I was sent the link to this video a few weeks ago and, having watched it a few times now, I’m still undecided about it. I’m just not sure it works.
Here’s the text of the email I received introducing the artist and the video:
“I wanted to introduce you to the new video from Billboard-acclaimed singer/songwriter, Sarah Fimm, for the song “Everything Becomes Whole”.The video was inspired by real-life accounts of violence against women; whose end result is a visually haunting and emotional short film. The video depicts a relationship that quickly turns from loving to abusive, with the male character overpowering and physically harming the female character. Sarah’s hope is to shine light on the issue, and create a call-to-action that inspires others to get involved with organizations determined to bring an end to the issue.
Currently, Sarah is working with both the International Justice Mission and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, to inspire viewers of the video to get involved and make a difference.”
And here’s the video: (Trigger warning)
Like I said, I’m not sure what I think about this: I’m not convinced it works, but then I also think the film’s probably a bit too arty for my tastes. The song’s growing on me though.
Too Much To Say For Myself 
Less is more. Imagery upon imagery tends to overwhelm rather than open the mind.
Yes it seems a bit too busy to me.
Hmm. If I didn’t know before watching that the video was supposed to be about domestic violence, I don’t think I’d figure it out by myself. I would probably have thought it was just arty-farty, and wouldn’t have realised that the depictions of violence and the power dynamic were there as a message.
It reminds me of the Nick Cave/ Kylie Minogue video for Where The Wild Roses Grow, which is basically titillating aesthetic fake snuff. If you hadn’t told us there was a critical pro-feminist message behind this, I don’t think I would have seen it. I would probably have read the artist’s intentions as being quite the opposite. It doesn’t build up a picture of the woman’s subjectivity. It doesn’t seem to be from her point of view.
So after the sinister Derren Brown lookalike another (nice) dude comes along and rescues our helpless victim? Oh and nul points for equating wheelchair user with “captive”….
Frankly I think it’s bollocks, and I’m not keen on the song either.
I don’t get the whole floating down the river in a bath thing…..
I am with the consensus here, in that I would not have figured out that it was supposed to be an anti-dv message. Frankly, it just looks like artsy woman-torture porn.
If someone is going to do the anti-dv message in this type of platform, then the ‘consequences’ element has to be 1) present and 2) obvious/strong. And, in doing anti-dv subjects, less is actually more, rather than long, lingering gruesome shots. It lacked adequate contrast, either contrast with outside appearances, or contrast life before/after. I think there was some attempt at this, but it was put in backwards (the creepy dude, same dude?) pawing at her at the end. So how the narrative comes off is that he does all these bad things, and THEN he is all smoochy, which comes off as more apologetic for the cycle of violence. The effect is the opposite of intended.
If a creative project is to effectively raise awareness of violence/abuse it has give voice to the victims/survivors – either directly or on their behalf and with their consent if possible – precisely because the purpose and process of their victimisation was intended to silence or erase them, one way or another. It also has to avoid too directly or explicitly depicting the violence and abuse inflicted on them because there’s a danger of calling forth voyeurism rather than empathy within the viewer, making abuse into a spectacle, and also out of care for viewers who have survived similar abuse. I don’t know how far this song and video achieves the first consideration, but that is at least the intent – according to Sarah Fimm’s website the song and video are inspired by the words of victims of trafficking, and intended to raise awareness of trafficking. I think it does in fact do fairly well with the second consideration, and without any context I personally would have identified it clearly as intending to depict the experience of a woman in an abusive situation. That several people here didn’t is obviously a problem – maybe to Fimm’s fans and fans of goth/metal music & aesthetics her intent may be clearer.
The video seems quite typical for the music genre, artiness is par for the course – nightmarish, dark, dissonant imagery, with the symbolism laid on a bit thick. Disembodied dolls heads? Being in a straitjacket? Rotting fruit? Floating like Ophelia & appearing to be dead? Not terribly original but there’s a reason why all that imagery resonates in creative representations of women’s experiences of abuse and violence. The use of the dolls in particular I found hackneyed and naive for example, but at the same time the idea of women turned into dolls or puppets, being dehumanised, with no will or mind, of being perfect use-objects is also still a really effective way of describing the real intent of predatory and objectifying men (a lot of Lynx adverts really evoke this for me).
