SFF Music Video of the Week #35
Duran Duran are a band we shall revisit in the future. Today, we're going to look at a spin-off project - Arcadia, and their hit "Election Day".
Full of all the excesses and fetishes of the 1980s New Romantic movement, this is, to my mind, the quintessential video of the genre - beating out Spandau Ballet's "Vienna" by a carefully mussed whisker. But is it genre? This is one of several videos I've had to consider carefully, and, in the end, it just falls on the SFF side of the fence.
Throughout the video there is a sense of odd - little things, like the game being played (and the implied effects of said game). There are other hints as well - for example there are the horse-men, who appear to be tightly bound by some unbreakable force that they are in a constant struggle against.
On top of that is a certain desperation to all the sensuality - an impending doom of some kind. (I'll conveniently skip over the fact that it was made at the height of Thatcherite Britain, and the desperation that created. Why let history get in the way of a great theory about art?)
Full of all the excesses and fetishes of the 1980s New Romantic movement, this is, to my mind, the quintessential video of the genre - beating out Spandau Ballet's "Vienna" by a carefully mussed whisker. But is it genre? This is one of several videos I've had to consider carefully, and, in the end, it just falls on the SFF side of the fence.
Throughout the video there is a sense of odd - little things, like the game being played (and the implied effects of said game). There are other hints as well - for example there are the horse-men, who appear to be tightly bound by some unbreakable force that they are in a constant struggle against.
On top of that is a certain desperation to all the sensuality - an impending doom of some kind. (I'll conveniently skip over the fact that it was made at the height of Thatcherite Britain, and the desperation that created. Why let history get in the way of a great theory about art?)
Between all of that we have a video that sits on the cusp, and just nudges in. For bonus points, it was directed by the art director of Alien.
Style is everything.
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