This Beautiful Life

This Beautiful Life
One foot, then the other
Such embarrassment, it wasn’t meant that
I, I should discover such offensive things
This suffering sends hope to the ground
But I really never had enough
They’ve got pride in him
This tide turns lives over

A black tongue prophecy, adorned in stony skin
We never ever (never ever) ever had to lie to move ahead
But here in oblivion, we cling to what we can
So in the end (in the end) we can say that with these hands
We took it all back, it all back

So let us force a smile and pretend that we’re alive
Oh, but somewhere, none of this happened
The bullets removed themselves; life is beautiful
I have a home above the lake where I could

Forget the words to the songs that we’ve heard
The passages read, all the names in a world
That have brought us this pain, from the wounds we’ve sustained
A cold calloused heart, sitting still in this cave of a chest
So abandon a life from before
A boy and his innocence

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Struggling with the revelation of Ms Terri’s profession and the circumstances of his own birth, Hunter comes to hate himself. While marching to the Somme, he resolves the only solution is to discard his past and restart life under another identity. The regiment then arrives at the Somme.

What’s in a name?
‘Hunter Hates His Life’.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter, hating his life.

🌲🌲🌲

>One foot, then the other / Such embarrassment, it wasn’t meant that / I,
Hunter is plodding along at the end of the line of soldiers, marching en route to the battleground. The mindless rhythm of the march has helped him cool down from He Said He Had A Story, but his mind is still fixated on all the implications of the horrible truth he’s learned.

>It wasn’t meant that / I, I should discover such offensive things
Hunter regrets learning about Ms Terri’s profession, especially in such a bawdy and denigrating manner. Hunter has always held his mother in extremely high esteem and from his perspective she’s never been anything but gentle, loving, and spotless. Knowing now that these were the secrets she was trying to hide from him, and that this is what she was doing every time she went away, Hunter feels like an idiot for ever trying to uncover the truth, and like he has utterly disrespected her memory by soiling it with images of her flirting with and getting pounded by clients. Moreover, now when he tries to think back on his past to periods where Ms Terri was absent, that absence automatically fills with unpleasant images of her getting railed.

Ms Terri obviously didn’t want this to affect him or to affect his perception of her — but now that he knows it, inevitably, it has.

>This suffering sends hope to the ground / But I really never had enough
Trying to uncover Ms Terri’s secrets, and from that find some stability, was the impetus for him leaving the Lake in the first place. Now that he knows those secrets weren’t worth uncovering, or rather that they were actively deleterious things to know, he feels not just beyond stupid, but like he’s accidentally upended any possibility of finding happiness in his life. Like, who is Hunter? Oh, he’s the selfish greedy spoilt bastard son of a raped prostitute.

Turns out Ms Terri was protecting him after all. He should have trusted her more.

>They’ve got pride in him
Hunter glances over the other soldiers and sees how they are looking to the General with admiration. They loved his story, and are impressed by the General’s authority and handling of that hesitant hooker — what a ridiculous thing! — by firmly putting her in her place. Hunter of course hates this and does not even know how to respond to the fact that consensus says the General is cool for raping his mother.

I imagine that the other soldiers expect Hunter to hold the same sentiment, and part of getting along with them means having to pretend he’s not furious. He’s gobsmacked by the whole thing.

>This tide turns lives over
Everything Hunter knows about his life has been upended. Prior to this moment, if you looked at Hunter’s life as a gestalt, you could say that it was basically good and happy. Of course, bad things happened, but those were interruptions bouncing off an essentially positive foundation.

Now it feels like it’s the other way around — Hunter’s life is basically horrible and miserable, and any strongholds of happiness in it were strenuously engineered to be so. Everything he thought to be a good decision in retrospect was wrong, and by defying the bounds that Ms Terri set for him, all he’s done is immerse himself in the utterly unremitting, merciless blackness that surrounds every facet of his life. Hunter is now understanding that actually, no, he doesn’t have the power to face this, and to think he could was incredibly naive.

>0:44 – 0:57
Those ‘buh buh buh’s again. Really need to figure out what’s up with those.

