"Paramore", "Decode": From the beginning of the video, the singer and band members appear to be seeking refuge in a large, lush forest as the singer tells - or rather, sings, - her story. As the video progresses, the viewer can see the singer and band members alternately regarding the forest as an apparent shield from some unseen force as they freely sing or play their music, and regarding the forest as an enemy, as each band member presses back to back and gazes off with anxiety towards the end of the video. As a child, I always held both a fascination and terror of forests, which could offer shelter and adventure to the unruly, overimaginative child that I was as my friends and I learned to climb fifteen-foot poles (safely attached to harnesses) or launch ourselves through the forest using a harness and wire suspended high above the ground. As the day grew darker, however, the forest could suddenly turn into a dark, terrible maze or home for giant monsters that were constantly ready to carry you off the moment the sun set, each 'night noise' turning from the daylight hours' singing bird to the night's screeching, fanged creature. Watching this video now, the members of Paramore appear to have housed similar fantasies and fears in their childhoods, and perhaps still possess some shreds of their fascination and fear.
"Within Temptation", "Memories": The video opens with an aging woman making her way slowly up to a large, abandoned 'For Sale' home, her eyes gleaming as she hurries as quickly as her aging body will allow towards the front door. As she steps inside the house, her face immediately seems to brighten, her skin smoothing and her clothes shifting into those of her youthful years long gone by and the house reverting back to its younger state as she moves swiftly through the house, encountering what seems to be the ghost of a lost loved-one, who re-presents a gold necklace to her before she flees from the rapidly-aging house. With the exceptions of my first home - a small apartment in a modern building - and my current home, only four years old, I have always lived in houses at least fifty years old, due mostly to my father's fascination with the 'classic' style of house. As a child, I would often explore our houses (we moved -a lot-) with a sense of excitement and intrigue over who had lived in the house before us, what had happened to make the previous owners leave, and - my personal favorite - were there ghosts? I spent many hours roaming through nooks and crannies in old attics and playing games of 'drop things down the laundry chute and see where they turn up' with my friends, the pasts of the houses sending shivers down my spine as I hurried from bathroom to bedroom at night, thrilling at the terrifying thought that there could be a ghost right behind me. It seems the members of 'Within Temptation' hold some such 'memories' as well.
"Apocalyptica", "I Don't Care": In the opening of this video, it is not immediately apparent that the singer and band members are playing inside a doll house. The lowness of the ceiling and impassable heights of the doorframes soon give the band's whereabouts away as the band members interact with apparently living dolls, their interactions with the 'dolls' wavering between reality and make-believe as they alternately use the dolls as violins late in the video, or have more intimate relationships with them towards the end of the song. Growing up, I always had a variety of doll houses at the ready, be they the plastic, miniscule, palm-sized versions created by Polly Pocket, the larger, more elaborate ones manufactured by companies such as Fisher Price, or large, hand-made and hand-painted houses of wood found at a garage sale for $5. Doll houses always held a sort of alternate reality for me and my friends, where we could imagine ourselves as both adults and children as we directed the lives of the ever-smiling 'mommy' and 'daddy' dolls or impish child dolls, while still allowing us the chance to return to innocent reality and leave our 'grown-up' selves behind in the parent dolls as we ran outside to throw snowballs or draw complex hop-skotch patterns across the sidewalks. While each band member in this video is male, it seems that each has still retained a sense of childhood longing to play make-believe, even as grown men. After all, I know more than one boy who played with dollhouses as a child.
"Evanescence", "My Immortal": With it's lack of color and calming music, the video for 'My Immortal' comes to highly resemble the main instrument used both visually and musically throughout the video - a piano. As the video progresses, the piano is used as both a symbol of calm as singer Amy Lee dances slowly around a fountain or rests on a rooftop, gazing up at the sky, but also representing other emotions at the same instant or closely together, such as sadness, with the strange man forlornly stroking the piano's keys while the wind around Amy becomes picks up, along with the music and the man's pace of playing. For as long as I can remember, we have had a piano in our house, an ancient, out-of-tune chunk of wood with yellowing keys and a broken bench that belonged to my grandfather when he was still alive and critiqueing music. My mother had grown up with a piano and lessons constantly at her disposal, and on more than one occasion I would find myself suddenly startled out of whatever I had been doing to listen to soft music floating up from our piano's 'place of honor' in the basement storage room, the music usually calm and soothing, though at times more slow and solemn or fast and sprightly depending on my mother's mood. As the years passed and my brother became more apt at caring for ourselves, the music became more frequent, my mother eventually teaching my brother and I to play small bits of songs, and shorter, easier songs before awing us with the way she could effortlessly play any tune we asked of her smoothly and with equal pressure on each key - double-handed - in comparison to mine or my brother's chunky one-finger tunes. Amy Lee apparently also harbors a love for the piano, as the solemn but loving presence of a piano in this video shows.
