"Well hello, my hollow Holofernes"
What the hell does this line from That Unwanted Animal mean? Two possibilities I've been toying with, one a popular fandom theory while the other is rather rarely mentioned:
1. The Assyrian general from the story of Judith and Holofernes. The tale (from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith) was that this man who was leading a siege against a beautiful Hebrew widow's hometown was so struck by her loveliness that Judith was able to get him drunk and then behead him in his own tent, thus saving her people. Artists, writers, and musicians from the Renaissance and the Baroque eras up to today have taken this narrative and run with it, using it to represent things such as virtue vs vice, the folly of pride, the Catholic Church vs Protestant heresy and the Ottoman Turks, you name it. Judith has been portrayed as everything from chaste heroine to depraved seductress, and Holofernes has been, well, dead. Lots of inspiration to mine there when interpreting the song, particularly in the theme of sexually charged violence.
(Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Holofernes, 1620-21)
2. The learned man from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Holofernes is a schoolteacher who is a rather insufferable pedant, priding himself on his intelligence and command of languages. He mocks others for their ignorance, but he himself is a ridiculous caricature of scholarly affectation and is walking, talking proof that education does not necessarily mean wisdom.
Of course the name is a reference to the Assyrian general (and all the cultural weight that comes with the story), but this specific character is interesting to me because of these lyrics:
And you, you follow philosophies
But me, I laugh, I choke
‘Well hello, my hollow Holofernes’
I wink but you don’t get the joke
It's like she's mockingly saying, "You think yourself a philosopher, but all of your knowledge is empty" just like the play's foolish scholar.
(From the Folger Shakespeare Library. Holofernes is in blue.)
We have at least two different interpretations to play with. Go wild!
