Covering Up the Cracks: Arthur Miller, Twenty One Pilots, and the American Literature of Neurosis

Abstract

In December 2009, a three-piece basement band called Twenty One Pilots independently released a self-titled debut studio album. The name, front man Tyler Joseph has disclosed on various occasions, is inspired by Arthur Miller’s All My Sons—in which Joe Keller’s decision to knowingly distribute defective cylinder heads causes twenty-one pilots to crash in Australia during World War II. This article considers the widely acknowledged, though thus far academically unexplored, relationship between Miller and Joseph’s texts. Though these two figures—the playwright and the pop star—may seem disparate at first glance, there are a number of “creative images” from Miller’s oeuvre that seem to uncannily reappear in Joseph’s lyricism—as the author shows. The exercise of holding these images up alongside each other yields a collection of telling insights into mythologized father figures, transplanted creative utterances, and an enduring “literature of neurosis.”