26 May 2003
by Jasmine Park
Music videos are cinema's ideal stand-in for today's ADD-stricken audiences. Like films that utilize good music to win over audiences faster than plot development can, music videos have the remarkable ability to suck a viewer in to whatever story happens to fill their three-minute allotments. So close are videos and film that many a recent director has made the leap from one to the other, David Fincher and Spike Jonze being the most talented of the bunch. Naturally, both are represented here, along with seven other sublime vignettes that make up the list of my ten favorites.
One of the most cleverly cinematic music videos of all time, Devil's Haircut depicts its star in a cowboy getup striding through various places in New York City with a radio, harking back to Jon Voight's urban ingénue from John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). At first, Devil's Haircut simply appears to be a montage of nicely shot scenes, but the sly camerawork at the end of each scene that freezes each shot and zooms in on Beck hints at a strange foreboding. The technique recalls 70's post-Watergate paranoia flicks - e.g., Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976) - in which nondescript government agents shadow innocent protagonists. This foreboding is validated in the end, when, scene by scene, the video cuts back to each of the shots we have witnessed and reveals men in dark glasses and suits lingering just outside of the frame who have been following our hero all along, presenting an ingenious coup of viewer expectation.
A technical feat, the video by this Norwegian duo is a series of crisply animated diagrams that depict the mundane quotidian details of a young, single, working woman's 9-to-5 day in London. The video distills these details into scientific explanations of cause and effect, such as a scene that, in just a few seconds, depicts how a toilet is flushed, matter works its way through plumbing, pipes, and the city's sewer system, and eventually becomes the cloud cover of the day's weather forecast. Although the video's clean-lined animation gives it the guise of innocent detachment, Remind Me mounts, scene by scene, a complex argument about contemporary life. The video astonishes in its factual detail, explaining all matters of existence as simply the result of technology, modernity, and environment.
Following in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001), Jamie Thraves's video for Coldplay's The Scientist is even more literal in the backwards-narrative trope by actually running the entire video in reverse. Chris Martin wakes up on a mattress outside on dirty pavement, and we follow his story as he moves backwards in time but forwards in the song (Martin had to learn how to sing the entire track in reverse for the video's filming). In addition to displaying how oddly people move if shot backwards, the video passes through increasingly strange scenery, as Martin strides through a forest, puts back on his coat, and walks by a woman in a meadow who appears to be sleeping. Only when he returns to his unconscious state inside of a wrecked car and the woman's body floats back through the shattered glass of the windshield do we realize that they were companions who have been in a car accident. The video packs an effective emotional punch as it finishes on the strangely sad and moving pre-crash scene of them driving happily along.
The music video that single-handedly made Christopher Walken accessible to Generation X, Spike Jonze's video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice features Walken in an empty hotel dancing to the track blaring from a janitor's cart. What is really funny about the video is way that Walken moves, a bit like your nerdy dad if he thought no one was at home. With his hands held midriff like a lapdog and his knees knocking about, the choreography seems so casual as to be random, and Walken captures the genuine feel of someone who has decided to dance just for the sake of it. Two-thirds of the way through, the video literally takes off from reality and lets him fly over a balcony and hover before a painting of sailboats in the lobby with a look of real satisfaction plastered on his face. Then he lands and settles back into his chair. Genuinely amusing and original, Jonze's clever, tongue-in-cheek style is written all over it.
Stylistically superb, Criminal follows the eerily voyeuristic gaze of a darkened camera lens as it surveys the interior of a room where Fiona Apple lounges about with other waifish youths in various states of undress. The video recalls the infamously pedophilic Calvin Klein television commercials that featured underage adolescents being directed to undress for the camera by an off-camera male voice; Criminal fuses the sex implicit in the material with Schiele-like shots of Fiona in her underwear lip-synching and looking like a feral streetcat. The video confirmed her odd, underfed sex appeal while effectively capturing the weltschmerz of being young, thin, and utterly bored.
One of the most unique music videos of all time, Take on Me depicts the meeting of reality versus make-believe when a young woman enters a comic book to meet her man, played by A-Ha's lead singer, like a reverse Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). But the two lovers are soon beset by difficulties as, in the real world, a waitress finds the book and crumples it up. This causes a rupture in the fictional world, and the villains of the storyline suddenly appear and seem determined to harm the lovers. The hero creates a portal for the girl to escape back to her real life, and in the end, he joins her by apparently busting through the frames of the comic book. The rotoscopic animated sketches that make up the comic book are drawn in just enough to give one a full sense of another world, and the story, with its proper dramatic arc, holds together exceptionally well, creating an ethereal fairy-tale experience.
The first music video to totally mimic a film, I'm Glad models itself after Flashdance (1983) and perfectly captures J. Lo's best assets, as she manages to be both sexy and earnest. Like a latter-day Madonna, J. Lo has become the most famous all-around performer of today; I'm Glad features a catchy track while demonstrating that J. Lo can certainly do the sweaty sexy workout scenes well, as her thighs and derriere get their due screen time. The scenes of the video are lifted directly from Flashdance, depicting her character's rise from factory worker to an audition before real dance critics, as she struts and vamps in black leg warmers. One parting shot of J. Lo tugging at her briefs as the song ends recalls another of her sexy videos, My Love Don't Cost a Thing; never before has the adjustment of an oncoming wedgie been so appealing.
From Michael's second solo album Listen Without Prejudice, Freedom '90 is the artist's best song to date and features an exceptionally glamorous video, thanks to a bevy of supermodel talent that includes Cindy Crawford, Christie Turlington, and Naomi Campbell, who traipse about apartments of decadent squalor lip-synching to the video's track. Freedom '90's slick retro feel is attributable to the video's then-unknown director David Fincher, who was also responsible for other video hits such as Aerosmith's Janie's Got a Gun and Madonna's Vogue. Like all things involving exceptionally beautiful people, each well-edited shot of the video is charged with sex, especially by never actually depicting it.
Directed by Mark Romanek, who made such brilliant but disparate videos as Nine Inch Nails's Closer and Lenny Kravitz's Are You Gonna Go My Way, Rain is one of Madonna's most visually stunning videos, and a surprisingly earnest song from her otherwise high-charged Erotica period of the early 1990's. Rain depicts a shoot-within-a-shoot with the star on a minimalist Japanese sound stage. The video skillfully hints at themes of technology and modernity during the production, while the scenes that the pseudo-director sets up are supremely, elegantly modern. The last shot of Madonna seemingly floating above a sea of black umbrellas is ineffably gorgeous.
A three-minute jolt of pure unbridled happiness. Björk's jazzy up-and-down tune about the emotional rollercoaster of love is given a tender visualization by Spike Jonze, who admitted to being influenced by the bright Technicolor joy of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) when he directed this video. The song's moments of downtime are given slow-motion treatment, while the happy choruses are sped up to real-time as extras like old ladies with parasols and a dancing mailbox back up Björk's childlike dance routines. The video amounts to a joyous, slightly clumsy musical number that is utterly charming.
Beck | Devil's Haircut
Röyksopp | Remind Me
Coldplay | The Scientist
Fatboy Slim | Weapon of Choice
Fiona Apple | Criminal
A-Ha | Take on Me
Jennifer Lopez | I'm Glad
George Michael | Freedom '90
Madonna | Rain
Björk | It's Oh So Quiet
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