ipl-logo

Dead Man's Bones: Ryan Gosling

970 Words4 Pages

Dead Man’s Bones Who starred in Murder by Numbers, The Slaughter Role, and Half Nelson? Ryan Gosling, yes the Ryan Gosling who also starred in The Notebook. He was born November 12, 1980 making him a Scorpio. Ryan was born in London, Ontario in Canada, to his Mormon parents which Gosling mentions “influenced every aspect of [their] lives”. Due to his father’s career as a salesman their family moved around a lot; however, after his parents divorced he lived with only his sister and his mother to whom he credits programming him to “think like a girl”. Ryan was a strange child, easily influenced by movies he enjoyed, he once brought steak knives to school then threw them at the other children (he was of course, suspended for the incident). …show more content…

In this poem the speaker is a child who is in the hospital or is otherwise ill, as illustrated by the phrase “Please make me better” (lines 4,8,12). The narrator being sick sets the stage to reveal the aforementioned theme that one may not always be helped even at their lowest. A key example of the alliterative use in the poem is between “Burn”(lines 1,2) and “Broken”(lines 5,6,9,10). This B alliteration connects the stanzas and in consequence the thought that the speaker is bitter, angry and afraid due to his sickness. The speaker is let down that no one has helped cure their disease and in response want to destroy the outside world represented by “Burn[ing] the street[s]/ [and] Burn[ing] the cars” (lines 1,2). It can also be assumed that the repetition of the poem in the phrase “pa pa power pa pa power” (lines 3,7,11) can represent the people who have the ability to help the child, be it doctors, parents, even God. This is because in the musical representation of the poem, performed by Dead Man’s Bones, “pa pa” is pronounced “puh puh”. This shows that the spelling of “pa pa” was intentional, reminiscent of papa or dad. Dad may refer to any person in power, a parent, or “The Father” (God). Further evidence in favor of the God representation is the fact that the phrase is repeated on three occasions, perhaps a nod toward the Holy Trinity. Regardless of which person of power is being represented, the narrator begs to them without them ever making the narrator any better. Ultimately the narrator feels fragile, “broken”, and helpless, nailing into the coffin the point Gosling was trying to make: even when one is at their lowest they may not always receive

More about Dead Man's Bones: Ryan Gosling

    Open Document