(no subject)
I need to sign up for another English class next quarter, if only so that it will stop me from analyzing music video clips at 4 am.
I wonder how many times I've watched the Directions video on the song 'What Sarah Said' that's posted on Death Cab's website until Monday. God damnit I feel so stupid sometimes for saying that a now huge commerically successful band understands me, and maybe I'm just trying to find the right symbolism because I need it to be there for me, but I feel like that video is a chronological history of my general relationship with guys.
I really did not care for this video at first because I thought it was too straightforward and... contrived, though I understand that there's not a lot you can pack into a six minute time frame. But after watching it everyday for the last week, I think that it's a lot of little things which make it really spectacular.
The entire video is in washed out colors, mostly black and white and yellow/light tones. It opens with last note of the song fading out before a silence, and then the beginning of the song starts up. There's with a girl looking into the mirror while putting on lipstick. She looks at her reflection, then takes her tube of lipstick and writes "Il m'aime" on the mirror (French for "He loves me"). The sound waves shift to be clearer when she goes out into a bedroom where a guy is dejectedly sitting on the edge of a bed, staring at an empty chair while smoking. She approaches him and opens her left hand, which has "just a little" written on it in French. He doesn't acknowledge her. She clutches her hand to her as if ashamed of suggesting it, then sits down on a seat off to the side of the room and nervously rubs the writting on her palm against the chair's arm, erasing it. She reaches for a stand holding a knife cutter, but then when she notices that the guy isn't paying attention, her hand flitters over to a jar full of paint brushes.
She stands at the head of the bed and writes "Beacoup" (which means "a lot") in huge painted letters on the wall. The guy doesn't turn around to look. She turns to stare at his back, then lets the jar of paintbrushes slip through her fingers and drop on the bed in a sort of hopeless abandonment of that tactic. She walks to the foot of the bed, and crouches down behind him to wrap an arm around him. She pulls up her sleeve, and "passionately" is painted on her arm (still in French). The male sits there, staring desolately at an empty room and smoking. There's pacing around the room and crying and tossed looks of desperation while the guy remains stoic. Blackout of the screen for a second while the music transitions into the bridge. She's sitting in a chair, and then reaches for a small knife (it looks like it'd be used to cut cardboard or something) with a blank look on her face like it doesn't matter if she can't get his attention anymore. On her left leg she cuts "with madness" in French into her skin. The guy doesn't pay attention. She sits there for a moment, then stands up and goes back to the bathroom. She adds "pas du tout" onto "il m'aime", making the mirror now say "He loves me not". It could just be my computer, but while earlier the writing had been a sort of faded out blackish/pink, it now looks red. The girl looks at the writing, then erases all of it. Shot to the guy still sitting on the edge of the bed looking depressed and smoking. The girl rewrites "il m'aime" over the messed up smear on the mirror then she turns and walks out of the bathroom.
Since I am a nerd, I'm trained to start off analyzing the video clip with the question "What is the director trying to say?" at the front of my mind. Not what it means to me.
I think there are two equally good theories about the message the film maker was trying to get across. The first, obvious one that came to me is that the girl is the dead one (hence the guy ignoring her), or is symbolically dead and like a ghost. Which is why she can't get his attention no matter how hard she tries.
The second theory says that the guy is the dying one. Oh, the preoccupation with death comes from the main line in the song that sums up the theme of the entire CD: "Love is watching someone die (so who's gonna watch you die?)". Assuming that the guy is not physically dead but suffering a spiritual/artistic death, the girl could represent his muse who's struggling to save him while he slids closer to oblivion. I also read a suggestion that rather than an artistic failing, the girl is watching the guy die from chain smoking.
I don't like the first theory because if the girl was actually dead, she would be saying "i love you" to the guy since she should be comforting him, not trying to reassure herself that he loves her. I don't like the second because if the guy is emotionally dead and it's not an issue of romance, then for her to be distressed over his situation is understandable, but she wouldn't be trying for a larger and larger sign of affection with every moment that he ignores her. I don't like the smoking theory just because French people are chain smokers, and while the guy does it out of stress it's not causing him any physical pain (like he's not hacking or coughing) so I don't think there's an anti-smoking message.