Stewing on his hurt, indignation, and changed perspective on his life, Hunter’s thoughts grow more incisive and spiteful.

>A black tongue prophecy, adorned in stony skin / We never ever (never ever) ever had to lie to move ahead
Wow this is a hard line! Okay.

‘A black tongue prophecy, adorned in stony skin’ -> Mostly this part. What’s this referring to? The idea of black-tongue prophecy, generally, points to the idea of Hunter’s life and fate being negative, but why is it adorned in stony skin? Whose tongue? What prophecy? Clueless on this one. Oracles maybe?

‘We never ever had to lie to move ahead’ -> Hunter mocks himself and the naive mentality of dumb honesty that got him to this point. Hunter’s general worldview before this was that there was no good reason to tell lies, that good people will be generally sincere and honest, and that you can resolve most misfortunes by fair means. That is, whatever difficulty is placed before you, you can generally solve it without resorting to scummy tactics. So on, so on, the innocent way of the Lake. Broadly speaking, he does still believe that good people will lean towards such things, but is recognising that he was conceited to apply these concepts to himself, because he’d just never been in a situation where he’d had to make such hard decisions before.

Obviously dumb honesty couldn’t work for Ms Terri, and won’t work for Hunter now. If he wants to be happy again, he has to find some way to dissociate from this awful past — when it’s as close to him as the questions “So where are you from?” or “What were your parents like?”, it’s always going to butt back into his life.

>But here in oblivion, we cling to what we can / So in the end (in the end) we can say that with these hands / We took it all back, it all back
Hunter resolves that, when you’re desperate, sometimes none of the options available to you are good. He is willing to use untoward methods to secure a good life for himself again.

>So let us force a smile and pretend that we’re alive
Hunter feels dead inside, but decides he’ll play along making friends with the General and his regiment.

>Oh, but somewhere, none of this happened / The bullets removed themselves; life is beautiful
Thinking about how sheerly agonising pretending to get along with these people will be, Hunter wistfully fantasises of a happier place where he didn’t experience any of this pain, nothing went wrong, none of his loved ones got hurt, and he still has a broadly positive and hopeful outlook towards life. He wishes, truly wishes, to go back to being dumb, naive, sheltered, and innocent.

>I have a home above the lake where I could
Wonderful buildup here. While on the train of thought of going back to safety, it occurs to Hunter that the comfort zone of the Lake is still, like, there.

Another thing to note — the home is ‘above the lake’, so I think my map was right. The cabin’s at the junction of the lake and the river.

>Forget the words to the songs that we’ve heard / The passages read, all the names in a world / That have brought us this pain, from the wounds we’ve sustained
He considers the possibility of running back to the Lake and pretending that none of the events that followed his leaving ever happened. Love the absolute despair cheery stuff going on in this verse, a bit Mustard Gassy. We have the BSB ‘smiling through the pain’ sting show up again here, too.

>A cold calloused heart, sitting still in this cave of a chest
But even if he went back to the Lake, he’d still be this horrible, selfish, greedy person and by all metrics would likely still be miserable. Going back to the Lake doesn’t give him anything new he can replace his current life with; it just forces him to pretend he’s happy.

>So abandon a life from before / A boy and his innocence
Hunter decides that what he has to do is erase any association he has with the life he’s lived up to now. The innocent boy that Ms Terri tried to shelter and nurture has been undone, and Hunter needs to assume a new identity if he’s to move forward anywhere.

For all purposes, this song marks the point where Hunter just snaps. His life is causing him so much pain he can’t handle it anymore.

>2:54 – 3:15 Instrumental
Buh buh buh buh buh. Hunter’s thoughts begin to take a devious direction.

>3:15 – 3:44 Instrumental
Unsure, but I think this big burst of energy before the fadeout might be Hunter already considering the possibility of stealing the Son’s identity.

>3:45 – 4:05 Ambiance
So we have wind… frogs… rain… Hunter’s regiment has reached the battleground (in terrible conditions, too), and will now participate in the Battle of the Somme.

He Said He Had A Story | Act III | Go Get Your Gun