Music Video Research // Narrative Theory in 'alt-J-Breezblocks' and 'Here We Go Magic-Hard To Be Close'

This is the music video for the song 'Breezeblocks' by British Alt-rock band Alt-J, which was released on 18 May 2012 on Infectious Music. They are a critically acclaimed band, having won the mercury prize in 2012 for their debut album 'An Awesome Wave', the BBC Radio 6 Music Album of the Year 2012 and 2013 Ivor Novello award, as well as receiving nominations for 3 Brit Awards. The video itself won a UK Music Video Award (UKMVA) for "Best Alternative Video" on 8 November 2012. In this post I will explore the narrative theory behind the music video, in order to gain a greater understanding of narrative conventions of the form and of the music video itself. As you will see, this music video sophisticatedly uses a range of narrative techniques and film language to add to audience appeal, and construct a very clever and creative representation. 

The opening shots of the video.

The music video begins with a shot of a young woman lying in a bathtub, a breezeblock rested on her chest keeping her submerged under the water. This immediately creates shock value in the music video, with potentially violent connotations that intrigue the audience, and challenge them to keep watching. This image could also be an intertextual reference to the strikingly visually similar Millais portrait of Ophelia, a classic victim from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', who drowns herself out of sorrow. This suggests an empathetic protagonist, as the woman appears to be a victim, as connoted by the high angle shot and her passive appearance which suggest vulnerability. This representation of the women as the victim is further supported by the next consecutive shot of a man holding his hands to his face. This is a conventional representation, with the women as the victim and the man the perpetrator of domestic violence. That women are often the victims of domestic violence is supported by many statistics, for example one that states 7.3% of Women in the UK have reported experiencing domestic violence where as the same figure for men is only 5%. Soon after however, and instead of using a more conventional technique such as flashback to reveal elements of the story, we see that the video is being played in reverse, suggested initially with a shot of water flowing upwards into a tap. 

The change in power, connoted by change in camera angle.

The video uses simple continuity editing, creating a simple, chronologically ordered story with easy to follow action, but instead shows the action in reverse. This artistic technique may be difficult for audiences to follow if used for extended period of time (although it is experimented with successfully in films such as 'Memento', but used in the context of a short form music video, it works very well. This gives the audience a sharp sense of dramatic irony, and lulls them into a false sense of omniscience . The representation built thus far into the video is one of domestic violence, and one based heavily upon classic gender construction (i.e. Woman as innocent victim, Man as violent aggressor), and by starting the video at the end of the narrative, the audience feels confident in this assumption. Indeed for the first third of the video, this representation is fully backed up by the onscreen action, with the violent scuffle leading up to the woman's death shown in woozy backwards slow motion. At about 53 seconds throughout the video, this representation begins to change. The woman grabs the breeze-block and tussles with the man, showing that the woman was not such a passive participant in the fight as is originally assumed. In the first section of the video, low angle wide shots are used to connote the man's dominance, but this changes with the level angle shot of the breeze-block struggle, connoting the alteration in the power balance. This challenges the representation of man as the aggressor and woman as powerless victim. This is where the audience really begin to notice the power of the reverse narrative, as different aspects of the narrative are gradually revealed.

The woman's escalation to the status of attacker.

At this stage of the music video, the representation of the woman begins to flip drastically, she goes from tragic victim to murderous attacker. She is shown lashing out and grabbing at the man,  whilst he attempts to escape. This differs greatly against the ideas about the woman that have been formed up to that point, maintaining audience interest. This is further escalated and explained when a preliminary character is introduced, the true victim. The fact that this vital information is revealed at the very end of the video as compared to the start is a clever choice as it leaves the most shocking aspect of the narrative til last, which gives all that much more power. The use of gender construction and conventional representation in this video are cleverly utilized to play with the audience and their expectations, failing to become hackneyed and predictable. This effect is one that could not be achieved without the use of reverse narrative, in order to de-construct an assumed representation. By doing this, the music video highlights certain prejudices that the viewer may have, for example, assuming men to be violent and women to be weak. One by one, assumptions of the man's guilt are stripped away revealing more and more of the truth of the situation each time. Thus the audience become aware of the very issue of representation and the prejudice that can arise from it.

