A Film Canon

 

 

The Dreaming is Kate Bush's masterpiece, and the most systematic exploration of her Protean voice, whose distortive, disruptive potential is thematised by her unprecedented prospopoeia, ensuring that virtually every song is sung from the perspective of an unusual persona, including a Vietnam soldier ("Pull Out The Pin"), a petty thief ("There Goes A Tenner"), and a criminal-smuggling pilot ("Night Of The Swallow"). Yet the penultimate track, "Houdini", suggests that prosopopoeia may in fact be possession; that is, that Bush is inhabited by these voices, rather than inhabiting them, explaining their pervasive association with criminal violation. But the album's double sleight of hand comes with the final track, "Get Out Of My House", which reinstates Bush with some qualified agency, insofar as these possessive voices are construed as so many manifestations of an artistic voice that is so original, so affronting, that it remains foreign even to the artist herself. For this reason, the track's various motivating factors - sexual anxiety, invasive reporters, Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining - all ultimately give way to an exorcism of that voice, albeit one which only distils it into so many hallucinatory shrieks, grunts and groans.