Of course I made all these theories not fit because I like the way I interpreted the film to have meaning to me the most.
Starting off with sound. There's a theme of repetition or a neverending cycle, since it starts with the song ending, and then pausing before beginning to play over again. I immediately felt like I sympathized with that girl when she looked up at herself in the mirror, then turned her head in an angle that people subconsciously do when they're trying to convince themselves that they're prettier than they think by striking a cute pose. When she turned to look at herself straight on and again while applying lipstick, I felt like it was saying that the girl had insecurities, or she was nervous about her looks. She wrote "Il m'aime" on the mirror like spelling out the words would make it real, and using lipstick which reminds me of covering yourself up to make you better than you really are. When she steps into the bedroom with the guy and the sound clears up, to me it meant that when you're near someone you love, everything comes into focus and the world is more... real. She approaches him to show him "you love me just a little" in the palm of her hand, which is like saying that she's not afraid to directly ask for something so little (and the size correlates with how small it's written). When he doesn't respond despite his sadness over something, she draws her hand back like he's assaulted her, and she acts ashamed of her suggestion as shown when she rubs it out of her against the chair. I love how she hesitates with her hand over the knifes like she wants him to object to her handling such a dangerous object, but when she sees that he's not paying attention she realizes that she's not at the end of her rope for attention and uses the paintbrushes instead. She writes A Lot in tall capital letters (once again the size thing) but even when she's broadcasting a huge brazen message, he still doesn't turn around to see. She realizes that shyly asking and loud displays won't get his attention, and drops the can of paintbrushes to abandon tools for a more intimate method. She shows a hidden part of herself, and her desperation for even a shred of attention, when she pulls up her sleeve to reveal the word "passionately" painted on her arm. With every moment that he ignores her, he's forcing her to realize how deep her feelings for him really run. Her questions of his love for her reflect how she feels about him. When he doesn't respond to "I love you a little" she proclaims that she loves him a lot to make him realize how important and serious this really is. Upon a lack of reaction, instead of having her pride hurt and abandoning her feelings for him, she's forced to admit to herself that she loves him passionately and can't give him up and she just needs some sign of reassurance in return.
After receiving no response to that, she paces around the room while he's still in his funk and she begins to hate their situation and how she can't reach him. Blackout of the screen to show that she's hit rock bottom, and when she reaches for the knife now there's no expecting gaze upon him to react. Just the certainty that she loves him but can't affect him at all. "With madness" sums up their situation, it's mad to love someone you can't feel or affect, and real love is mad because it's senseless and persistent like that.
When she goes back to the bathroom to write "He loves me not", to me it glowed a brighter shade (red) than anything else about that movie, like it was true and it was everything she feared. She erased it, but there's still traces in the smudges and stains it left on the mirror. Even though that was the truth (and maybe why he couldn't respond, because he really hadn't loved her so he couldn't understand what she was asking) she wrote "He loves me" over that, like that was the last thing she wanted to walk away with from their relationship. Even if he hadn't loved her, eventually that memory of confrontation will fade and the times she'll remember from their relationship is when she did believe that they were in love.
I think that she did die a death (either literal or being far away in a situation where she could no longer communicate with him), because he feels sad when he's looking back and thinking upon their relationship. Inventing a back story that would correlate with my life, she pulled him around and teased him without evering letting the notion of a romantic love come between them. And he feels sad because he's thinking about how much more their relationship could have been if she'd trusted him and been open with him and able to say that she did love him. Now, in death, she's come back to ask if during their relationship where she kept her feelings for him in check, if he had loved her. And she discovers the awful truth that now that she's dead and trying to convince herself that he did love her, that she had been in love with him all along even though they never said it to each other. And she feels despair as she finds the depths of these feelings and the awful realization of how she'll never being able to express them to him (it goes from the petty 'look at me and care that I'm playing with knifes' to 'I can cut myself because I feel pain without doing it to make you worry about me'). Even though cutting is now stereotypical, I like what she said about it being with love and madness, and how calculated and despairing it is to carve a message into yourself, instead of cutting random slashes out of anger or overwhelming sadness. And I think that on a more physical level it's also true, you hurt yourself and you bleed and feel that suffocating sort of helplessness when you love someone but you missed you chance to express it to them.