"Rihanna", "Disturbia": The setting of Rihanna's "Disturbia" creates both a sense of thrill and anxiety in the viewer as they're introduced to a miriad of 'freak show'-like contenders - an overy-muscle bound man(?), twin, gaunt men in matching tux-overalls, and half-crazed version of Rihanna herself encaged by thick metal bars and two guards standing ready outside her door. At the center of it all is the 'real' Rihanna, the eye of the storm and calm presence in the darl, chaotic scene layed out before the viewer in reference to nearly every horror film known to man. If there was one thing in my life I could always count on, it was the presence of horror films. At the first sign of fall every year, my father would immediately have his study strewn with the classics - Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy - in every film variation available, ranging from black-and-white to color, gory to psychologically unnerving, cheezy spoofs to nightmarish originals. In the beginning, I held little love for the creatures depicted in this films, the eeriness of gleaming fangs or raging fires usually doing little more than wake me screaming in the middle of the night. As I grew, I learned to recognize another view of these films - not just the creepy visuals and crazed monsters, but the underlying battles of good and evil and antiks of misunderstood creations longing for companionship. When my parents divorced, these largely disappeared, though, without fail, I will myself haul out one or two classic - read, 'still on VHS' - movies every Halloween, sometimes also helping to inspire my artistic style. As evidenced by the gothic, monsteresque feel of this video, these films have had the same sort of effect on Rihanna, too.
"Brad Paisley" & "Alison Krauss", "Whiskey Lullaby": With the return of the soldier at the beginning of the video and knowing the premise of the song, the viewer immediately develops a sense of anxiety at the image of this soldier walking joyfully and purposefully towards his home, a past scene of the soldier and his girlfriend or wife promising to start their family when the soldier comes home increasing the viewer's anxiousness as the soldier makes his way to his bedroom and finds his wife in bed with another man. The image of soldiers standing at attention, ready to serve their country has become a very prevelant image in the news, films, and in my friends homes over the past several years since Sept. 11th, at times commanding a sense of respect and dignity for those watching for any sign of danger to their loved ones and/or country, love and devotion in scenes depicting the soldiers and fathers of my friends returning safely home from war to be reunited with their families, holding each other tightly and grinning from ear to ear, or fear and chaos as soldiers shoot at opposing soldiers and dive out of the way of bombs... or don't. I've seen the anxiety on my friends faces when they tell me their family members are off to war again, and see the solemness in their faces when watching videos such as 'The Patriot', which I had always regarded as entertainment, a window on the past, but not the present before becoming acquainted with the families of actual soldiers. This video shows the not-so-happy ending that some soldiers might unfortunately come home to, if the situations of characters in movies such as 'Jarhead' hold any truth.
"Garbage", "The World Is Not Enough":
The video opens on a theater in 1964, where the enormous picture of a fiery-red-haired woman is glaring down onto the streets as people begin to slowly file into the theater doors. Inside the theater, the pictured woman is shown twirling around her dressing room in a blood-red dress, before leaning down to her dressing table, pulling an earring off of someone's earlobe and attaching it to her own ear before twirling once more to walk out of the room, the body of the real woman lying dead at the dressing table - the next scene flashes back two weeks and shows the construction of a robot-woman resembling the actress, who kills and takes the place of the real actress only moments before the actress/singer's show begins. One of the most unifying objects in my family has always been James Bond movies - my father and brother both appreciate them for the action sequences, be they 'Aston Martin' car chases, shoot-outs or fist-fights - my mother appreciates them for the drama and romance aspects, and I... I've always appreciated them for the ability they give me to annoy my aforementioned family members by pointing out every plothole and goof up in the films I can find. Recently, my mother started getting in on this aspect of the films with me, too, when she, my brother and I went to see 'Quantum Solace', which had possibly the worst opening sequence in the history of movie-making. My mother and I both sat in the theater feeling mildly annoyed, and after the movie, we fondly made fun of every inconsistancy in the film to the point that my brother no longer wanted to see a movie anytime, anywhere, with either of us, ever again. Judging from the fact that the robot-actress felt the need to destroy the entire audience, I'd have to assume she feels...er, felt, likewise.
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