Shady Beasts, Animal Transgression, and Identity
91
And there’s a million of us just like me
Who cuss like me; who just don’t give a fuck like me
Who dress like me; walk, talk, and act like me.
(“The Real Slim Shady’’)
But he is, in fact, being humped by Tom Green—the character who can
“really” do whatever he wants. The star musician is no more free than the
countless other slim shadys listening to his music; to this end, the song
multiplies the problem when it suggests that, “there’s a million of us just
like me” (detailing linguistic, behavioral, and fashion similarities), and
that “Every single person is a Slim Shady lurkin.” The conclusion,
“Guess there’s a Slim Shady in all of us / Fuck it, let’s all stand up,”
gives up the search for the real Slim Shady and the possibility of
responsible singularity. There is no other, no exemplar above the law, in
short, there is no antidote to the problems raised in the song. The moose,
dead, is not free and cannot be set free. The fantasy of social
responsibility is bankrupt in Eminem’s song. The corpse of the animal
pollutes the human entirely. Eminem’s attempt to create a new
community in which he is just a member is thoroughly undermined even
as, for every purchase of the song arguing that everyone is a slim shady,
there is still only one Slim Shady who is earning royalties. The moose
functions as an animemorial, destabilizing identity, knowability, and
responsible humanity. We are not free from this creature presence that
illustrates only an absence of our own certainty of place. Eminem is an
example (only one among so many) of the reception of the struggle with
animals in the Romantic period. The Byronic method of engaging an
animal corpse in the interest of identifying a human self, parsing social
relationships, and redefining a space in which humans can seek a stable
identity even at death’s door remains a mark of Romantic reception of
shady beasts and ought to continue to inflect our reading of animals in
popular culture.
There is yet another confrontation with a significant moose that
adds to the discussion, specifically demonstrating the extension of
identity politics into the realms of race through confrontations with taboo
animals even while it destabilizes the boimdary between human and
nonhuman animals. Confrontations with beasts and bodies continue to
shape human representations of self, and the relative threat is often
obscured with comedy. Woody Allen (himself bom Allen Konigsberg)
hilariously identifies the comic potential of an apparently dead moose in
his 1965 standup routine, “The Moose.” The routine is readily available