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I was trolling Youtube while bored recently, and on a whim I searched for clips from a movie from my youth called Rock & Rule (2-Disc Collector’s Edition). I was specifically hoping to find this particular song from the movie called “My Name is Mok” by Lou Reed. And I was ecstatic to actually find it!  It’s pure electric swagger, baby.

Some background on the movie can be found here.  It’s a hideously underrated animated classic that arrived well before animation for adults really exploded and therefore didn’t perform to well in terms of the money it made.  It was a little too ahead of its time.  I saw it on cable TV as a kid and it made a huge impression on my young, superimpressionable, mushlike mind.  Especially the aforementioned scene with the villain Mok, an animated amalgam of the most charismatic living rock stars ever, which showed me what charisma and swagger were long before I ever knew what those words actually meant.  Here is the Mok theme song, sung by Lou Reed, and a very defining scene that immediately follows it:
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As described in the site I linked to above:

As compelling as Angel is, the real star of Rock & Rule is Mok. Like the best screen villains, Mok is charismatic, vain, and egomaniacal. Mind-bogglingly rich and powerful, he has the haggard, seemingly immortal presence of Mick Jagger; the alienated weirdness of Iggy Pop; and the chameleon-like tendencies of David Bowie. He is the supreme rock god. He has merged his stage persona with his personal life (or maybe they were never truly separate), which leads people to not only admire him, but to fear him as well. However, Mok is a prisoner of his own image: he resorts to orchestrated theatrics and video wizardry to convince Angel to join him, when it’s obvious that he could have chosen several other means of getting her to sing for him. It’s not so much that it’s a game to him; he needs to prove that he is The Magic Man, that through sheer force of personality (and special effects) he can bend Angel to his will. Ultimately, in his battle of wills with Angel, Mok loses.

In my previous posts about charisma (part 1 and part 2), I describe it as having a strong enough frame that you can suck other people into your reality through sheer force of will and personality appeal.  The fact that he exists in a reality defined primarily by himself, and expects others to do that same, can be seen in the speech he gives his henchman after the music video is over:

Evil spelled backwards is live, and we all want to do that…

But what makes Rock and Rule really cool is that it shows what happens when charisma fails or isn’t enough to get the job done.  Oftentimes the charismatic person can’t handle it and gets driven to extreme behavior and ultimately self-destruction.

Recommended Viewing:

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