Unmasking the Mystery of Natalie Merchant

Ever since she first appeared with her band 10,000 Maniacs, spinning madly in opening slots with R.E.M., there’s been a compelling mystery to Natalie Merchant.

The poet and vocalist from Jamestown, N.Y., was the focal point of the Maniacs through its six albums, which began to seep into the public consciousness with singles such as “Like the Weather,” “Trouble Me” and “These Are Days.”

Yet Merchant played against the rules of female rock stardom. She declined to be dolled up, preferring no makeup and her own clothes, which she’d be wearing if she were a librarian in upstate New York. Because she didn’t giggle during interviews and chose to speak out for causes she believed in, she was thought to have no humor.

When she split from her band in 1993 for a solo career, she seemed to take most of her cult following with her. Her solo debut, “Tiger-lily,” released in 1995, went on to sell 4 million copies with more of the same introspective songs that had marked her earlier work. She remained a strong draw to live shows.

Fans may have been thrown for a loop, though, when Merchant released “Ophelia” earlier this year. On it, she is dolled up in a black satin dress and more makeup than she’s ever worn. She appears in six other extreme portraits inside--as a nun, a tough broad with ratted hair and cigarette, a blond Olympian, a uniformed suffragette, a big-top performer, and a shattered asylum victim.

The vivid, differing portraits were akin to a Cindy Sherman photo exhibit in that the only constant, beneath the makeup and costumes, was the female subject.

Clues are offered in the title song to “Ophelia,” in which all are introduced. Here is the nun (“a novice Carmelite”), the “blue stocking suffragette,” the Olympian “sweetheart to a nation,” the Hollywood “demigoddess in pre-war Babylon,” “the mistress to a Vegas gambling man,” “the circus queen” and, ultimately, the asylum-wandering multiple personality with the same name and malady of Hamlet’s doomed sweetheart.

More explanation appeared as “Ophelia: A Film Companion to the Album” (Elektra, $19.98) was just released after much delay. The 22-minute film comes with five more conventional video clips from Merchant’s two solo albums and is packaged as a home video.

Directed by Mark Seliger and Fred Woodward, the film explores at length the different personalities, who are all given names and different languages to speak. The nun, Hermanita Merchant, speaks Spanish. Frau Merchant, the athlete whose main sports seem to be rhythmic gymnastics and archery, speaks German. Mme. Merchant, the lounging star, speaks French. Natalia Mercanti, the Mafia courtesan, speaks Italian. Natasha Mercolovich, the human cannonball, speaks Russian. The women’s rights activist--who seems to share the singer’s origins of upstate New York, where the suffragette movement flourished--takes on Merchant’s own name and her native tongue.

Appearing “as herselves,” the mad Ophelia does not speak at all.

After an elaborate presentation of the title song, the film takes a documentary style in interviewing the personalities and Merchant herself as she undergoes the transformation in the makeup room to the various characters.

Debunking her dour image, it’s easy to see her joy in the role-playing. She’s talking in the third person about the characters, then suddenly she’s speaking in the character’s own voice, improvising lines and life stories in an elaborate game of make-believe.

Even better is when each character (except the mad Ophelia) mouths lyrics from other songs on “Ophelia” and briefly appears to sing them, lending the idea that the album and its songs have an underlying theme deeper than the single-concept video.

The suffragette sounds just right singing “Thick as Thieves.” The athlete trilling “Life Is Sweet” seems appropriate. The nun contemplates “Frozen Charlotte.” The star endorses luxury in “My Skin.” The courtesan belies her tough exterior with “Break Your Heart.” And the cannonball queen comes closest to natural Natalie exuberance in dancing a Belinda Carlisle dance to “Kind & Generous.”

The videos from “Tigerlily” that close the home video indicate how far Merchant has come in her “Ophelia” project. In them, she appears essentially as herself, among women of all stripes in “Miracle,” singing in a garment-district loft with her band in “Jealousy,” but most notably, taking pictures of the passing circus as strictly an outsider in “Carnival.”

Its lyrics could almost be a blueprint for the picture she enters in “Ophelia”:

“I’ve walked these streets

a virtual stage

it seemed to me.

Makeup on their faces

actors took their

places next to me,” she sings.

“I’ve walked these streets in the mad house asylum.”