A warning - don’t view this unless you are of strong stomach
I’ve thought about this M.I.A. video a lot in the past week. I know a lot of people think it’s gratuitously violent and I wouldn’t argue that to a degree. But I think there’s something to be said for creating a mood that’s so sick and dystopian that it infects you when you watch it and you’re just left with a horrible, haunting feeling that you can’t shake off easily. I would recommend in the same vein, a British movie that’s just hitting our market - Harry Brown, starring Michael Caine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOSfHFNlcI
I support M.I.A. completely for this video. It’s sickening but that’s exactly the point. For people who think it goes too far, I wonder about what they thought of the Lady Gaga “telephone” video. There’s a very interesting distinction between the two. As a parody of the Gaga video said in the lyrics, “Blood and guts and boobs and butts and I just wanna make your head explode” — that joke is very revealing. I think M.I.A. is right to criticize Lady Gaga here. Lady Gaga is just being controversial for the sake of being so - and I know of course that I’m not the first to say that. But Gaga’s is an easy offense. Easy to say that nudity might be wrong, and easy for her supporters to say that nudity is okay, but that kind of argument in this day for those who are savvy, is hardly ground-breaking. It’s boring and obvious.
Granted, M.I.A. goes easy by going so violent, but at least the video draws a very fresh and raw political parallel that someone like Gaga, courting the mainstream, could never risk going for.
