughts band merch, originate: women should always aim to support one another; patriarchy makes friendship between women terribly difficult, and sex with men a bore; survivors are omnipotent; the reckless abandon of teen girls doesn’t justify assault; no one asks to be made into a monster, but no one should be surprised when the monster of their creation invites herself over for dinner.”
Halsey has spoken about her own sexuality in recent years. “I’m a young, bisexual woman, and I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to validate myself — to my friends, to my family, to myself — trying to prove that who I love and how I feel is not a phase,” she said in a 2018 video accepting an award from GLAAD. “So I tried really hard to find the courage this year to write female pronouns into my music.”
Both of these references were obviously chosen with intention, and they help illuminate the themes Halsey is interested in on Manic: internal chaos, self-reflection, self-sabotage, dynamic relationships and their endings, and how her gender and sexuality intersect with the “hysteria” of America and the bad behavior of men.
There’s a lot to unpack as fans delve into the record — as Halsey put it in a tweet about the album’s release, “I’ve gone my whole life struggling to accept this part of me and I made art out of it. I feel happy. Thank you.”
This story originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
