¶ The Ways of Glass · 12 March 2006
I'm not sure I've seen more than a dozen music videos in my life that seemed to me like independently worthwhile demonstrations of human creativity. As a field of marketing ingenuity and technical innovation, music video is astonishingly rich, but as an art it's a horrific disaster. At this point the most I really hope to get out of a video is some more visceral impression of how an artist from some culture other than mine fits into theirs, and/or crosses out into mine.
But I just watched HIM's DVD of 1997-2003 videos, in search of little more than some shots of their Finland, and am adding "Right Here in My Arms" to my not-formally-compiled but I'm sure pathetically short list of internally brilliant music videos. It's brilliant enough that I can tell you what's brilliant about it without you having seen it. Structurally it's mostly a performance video, staged inside and outside of a room whose walls are one-way mirrors transparent from the outside in. The band is inside the room. A girl is outside. She is watching the band, and sees them watching her back. They see and are watching nothing but themselves. She presses herself against her side of the glass, while Ville Valo writhes against his reflection. He doesn't know she's there, and she doesn't know he doesn't know.
Thus her contact is a delusion, and an artifice, but her experience of her contact is real. The band's performance is a ballet of narcicism, but it is narcicism as a proxy for empathy. The box is how art works. The box is, in fact, what differentiates art from conversation.
But I just watched HIM's DVD of 1997-2003 videos, in search of little more than some shots of their Finland, and am adding "Right Here in My Arms" to my not-formally-compiled but I'm sure pathetically short list of internally brilliant music videos. It's brilliant enough that I can tell you what's brilliant about it without you having seen it. Structurally it's mostly a performance video, staged inside and outside of a room whose walls are one-way mirrors transparent from the outside in. The band is inside the room. A girl is outside. She is watching the band, and sees them watching her back. They see and are watching nothing but themselves. She presses herself against her side of the glass, while Ville Valo writhes against his reflection. He doesn't know she's there, and she doesn't know he doesn't know.
Thus her contact is a delusion, and an artifice, but her experience of her contact is real. The band's performance is a ballet of narcicism, but it is narcicism as a proxy for empathy. The box is how art works. The box is, in fact, what differentiates art from conversation.