No secret at all, 3

Here is my "Fly" series' final post, in which we'll be going straight through the Vertigo Tour version as best I've been able to grasp it. As I said in #2, this presentation picks up on two repeated concepts in the lyrics: "secret" and "love." Any remaining lyrical connection is tenuous; there is clearly a narrative of resistance, which plays no part in the original text --although I could imagine someone arguing that the point here is about standing up, before it's too late, to the forces that want to take you to Hell (metaphorically and perhaps literally as well).

The opening (over the riff) introduces the theme of making the often costly choice to seek truth for yourself. I've become convinced it's a conversation:
SEE
I DON'T WANT TO
HEAR
I DON'T WANT TO
HEAR/ SEE/ HEAR
I DON'T WANT TO
KNOW

In the first knockout moment, we're warned of the formational power of messages we take in uncritically:
LETTERS/ BECOME WORDS/ BECOME SENTENCES/ BECOME LIES/ BECOME/ YOU.
As the first verse begins, the visuals offer statements missing a word or phrase so important that it determines the whole intent of the message. Your mind, of course, instinctively tries to supply what belongs in the blanks, e.g.:
I _____ my friend
she always _____
it never really _____
What is the _____
Why do you _____

And as we move into the first chorus, multicolored LOVE splashes across the side screens and we get an almost didactic explanation of what that all meant:
You fill in the gaps/ You are the difference
However, this gap-filling is not automatically benign; we learn that we have an adversary, here just called Them, and They've got an agenda for our thought-lives.
They are the givers/We are the acceptors/When will it end?
NEVER

Over the second verse, the visuals drop hints about the answer to dealing with our adversary. There's a secret. What do we know about it?
The secret is BEHIND YOU
The secret is INVISIBLE NOW
The secret is LOUD ENOUGH
THE SECRET IS WHAT YOU never want to see/never want to hear/never want to believe
For the chorus there is a rain of letters with messages on the side screens, and then as the band go into the brief bridge, some of Their words get blown to bits in front of us: INEVITABLE, IMPOSSIBLE.

[update 2/2006: a video of a slightly earlier version than this post narrates, beginning at this point, is now available here]

And over the solo, still with the fill in the blank technique, we get to see some of the statements They'd like us to flesh out for Them:
under-estim te/ feed y ur shadow / bl w your mind / s ll your soul
... except the screens also start exposing what They're really trying to do:
p rsuade/ de-base/ coerce/ bully/ bludg on


Over the chorus (you can tell everyone senses this is the apex of the message because of the wide availability of photos of it), the truth comes out, revealing where real freedom is to be found; it's superimposed over big white words like HOPE:
THE SECRET IS YOURSELF
THE SECRET IS YOUR PAIN
THE SECRET IS LETTING GO
GIVING UP
BREAKING DOWN
GIVING IN
...TO THE END
...TO THE BEGINNING [that would be giving in to the omega and the alpha, then?]
GIVING IN TO...[and as I said earlier, here I was really expecting at last to get the ironic turn, the way "it's your world you can change it" used to shift to "charge it," but, no, the 90s are well and truly gone:]

LOVE

The main theological point made, we can imitate Paul and move into the exhortation section. I know fewer of these lines, but it's things like
Re laim your space/ Recla m your space/ Reclaim your space/ It belongs to you
You can do it
They own you/ You own them
It is there/ Down the block / In your face
Close your eyes
Close your ears/ Shut them out
You will win
And then, over the final guitar crescendo to the end, the thing stuns you by reversing itself, and plays the beginning backwards. (This immediately conjured up the redemptive reversal scheme of the HTDAAB deluxe book for me.) YOU/ BECOME LIES/ BECOME SENTENCES/ BECOME WORDS... until Their lies and our apathy and powerlessness disappear into nothing before your eyes, the final triumphant word being

SEE