As a consumer of art, I enjoy being befuddled. I love watching the movie Primer because somewhere in the middle the narrative breaks and becomes almost impossible to follow. I love Steve Reich’s Piano Phase because as the phasing begins it feels like my head is coming apart. There’s nothing for me to follow.

Camera Obscura has tapped into this effect with their video for Troublemaker. I have watched this video over and over and cannot figure it out. Plus it’s lots of fun!

WHAAAAAAAT?!?!?

This is what I was able to puzzle out: You have a dude.

This dude, who is wearing a rockin’ amulet, has brain powers.

Look at him using those brain powers! Maybe he is communicating with those two people or he gains strength from them?

He is in opposition to a woman, who is wearing a wicked amulet, who has brain powers as well.

One of her brain powers is the ability to make copies of herself.

She uses her brain powers and multiple forms to hunt down the dude, who seems to be running away.

She uses a brain attack against the dude.

This causes some pretty intense pain for the dude.

In his brain.

He somehow resists the attack and defeats the woman, turning her into an outline and then nothingness.

He feels remorse about this. Why you ask?

Because he didn’t used to be in opposition to the woman! They used to train together.

After the training they would lounge on the grass, shoeless, and talk of their lives and silly things.

That is the whole story, from what I’m able to tell. The problem is that there are about 300 other characters doing various things that I am not able to work into this story in any way.

You have the two people who I briefly mentioned earlier but are in the video a bunch. The woman is the singer.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear they have bitchin’ amulets and wear red cloaks.

There is Beardy McBinoculars.

There are the two bemasked mannequins/robots/Jeep enthusiasts.

The librarian who also has eye powers?

Wait, maybe that is a book shop. That would explain the eye powers.

There is the boy who the dude seems to communicate with but then doesn’t do anything.

There this guy.

He creeps me out. Who stands in a black room with his eyes closed?

Also, the two red-cloaked amulet-havers sometimes hold a baby.

There’s Beardy McGlasses-Brainpowers who has a beard, wears glasses, and has brain powers.

Oooooh! That’s where his name comes from!

There’s a woman who begs your pardon but she never promised you a rose garden.

She did deliver a rose garden, however. She really under-promised and over- delivered on that one.

There’s another woman with eye powers who has questionable decorating tastes.

So, in order for my narrative to be correct, you need to ignore all of those characters. Clearly I am missing something. And I love it!

There’s only two clues in the video about its meaning. First, there’s a flashback where the dude is not wearing an amulet while his then-friend/later- adversary is wearing the amulet.

Next, there’s this which speaks for itself.

Women’s literature. Women’s literature. Women’s literature. It’s all starting to come together.

There’s so much else to love in the video as well besides it being weird as shit. There’s the weirdly self-satisfied smile on the red cloaked singer.

There’s the title card, which you know I love.

There’s also a randomly made up episode number.

I don’t know if it was because I liked [Star Wars](http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS- Despecialized-Edition-HD-V25-MKV-IS-OUT-NOW/topic/12713/) so much as a kid, but I really like it when people do that. Just claim something is part 3 of 7! It’s great!

This video really makes me happy. I don’t even particularly like the song it accompanies, which I find bland. I watched this video a bunch of times in a row and I can’t even think of how the chorus goes now. But I will always remember the dude and his brain powers.

-PTD

Contrast is important in any artist endeavor. In painting, you might have purple contrasting with yellow. In comics, you have Green He-Hulk contrasting with Red She-Hulk. In film, you have what’s-his-face contrasting with that other guy. And in TV, you have the one attractive, snarky, gainfully employed but with an inexplicably huge amount of free time brunette contrasted with the attractive, snarky, gainfully employed but with an inexplicably large amount of free time blonde.

The Clean, who “have been described as the most influential band to come from the Flying Nun label, whose repertoire included many major proponents of the ‘Dunedin Sound,'” (whip that one out at a part and watch everyone immediately remember that they left their oven on) are a study in contrasts. They decided to make a music video to show this to the world.

Anything Could Happen by The Clean:

The video opens with a shot of a pastoral field.

Do you feel calm now? You shouldn’t. That’s a dandelion right there! Someone needs to do some weeding.

This is contrasted with a shot of a big pile of filth.

Icky icky! Gross! BLUUUUUUURRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH! yuck

Then we get to see the band.

In the front there is the singer. He is going as Bob Dylan for Halloween. On the right is the drummer who, as is our custom, we will ignore for the rest of the video. On the left, though, is the bass player. Look at him. Isn’t he wonderful? Look at those glasses. Look at that haircut. Look at the expression on his face! I think the person who invented the word “nerd-rage” had a picture of the bass player taped to his bathroom mirror. I love him. If he’s still alive (why wouldn’t he be? this video is from 1981) I should write him a letter.

