Presenting: The Cinematic City!

The Keepers by Santigold

 I've also been in love with Santigold for a long time. I didn't know she had a new album out from last year and I'm realizing she has some pretty good songs on it as usual. This one is one of my favourites from her. I personally like this though for the video and my purposes for this post is to try to convert Santigold's video into an analysis of the American landscape - one fraught with illusions and a dream gone sour. I'm also going to compare this video to one of my favourite books The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The video i think is a stark representation of some of the scenes painted in the text. So look at that video very carefully (but i assure you it's an entertaining video).

 To make it a little easier, I'm just going to point out some scenes from the video and juxtapose them with some from the book:

The Keepers - The spoiled, toxic, glowing food
The Day of the Locust - “The SunGold Market into which he turned was a large, brilliantly lit place... Colored spotlights played on the showcases and counters, heightening the natural hues of the different foods. The oranges were bathed in red, the lemons in yellow, the fish in pale green, the steaks in rose and the eggs in ivory.” (pg. 63)         

 
The Keepers -  The mother turning, showcasing (I'm assuming her newly bought body...*smh)
 The Day of the Locust - “Mrs. Schwartzen was a big girl with large hands and feet and square, bony shoulders. She a had a pretty, eighteen-year-old face and thirty-five-year-old neck that was veined and sinewy. Her deep sunburn, ruby colored with a slight blue tint, kept the contrast between her face and neck from being too startling”. (pg. 37) – This may not be an exact description but it’s the closest I could get to make you see oddness of the characters.

The Keepers - The burning house

The Day of the Locust - “…he was able to think clearly about his picture, “The Burning of Los Angeles.”

…modeling the tongues of fire so that the licked even more avidly at a corinthian column…” (pg. 200-201)

I'm not sure if the two texts are related in regards to whether the video was intentionally inspired by the book or not but i will not deny that the two situations are highly analogous and present the same/similar idea(s).

The Day of the Locust is centred in the setting of Hollywood, California, considered as the promise land, the nexus of dreams, pleasure and hedonism. It is the land of eternal summer and perpetual youth - people go there to lose themselves and free to do anything, be anything or anyone. The city evokes mass production of fantasy and vision. But the downside to this life is that the city is in a perpetual state of readiness for impending disaster. The Keepers however is more encompassing of America on a whole. Similar to West's book, the people in music video are self centred, living in an illusion. The family - an "All-American" family is satirized to display almost an automated, corrupt civilization. The American perfection symbolized the family is illusory - the innocent domestic space is invaded by the grotesque (gross images of food and the exploitation of youthful dreams exemplified by the plastic woman with her enormous butt and fake shape). In fact, the very things that America tried to package as perfect has now been overturned to show that the country has gone too far in making things 'better', 'easier', 'more appealing/entertaining'. Instead, these 'improvements' have much more dire consequences than benefits. Also, the processes that America uses are actually toxic for the environment and the people. The large lips/fake butt (plastic surgery); chicken with growth hormones (explains why some teenagers look like 20s - jailbait); contaminated seafood (recycled water); tv (idiot box - turns children into zombies - addicted to popular entertainment); the boy taking a picture of the dead man (instead of helping the situation, we stand back and take pictures almost celebrating the morbid through popular networks). The house then signifies the country burning down, it is done.  

It's like someone told me one day - Instead of taking people forward, technology takes us two steps backwards. American popular culture, the advent of technology, mass production of fantasy again has again achieved the power to their own destruction.