“The Enemy Has Never Ceased to Be Victorious”: Anne Frank and Neutral Milk Hotel

Abstract

Here I argue that the affective content of music can usefully combine with utopian longings embodied by the technological wish image. My exemplar is Neutral Milk Hotel’s album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea. This startling requiem for Anne Frank contains a potentially affective charge that derives from its perverse eroticization of Frank, a charge that is capable of bringing repressed utopian longings about history into the open. Especially longed for is the redemption of past hopes that have been dashed by an “enemy [who] has never ceased to be victorious.” However, through a discussion of songwriter Jeff Mangum’s surprise performance in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, I discuss enduring resistances to repressed wishful images that prevent the wish image from being realized or made real.