Even the music video can’t believe the contrast present in the band. It points at them.

They play amongst the garbage.

The singer desperately tries to get you to pay attention to him. It is futile, though. Your eye is immediately drawn to the man on the left.

The band plays in a cityscape (I didn’t know New Zealand had cities) to contrast with the earlier rural-scapes.

I love how the bass drum is front and center in this shot. It also effectively obscures most of the drummer.

In the next scene the band plays in a field. The bass player looks down intently as he plays in an extremely uncomfortable manner.

He looks like he never played the bass in his life and someone handed him one and asked him to play in the video. At the same time, however, he looks like he is a master bassist. He must be a deeply uncomfortable person.

The director finally gives up and puts the bass player in the front.

I can’t look away.

The video ends in garbage.

So, what have we learned? A whole lot!
1. I love the bass player.
2. Don’t dress like the 1960s. It is not cool to try to look like your parents. It might be cool to dance like your parents.
3. There’s an old orchestra joke: The orchestra arrived backstage at a venue and there was a sign saying “Musicians and drummers this way”. Hilarious.
4. Don’t be afraid to cook with high heat.

They say you should try to learn something new every day. Since we just learned four things we can take a few days off. I won’t be taking time off, though. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Happy Halloween!

-PTD

In film, narrative brevity is vital. Take a look at The Outlaw Josey Wales. No, seriously. Watch it. All the way through. Go rent it from the video store if you have to. (Note to younger readers: A video store was a place that had a bunch of videos [a video was like a Blue Ray, but you had to rewind it because it was made out of tape] that you could pay money to borrow.)

I’m not going to be flexible on this. You have to watch the whole thing. The rest of this blog post will make no sense if you don’t watch it right now all the way through.

Did you watch it? I don’t believe you. You have to pass this test to continue reading.

1. What is the titular character’s last name?
a. Whales
b. Dolphins
c. Wales

The correct answer was e. The Oulaw Josey Wales. If you got it correct that means that you watched the whole movie all the way through and you may continue.

Okay. Remember in, like, the first 30 seconds of the movie where Josey is plowing the field, he looks up at his family lovingly, and then those bleeding Kansans show up and kill his wife and kids? There doesn’t need to be several scenes of Josey’s wife smiling at him while washing clothes or Josey chasing his son around the crops to establish that he loves his family. Just show him, show his family, and kill his family. That is narrative brevity.

Here’s a video that failed to understand the past and even failed to repeat it. I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen:

The whole video is only 3 minutes and 30 seconds and the music doesn’t start until after 1 minute and 10 seconds. During that time the following is established.

1. There is a automobile repair shoppe.

2. Someone in a fancy car is a regular customer.

3. Working class hero Bruce Springsteen works in that automobile repair shoppe.

His job is sex mechanic.

4. The regular customer is not just fancy car rich, she is diamond jewelry rich.

Some of her diamond jewelry is a wedding ring.

5. She gives the keys to her house to the sex mechanic.

Having established all of that, the music begins. During the rest of the music video almost nothing at all happens. Why couldn’t they just establish all of those vital facts during the first part of the song and compress the longing looks into the last half of the song? Do we really need so many shots of working class hero Bruce Springsteen consumed with lust?

Here he is, in bed, desperate to have sex. It’s like his sex is on fire.

Who (or what ) does he want to have sex with? Let’s take a look:

We believe that he wants to sleep with the car. Then the singing starts, “Hey little girl is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone?” Okay, so he is planning on finding a small girl whose father is away and have sex with her. That is terrifying. Did he realize that this song would be released to the public? Do the police realize that he is still at large?

As a sex offender, working class menace Bruce Springsteen must alert everyone in the neighborhood about his presence. He jumps in the car to do so.

He drives up to a fancy house.

And suggestively reaches for the doorbell.

Suddenly, he realizes that he was just thinking about sexually assaulting a small girl, and has not done so (yet?). Having committed no crime, he is not in fact a sex offender. It would be very strange to ring people’s doorbells and inform them that you are not a sex offender.

Fun suggestion: Try adding the sentence “[Name] was not a Nazi,” to the Wikipedia page of many well-known actors from the ‘40’s. Then, see if anyone wonders if actors not explicitly listed as non-Nazis were Nazis. That kind of wackiness was almost started here, but for sex offenders. “Hi, I’m PTD. I’m not a sex offender.”

Having narrowly avoided making himself a social pariah, working class citizen Bruce Springsteen leaves the keys to that car in this person’s mailbox.

There is no indication that house belongs the car owner. I have to assume that he just picked a home at random. I wonder what they’ll think when they see a strange car in the driveway and a set of keys in the mailbox. It would never, not in 136 years, occur to me to try the keys in the car.

That’s just me, though.

-PTD