“Not so long ago in a manaxy not so far away,” begins the “Peur des Filles” video from L’Impératrice that serves as a “short film” about the fairly obvious necessity of cutting up all men and making them controllable puppets the way they thought they could with women for so many centuries. Of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, suddenly they balk at the idea.
With the title card written in English and featuring a “creepshow” sort of font, we see “Afraid of Girls” scrawled across the screen, along with “L’Impératrice presents an ultra misandrist film by Aube Perrie.” The very film, in fact, that would catch the eye of Megan Thee Stallion long enough for her to enlist Perrie to direct the perhaps equally “gross-out” (even if only one instance in particular) “Thot Shit” video. Panning down to a doorway with the address number “666,” a couple of men, Pyjama Guy 1 (Charles de Boisseguin, keyboards) and Pyjama Guy 2 (Achille Trocellier, electric guitar), emerge from the house to join the others in the neighborhood, including Dog Guy (Hagni Gwon, keyboards), Milkshake Guy (David Gaugué, bass guitar) and Pipe Guy (Tom Daveau, drums). All of them have been outside this entire time while looking up at the sky in terror. They are, after all, “peur des filles” (“afraid of girls”). But that’s precisely the gender that’s landed in their “manaxy.” One second Pyjama Guy 2 (who has emerged from the house first) is standing next to Pyjama Guy 1, and the next a woman with a bloody knife has replaced him beneath the UFO-like spotlight that’s cascading down upon them. That woman is played by the band’s vocalist, Flore Benguigui.
Pyjama Guy 2 slowly realizes that he’s standing near a cold-blooded killer—or at least a cold-blooded killer solely of men. Someone had to pick up where Valerie Solanas left off, after all. And it seems Benguigui is all too well-read in The S.C.U.M. Manifesto as she proceeds to continue her stab fest, bloodying the erstwhile pristine suburban milieu. She doesn’t stop at just a knife either—there’s an axe that gets plenty of play as well. After a bit of hacking, she takes a break while holding the head of Milkshake Guy, now drinking his milkshake as though it was always hers. Having quenched her thirst in more ways than one, Flore then finagles a setup wherein she can control the headless corpses with a remote, therefore making them, let’s say, reanimated in her own image. In this sense, the video lends godlike qualities to a woman where once she never had them. Certainly not in the telling of this “galaxy’s” (or planet’s) creation story. All that power was automatically bequeathed to a male god. But not anymore—Flore is taking back the power for all women as she crafts her own brand new and brave new world.
Men in particular will want to see the video as pure “satire” to match the lyrics that chirp (when translated to English), “Girls, they breathe underwater/They are much worse than in Shakespeare/They have teeth under their skin [side note: that sounds like a nod to the vagina dentata]/Play martyrs, hide a smile, a gun in your back/The big bad wolf, they’re everywhere.” But it’s clear Flore’s sarcasm is laden with seriousness, especially in the chorus when she mocks, “You’re scared of girls (scared of girls)/They transform once a month/Fear of girls (fear of girls)/They don’t have the same thing downstairs.” Which, once again, speaks to the inherently homoerotic nature of most men who secretly just want to deal with something they’re “familiar with.” And besides, as it is said by so many with a pénis, “A hole is a hole.”
As we watch Flore get these men to do whatever she wants (including feed her their own fingers), there’s clearly something to be said for the vindictive poetry of a woman finally having all the literal control over a man’s body. You know, since men in government seem to think it’s somehow their divine right to rule over everything that a woman’s body is “permitted” to do. Yet, once more, if things were reversed, maybe men wouldn’t feel so strongly about their perceived need to “dominate” (read: subjugate) a woman’s life.
Soon enough, the male husks in this narrative are sans tête and completely out of bodily proportion (still, they’re a slightly prettier picture than what Frankenstein looked like). After securing them as her servile cadre of cadavers, Flore does a choreographed jig with them while the last “live” male—Pyjama Guy 2—runs loose trying to contact someone who might rescue him. Alas, as he’s dialing a number, Flore creeps up behind him and cuts off his hand—to start with—later holding the detached body part by way of putting the phone with the severed extremity still on it up to her ear. As it turns out, it seemed Flore was planning a special barbeque all along, with each and every murdered man’s head on a platter (John the Baptist-style) set at the table.
Now dressed in what can be described to conservatives as “male clothing” (because it’s pants with a blazer), she approaches the two other women who have joined the party wearing tube tops that read “Earth” and “Sucks,” respectively. Indeed it does. So why not remake another “manaxy” into something resembling full-tilt matriarchy? That’s just what Flore has done with her casual murderous rampage.