Also refreshing in that usually this kind of video imagery is used to convey dudely angst or sensationalist horror – makes a change that it is used to convey the horror and entrapment of an abusive relationship. I disagree that there’s ambiguity – the scenes that look affectionate and romantic are intercut with the scenes of him drugging her, and I’d read that as portraying the affection as a facade for an abusive reality.
There’s no resolution, no rescue in the video – her appearing dead in the bath in the river, and the headless doll floating down the river at the end, seem to represent the woman’s fear/expectation of what will happen to her. The recurring lyric (which I had to look up because I can never hear lyrics properly) is “It’s in the death of yourself / that everything becomes whole” – it and the video seem to me to convey a sense of being trapped, abused and helpless, and a tension between struggling to survive and resist with no apparent way out versus the prospect that resolution to an unbearable situation will only be found in the death of that resisting self – either by psychological acceptance/accommodation of/with the use-object role she is being forced into, or by literal death, at her own or her abuser’s hands.
Agree with you Polly that using the wheelchair to symbolise helplessness, and amputation as metaphor too, is a thoughtless fail.
I don’t feel that the woman in the video is sexually objectified. The video avoids exposing her body and mostly avoids actually depicting her being abused. (Which is a mercy and in stark contrast to numerous other things I’ve watched where the fact that a villain is shown sexually assaulting a woman or threatening to do so is used to convey how evil and repulsive he is, while eroticising the victimisation of the woman for the benefit of the viewer – e.g the films Sin City and 300 spring immediately to mind as having particularly blatant examples of this). Instead it’s implied and symbolised – e.g. when the man bites into the apple, and when he is shown drugging her and is briefly touching her torso. The drugging could be meant to be literal or it could be symbolic of the idea that he is doing things to her against her will, a stand-in for non-consensual actions not shown.
Whether the video is from her point of view is debatable – perhaps it could be best described as observing her situation – but what it does is depict her situation as clearly oppressive. Her fear and despair are obvious, her terror of the man, his exercising power over her and drugging her portray his actions as unambiguously abusive.
The Nick Cave/Kylie Minogue video for Where the Wild Roses Grow is a good comparison – I just went and rewatched it (ugh, it starts with a close up panning up Kylie’s thighs):
I think that Everything Becomes Whole does well at avoiding the problems that there are in Where The Wild Roses Grow. The latter romanticises the murder of the woman in the video, is sung/shown from the killer’s perspective, and is pure fetishisation and equivalencing of dead woman==desirable woman. Although it’s a duet, the victim’s verses & point of view only serve, until her very last line, to show that she regards her relationship with the killer as a romantic one (had to look up the lyrics for this song too and omg are they creepy). Throughout she is depicted in a very passive way, not only when she’s lying prone on the riverbank or in the river, but also even when she’s walking and singing she is wholly within the consuming gaze of the man/killer/viewer. There is no resistance, no fear, no agitation – everything even when she’s represented as beautifully dead (yet singing) is bright, sunny, idealised. The man touches her body lying in the water and we see him doing this far more lingeringly, far more intrusively, than in the Everything Flows video. When the woman lies on the riverbank in the sunshine, there’s no actual contrast or dissonance in the dual possiblities that she’s lying there because she’s dead or she’s lying there for sex – for the killer and for the viewer the difference is disturbingly immaterial. (The Everything Becomes Whole video makes a horror story of its scenario, and as in a horror story the viewer identifies with and roots for the victim, desires her escape – when we see her floating down the river, we’re not encouraged to enjoy how her stillness facilitates our visual consumption of her, but to despair at the bad outcome we/she feared). While in Where the Wild Roses Grow the act of violence is not shown (only suggested by showing the man’s hand clutching the stone he’ll use as a weapon), unlike in Everything Becomes Whole there is no other hint of his violence or abusiveness – the absence serves not to spare the viewer or protect the dignity of the victim, but to make it less problematic to see from the killer’s perspective – to facilitate denial, to romanticise what he does.
I’m not familiar with the genre MariaS, so I probably am at a disadvantage there. But I have big issues with what I’m going to call ‘victim chic’ for want of a better expression. I think the problem with this is that it doesn’t focus on the perpetrator, but basically seems to actually celebrate/fetishise/romanticise suffering and powerlessness. I’ve said it before, and I’m going to keep on saying it, that’s a pretty weird message for feminism to send out.