The second text that I will analyse is the music video for Here We Go Magic's 'Hard To Be Close'. Here We Go Magic are an alternative rock band hailing from Brooklyn, New York, formed in late 2008 and signed to the independent label Secretly Canadian. 

The video itself is based on a video made by the New York public access program 'Robosh*thead' of which one of the original members, Chuck Stern appears in the video. The video largely creates audience pleasure through it's sheer absurdity, due in part to the acting of the characters, amusingly bizarre situations and appropriately, the wild use of narrative structure. 

An example of one of the titles and the exaggerated acting of the characters.

Where as many texts use flash-back, this video uses the Narrative Structure of flash-forward, with increasing, sometimes comedic intensity. The jumps in time are suggested primarily through the use of titles stating the difference in time (i.e 1 SECOND LATER, 100 MILLION YEARS LATER) as well as very slight changes in continuity, such as costume and position of characters. The slightness of these changes is key to the effect this video aims to create, despite the insistence of the titles the mise en scene of the scene remains more or less the same, the usual markers of the passing of such immense lengths of time (such as beards, aging or decay of the surroundings) are left untouched, creating a sense of absurdity and therefore comedy, an audience pleasure. The narrative, and the way it is connoted, is a joke about the process of film-making and editing itself, playing on typical methods of construction. This lack of logical visual progression means the audience are encouraged to question the authority of the titles, and perhaps the sanity of the characters. This creates a sense of ambiguity and makes the text feel much more open, connoting the more upmarket, niche audience of the song the video is attempting to promote.

The situations of each scene gradually build up in their absurdity, starting fairly believable, before audience expectations are disregarded more and more. Though the audience would at first expect the characters to starve to death or dehydrate after an extended length of time isolated in a confined space, the characters are shown to be absolutely fine, even after 1 month without food or water. This denial of typical logic creates audience intrigue as well as a sense of humour from the obvious lack of logic shown in the video. This continues into increasingly ludicrous lengths of time with increasingly ludicrous scenarios taking place within the confines of the elevator. Thus the audience are both continually surprised and continually expectant of further ridiculousness, both audience pleasures. 

The great pay-off off to the video comes at the conclusion of the video, a twist ending accentuating the power of the rest of the text. After the steadily ascending absurdity of the preceding scenes and marked by the epic, ultimate sounding "1 Billion Years Later" the video suddenly reverts back to normality. Throughout the video, the characters develop an increasingly intimate and spiritual connection, connoted through their close interactions and their bare chests, but the end of the video suddenly brings the characters back to the start, mirroring the awkwardness and small talk of the strangers at the beginning of the video. This part of the video creates a sense of circular narrative, such as used in Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction', where the story finishes where it starts. This stark difference between the ending and the rest of the video, connotes that the entire video was entirely fantasy, perhaps explaining the huge flaws in logic exhibited throughout. However, just as the audience begin to feel satisfied with the conclusive ending, they are hit with yet another twist as the elevator opens and reveals the characters floating in space. This double bluff gives the ending tremendous comedic power and a very playful tone, as well as leaving it satisfyingly open to interpretation. 

Overall, 'Breezeblocks' is a very clever, intelligent and powerful video, that uses the audience against itself by crafting its meticulous backwards narrative. Narrative Structure is vital to its very existence, as it is only when viewed backwards that the video is interesting. In a similar way, narrative structure is a very key aspect of 'Hard to be Close''s audience pleasure, creating a constant amount of humor and keeping them involved. By looking at and comparing the 2 videos, we learn how different narrative structures can be used to create highly intelligent, interesting and thought provoking or amusing texts. This is very useful knowledge for both audiences and creators, and knowledge I am sure to deploy in the production and evaluation of my own media products.