It’s a simple music video. One shot. No camera movements,
just a steady zoom. A man plays his guitar in a kitchen. This restraint may
seem to some bland and uninteresting, but it is in fact a testament to the
power of developing a narrative and visual style to accompany the core emotions
of your project instead of building upon it.
The song Brilliant Disguise, from the Bruce Springsteen album Tunnel of Love, was released as a single 1987. The song’s about the nature of identity in marriage, it is a
contemplative piece about the doubts one feels about their significant other in
a relationship, and the fears and pains that accompany them. The narrator and
his significant other are clearly past the point of blissful love, that period
of time where you are blinded by the pure overwhelming emotions of being
attached to someone. He is still in love it seems, but now he is looking at who
she really is and who he really is. And he can’t help but doubt.
So tell me what I see
When I look
in your eyes
Is that you baby, or just a brilliant disguise?
Is the person he fell in love with
the person she really is? I mean, can you ever really know, understand a person’s
pains? Fears? Hell, can you ever really understand your own? The song never addresses
these questions, which ends up making it that much more powerful. It doesn’t
give the answers for the dark underbelly of identity in a relationship, but
simply brings them up and ponders the ramifications of them. It’s a powerful testament to one of the
many discrepancies in love, and a powerful one at that.
This is a complicated, unnerving
emotion to render into a music video. The video was released around the
beginning of the peak of MTV. Videos were starting to get really flashy; they’d
have big narrative arcs that the songs would accompany and detail instead of
having the images give flavor to the songs. That is not necessarily bad. Sometimes
fancy editing and extravagant camera movements empower the creators and help
them deliver their message. Sometimes it is simply a show of skill and prowess,
unnecessarily clogging up their visual palette and distracting from the core
emotions of their piece. So going into the music video, in that era, one would
expect some sort of narrative showcase of Bruce with a wife in a variety of
situations looking forlornly off into the distance. There’d probably be some
real nice dissolves here and there, maybe the woman even stares at the moon
from a balcony at some point, her dress waving beautifully in the night time
winds.
Instead, in the hands of director Meiert Avis, we have a black and white
video of single shot zoom in on Bruce as he plays the guitar. It’s uncomplicated.
He just plays his guitar and sings while staring into the camera. At the
beginning, we’re something like ten feet away from him visually. The kitchen he’s
sitting in looks like a set. It comes
across as surprisingly gimmicky and cheap.
Well I've tried to hard baby
But I just can't see
What a woman like you
Is doing with me
But the song delves into the deeper
and more emotionally stirring parts of the song. The camera keeps steadily
zooming in on Bruce. His face is browbeaten and weary. Bruce’s singing, which
was recorded live on set that day, which is an unusual practice, strains in
parts. The polish is gone. Instead, these words are pouring straight from his
soul. The kitchen keeps looking like a set, but it takes one a whole other
sense of identity. This is where the romantic, idealized marriage should
happen. Loved ones gather at the dinner table to bond. These meals should serve
as an affirmation of love. It should be perfect. It should be the moment you
look forward to at the end of the day. But sometimes our lives don’t live up to
the ideals we hope to be true. And so the kitchen becomes foreboding. It is a
dead hope; an ideal ransacked by the true nature of life, and this man can’t
help but live with it. Love was never going to be this simple, but he can’t
help but hope for it.
The
song ends on a final lyrical coda before an instrumental outro:
Tonight our bed is cold
I'm lost in the darkness of our love
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he's sure of
The video, in turn ends on a tight shot of Bruce’s face. His very
human, soulful stare is almost pleading to the camera as the song and video fade out. The
moment haunt, and it fills the viewer with an impression of dread and fear. For
the man, for themselves, who knows.
This is
not the convoluted narrative conclusion or a special effects laden spectacle of
visual noise and aural bombast. No, this is just a man and his doubts.
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