“My and many people’s critique of this Aristophanes story is that we don’t need another person to be whole,” Stovall says.
In recent TV shows, Lilith has been used as a symbol of revolt against the patriarchy. In the Middle Ages, many paintings were drawn of Lilith as a part-serpent, part-human demon who tries to tempt Adam into all sorts of bad behavior-including having sex on top of Adam, which is depicted in “Montero.” “Lilith still has this popular culture degree to her and is understood to still exist in the world,” Betancourt says he cites the popularity of the character on TikTok, where videos tagged #lilith have accrued 193 million views. Lil Nas is turning that on its head with the way that his character and the serpent interact.”īetancourt also notes that Lil Nas’ snake resembles not just the serpent in most retellings of the Bible, but Lilith, Adam’s first wife from Jewish mythology. “It aligns women with evil it aligns sexuality with women and with evil. “The story of the garden is a tradition that is historically misogynist,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia University, says.
His character is tempted into sin by a snake, who also has Lil Nas’ face. The first one takes place in the garden of Eden, where Lil Nas plays either Adam, Eve or some combination of the two. “Montero,” which was co-directed by Lil Nas X and Tanu Muino, is composed of three acts. Read more: Lil Nas X on ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name),’ LGBTQ Repression and the Influence of FKA Twigs The Garden of Eden
“It says that institutionalization of homophobia is a learned thing-and that there are other origin myths available to us that are not rooted in those ideas.”
“Watching this video, I was a little bit shocked just because of how much knowledge you need to have to unpack some of these elements,” Roland Betancourt, a professor at University of California, Irvine and the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, says. “It’s the same thing over and over.”Īnd scholars have come away impressed by the video’s attention to detail and conceptual sharpness they say it is deeply researched and builds a powerful historical narrative that centers queerness in historical and religious spaces where it is too often erased. “I wanted to use these things that have been around for so long to tell my own story, and the story of so many other people in the community-or people who have been outcast in general through history,” he says. Lil Nas, in an interview with TIME, says he wanted to deploy this type of iconography and symbolism to draw a connection between ancient and modern-day persecution. “Montero,” across its three-minute runtime, is stuffed with Greco-Roman and medieval Christian motifs and messages in both Greek and Latin. Another contingent has also excitedly rallied around the music video: historical scholars.
On those two topics, Lil Nas has drawn unsolicited commentary from everyone from South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to basketball player Nick Young to conservative commentator Candace Owens.Īt the same time, the video has drawn praise, and not just among those celebrating its proud embrace of LGBTQ imagery and themes. Over the past few days, a tumultuous discourse around the musician Lil Nas X has reached a fever pitch regarding two things: the lap dance he gives the devil in his new music video “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” and his sale of “Satan Shoes,” which allegedly have a drop of human blood in them.