The end.
I wonder how many times I've watched the Directions video on the song 'What Sarah Said' that's posted on Death Cab's website until Monday. God damnit I feel so stupid sometimes for saying that a now huge commerically successful band understands me, and maybe I'm just trying to find the right symbolism because I need it to be there for me, but I feel like that video is a chronological history of my general relationship with guys.
I really did not care for this video at first because I thought it was too straightforward and... contrived, though I understand that there's not a lot you can pack into a six minute time frame. But after watching it everyday for the last week, I think that it's a lot of little things which make it really spectacular.
The entire video is in washed out colors, mostly black and white and yellow/light tones. It opens with last note of the song fading out before a silence, and then the beginning of the song starts up. There's with a girl looking into the mirror while putting on lipstick. She looks at her reflection, then takes her tube of lipstick and writes "Il m'aime" on the mirror (French for "He loves me"). The sound waves shift to be clearer when she goes out into a bedroom where a guy is dejectedly sitting on the edge of a bed, staring at an empty chair while smoking. She approaches him and opens her left hand, which has "just a little" written on it in French. He doesn't acknowledge her. She clutches her hand to her as if ashamed of suggesting it, then sits down on a seat off to the side of the room and nervously rubs the writting on her palm against the chair's arm, erasing it. She reaches for a stand holding a knife cutter, but then when she notices that the guy isn't paying attention, her hand flitters over to a jar full of paint brushes.
She stands at the head of the bed and writes "Beacoup" (which means "a lot") in huge painted letters on the wall. The guy doesn't turn around to look. She turns to stare at his back, then lets the jar of paintbrushes slip through her fingers and drop on the bed in a sort of hopeless abandonment of that tactic. She walks to the foot of the bed, and crouches down behind him to wrap an arm around him. She pulls up her sleeve, and "passionately" is painted on her arm (still in French). The male sits there, staring desolately at an empty room and smoking. There's pacing around the room and crying and tossed looks of desperation while the guy remains stoic. Blackout of the screen for a second while the music transitions into the bridge. She's sitting in a chair, and then reaches for a small knife (it looks like it'd be used to cut cardboard or something) with a blank look on her face like it doesn't matter if she can't get his attention anymore. On her left leg she cuts "with madness" in French into her skin. The guy doesn't pay attention. She sits there for a moment, then stands up and goes back to the bathroom. She adds "pas du tout" onto "il m'aime", making the mirror now say "He loves me not". It could just be my computer, but while earlier the writing had been a sort of faded out blackish/pink, it now looks red. The girl looks at the writing, then erases all of it. Shot to the guy still sitting on the edge of the bed looking depressed and smoking. The girl rewrites "il m'aime" over the messed up smear on the mirror then she turns and walks out of the bathroom.
Since I am a nerd, I'm trained to start off analyzing the video clip with the question "What is the director trying to say?" at the front of my mind. Not what it means to me.
I think there are two equally good theories about the message the film maker was trying to get across. The first, obvious one that came to me is that the girl is the dead one (hence the guy ignoring her), or is symbolically dead and like a ghost. Which is why she can't get his attention no matter how hard she tries.
The second theory says that the guy is the dying one. Oh, the preoccupation with death comes from the main line in the song that sums up the theme of the entire CD: "Love is watching someone die (so who's gonna watch you die?)". Assuming that the guy is not physically dead but suffering a spiritual/artistic death, the girl could represent his muse who's struggling to save him while he slids closer to oblivion. I also read a suggestion that rather than an artistic failing, the girl is watching the guy die from chain smoking.
I don't like the first theory because if the girl was actually dead, she would be saying "i love you" to the guy since she should be comforting him, not trying to reassure herself that he loves her. I don't like the second because if the guy is emotionally dead and it's not an issue of romance, then for her to be distressed over his situation is understandable, but she wouldn't be trying for a larger and larger sign of affection with every moment that he ignores her. I don't like the smoking theory just because French people are chain smokers, and while the guy does it out of stress it's not causing him any physical pain (like he's not hacking or coughing) so I don't think there's an anti-smoking message.
Of course I made all these theories not fit because I like the way I interpreted the film to have meaning to me the most.
