Original video:
Version with all the events in order:
The first thing I noticed about this music video was that everything is in reverse. People are used to experiencing time from beginning to end, so it was hard to piece together what was happening. It wasn’t until I found a version that played it in order that I realized what was going on. Based on my understanding, the husband is having an affair with another woman. This woman gets jealous, locks the wife in the closet and waits for the husband gets home so that she can kill him. I don’t think she was intending to kill the wife though. If she wanted to kill her she had the perfect opportunity to. In the end she gets hit with a breezeblock and falls into the bathtub, where she is held down by “soggy clothes and breezeblocks”. She’s also dead which probably prevents her from leaving.
I agree that the Husband in this video turned out to be the good guy and that it’s meant to make us question the perspective, but I don’t think that men always seem like the bad guy. I don’t think proving that men aren’t always bad was the point of this music video, especially since it was the woman who was the first one to attack.
The lines,
“Do you know where the wild things go?
They go along to take your honey (la la la la)
Seem to be from the woman’s perspective. She’s going to to take his honey (his wife). This probably means that if he chooses his wife over her, she’ll kill his wife.
The lyrics, “Please don’t go, I’ll eat you whole, I love you so” is from the book “Where the Wild Things are”. The lines in the book are
But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go we’ll
eat you up-we love you so!”
And Max said, “No!”
The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye.
I think this children’s book was a prominent source of inspiration for this song. In the book, the main character, Max, sees the creatures and called them “wild things” and when they see him they think he is the “wild thing”. So, in the music video, the woman sees the husband and his wife and think that they are “wild” and the couple think the woman is “wild”. I think that the woman is the one who is most like the wild things. When the husband denies her love she goes insane and tries to kills him. In the video she is shown throwing glass bottled and practically clawing the guy.
Many of the lyrics also allude to medical terms.
“Citrezene your fever’s gripped me again”
“She bruises coughs she splutters pistol shots
But hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks
She’s morphine queen of my vaccine my love my love love love, la la la la”
Cetirizine is a type of allergy medicine. This medicine is also something that can be overdosed.
This song has many implications of death and I think referring to cetirizine is a reference to suicide. At the end, after he’s killed the woman, he stays in the bathroom instead of going to his wife. The bathroom is usually a place where people keep pharmaceutical drugs, so by showing him staying in the bathroom could imply that he’s considering suicide.
The line about morphine really caught my attention. Since morphine is an opiate, it manipulates the brain to receive less pain signals. It can also increase the release of dopamine and endorphins which can make a person feel euphoric. Morphine is also a drug that can be overdosed. When the lines says that she is the “queen of my vaccine”, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what that means. I interpret it to mean that the woman dominates his wife. His wife is the antidote to him and the woman is like a drug he keeps overdosing on.
I thought this comment was really interesting. It could be true that the woman was a lover that the husband abandoned for the wife, but it doesn’t change the implication that there was an affair and that the woman went insane.
Wow this song was really good and the music video made it that much better! Great choice! I really loved how you discussed both male and female stereotypes and how people tend to make assumptions about the male character in this music video. Perhaps you could have gone into this discussion more, being more specific about why the man seems to be the bad person, why you don’t think he is, and then go into more details about other people’s reactions to this music video or scenarios that resemble the theme in this music video. I also really enjoyed the parallel to the book “Where The Wild Things Are” however I was looking for more: was there any imagery from that book in the music video? Also, how are you sure the man is thinking about suicide at the end? Are you sure he just didn’t feel badly about what he did? Overall, I think your blogpost was very interesting, just some small gaps could have been filled to give more insight or context.