On Reptile, Trent Reznor reveals the ugliest side of his persona, wounded by broken relationships he treads a crooked line between misogyny, body horror and a burning hatred for Courtney Love. If The Downward Spiral is an album that charts a narrator lost in a blizzard between the twin poles of his own egomania and self-loathing; Reptile is perhaps the song that best explores what happens when our inner pain becomes a way of seeing others.
On Reptile we hear a voice, divided, this time torn between attraction and repulsion – the narrator is caught in contradiction – he loves the one he hates. He finds a female antagonist: seductive, seemingly promiscuous and enticing, perhaps he is spurned, rejected and so he becomes the victim exploited by a cruel woman who toys with his feelings. Like the snake that seduced Adam and Eve she drips honeyed poison into his ear; so Reznor pours scorn upon her beauty, the dread weight of her attraction.
In the context of the album, Reptile confirms further loss of faith in others and relationships, this time in the ‘goodness’ of beauty, women or perhaps even love itself. The female becomes othered and vulgar as a deceitful reptilian creature, void of form. The narrator feels so let-down by this [now] figure of hate, she/it becomes an object into which he can pour all of his gathered resentments of soured relationships. In the narrator’s attempt to find and appreciate beauty within his terrible headspace, he ends-up resenting it, seeking to destroy what he cannot have, control or contain; the reptile is some kind of monster, but the narrator’s bitterness at being denied or discarded by it, culminates in a deep self-hate projected onto other, that is even uglier still.
Onto her, he can project the true source of his pain and misery as target for blame and derision; the more he knocks her down, for making him feel this way, the better he feels about himself and the truer his feelings become until it is perhaps all women who have become monsters in his eyes. From: https://adamsteiner.uk/2021/06/26/nine-inch-nails-reptile-reznor-beauty-and-self-courtney-love/
Characteristic of the band's mid-90s industrial rock sound, Reptile opens with an eerie and quiet machine-like sound collage sampled from the film Leviathan, which transitions into an imitative musical composition. The structure, repetitive in nature, contains three distinct but similar sections, all driven by machine-like percussion loops and undulating rhythm guitar and synthesized bass. Two looped mechanical sounds that run through the song are sampled from the film Aliens: a metallic thud from the opening scene immediately after the chamber is cut open, and a pitched-up mechanical sound from the first power loader scene. The choruses reflect a brighter mood with prominent melodic synthesizers and glimpses of guitar. The three sections are joined by two quiet instrumental breaks, a technique used later on "Even Deeper." The ascending synth melody from 5:13 to 5:20 could potentially be a reference to or an interpolation of "Laura Palmer's Theme" from the television show Twin Peaks. During this same section, there is a looped sample of a woman saying, "Kirk, help?" from the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The "gong" sound that appears midway through the track and after the bridge is also used near the end of "Hurt", but the pitch is changed. The synth melody during the outro has the same voicing as that heard during the outro of "Last". The drums used are the same as on "Fell From Heaven" by Lead Into Gold (a Paul Barker side-project, and one whose music video for "Faster Than Light" features a cameo from Reznor.) This may be strictly coincidence, given that some of the same or similar instruments may have been used, or it could be an actual sample. From: https://www.nin.wiki/Reptile