Starting off with sound. There's a theme of repetition or a neverending cycle, since it starts with the song ending, and then pausing before beginning to play over again. I immediately felt like I sympathized with that girl when she looked up at herself in the mirror, then turned her head in an angle that people subconsciously do when they're trying to convince themselves that they're prettier than they think by striking a cute pose. When she turned to look at herself straight on and again while applying lipstick, I felt like it was saying that the girl had insecurities, or she was nervous about her looks. She wrote "Il m'aime" on the mirror like spelling out the words would make it real, and using lipstick which reminds me of covering yourself up to make you better than you really are. When she steps into the bedroom with the guy and the sound clears up, to me it meant that when you're near someone you love, everything comes into focus and the world is more... real. She approaches him to show him "you love me just a little" in the palm of her hand, which is like saying that she's not afraid to directly ask for something so little (and the size correlates with how small it's written). When he doesn't respond despite his sadness over something, she draws her hand back like he's assaulted her, and she acts ashamed of her suggestion as shown when she rubs it out of her against the chair. I love how she hesitates with her hand over the knifes like she wants him to object to her handling such a dangerous object, but when she sees that he's not paying attention she realizes that she's not at the end of her rope for attention and uses the paintbrushes instead. She writes A Lot in tall capital letters (once again the size thing) but even when she's broadcasting a huge brazen message, he still doesn't turn around to see. She realizes that shyly asking and loud displays won't get his attention, and drops the can of paintbrushes to abandon tools for a more intimate method. She shows a hidden part of herself, and her desperation for even a shred of attention, when she pulls up her sleeve to reveal the word "passionately" painted on her arm. With every moment that he ignores her, he's forcing her to realize how deep her feelings for him really run. Her questions of his love for her reflect how she feels about him. When he doesn't respond to "I love you a little" she proclaims that she loves him a lot to make him realize how important and serious this really is. Upon a lack of reaction, instead of having her pride hurt and abandoning her feelings for him, she's forced to admit to herself that she loves him passionately and can't give him up and she just needs some sign of reassurance in return.
After receiving no response to that, she paces around the room while he's still in his funk and she begins to hate their situation and how she can't reach him. Blackout of the screen to show that she's hit rock bottom, and when she reaches for the knife now there's no expecting gaze upon him to react. Just the certainty that she loves him but can't affect him at all. "With madness" sums up their situation, it's mad to love someone you can't feel or affect, and real love is mad because it's senseless and persistent like that.
When she goes back to the bathroom to write "He loves me not", to me it glowed a brighter shade (red) than anything else about that movie, like it was true and it was everything she feared. She erased it, but there's still traces in the smudges and stains it left on the mirror. Even though that was the truth (and maybe why he couldn't respond, because he really hadn't loved her so he couldn't understand what she was asking) she wrote "He loves me" over that, like that was the last thing she wanted to walk away with from their relationship. Even if he hadn't loved her, eventually that memory of confrontation will fade and the times she'll remember from their relationship is when she did believe that they were in love.
I think that she did die a death (either literal or being far away in a situation where she could no longer communicate with him), because he feels sad when he's looking back and thinking upon their relationship. Inventing a back story that would correlate with my life, she pulled him around and teased him without evering letting the notion of a romantic love come between them. And he feels sad because he's thinking about how much more their relationship could have been if she'd trusted him and been open with him and able to say that she did love him. Now, in death, she's come back to ask if during their relationship where she kept her feelings for him in check, if he had loved her. And she discovers the awful truth that now that she's dead and trying to convince herself that he did love her, that she had been in love with him all along even though they never said it to each other. And she feels despair as she finds the depths of these feelings and the awful realization of how she'll never being able to express them to him (it goes from the petty 'look at me and care that I'm playing with knifes' to 'I can cut myself because I feel pain without doing it to make you worry about me'). Even though cutting is now stereotypical, I like what she said about it being with love and madness, and how calculated and despairing it is to carve a message into yourself, instead of cutting random slashes out of anger or overwhelming sadness. And I think that on a more physical level it's also true, you hurt yourself and you bleed and feel that suffocating sort of helplessness when you love someone but you missed you chance to express it to them.
The end.