Sound And Vision: Darren Aronofsky
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at Lou Reed and Metallica's The View, directed by Darren Aronofsky.
Darren Aronofsky is known for his swerves as a filmmaker. With the impending release of Caught Stealing, which seems to be set in fairly Guy Ritchie-esque territory, it is time to look back on the sole music video that Aronofsky made, that is for better or worse typical Aronofsky, in that he went for broke.
Aronofsky has made an eclectic list of films, but if there is one thing that is tying, let's say, the dance school horror of Black Swan, to the biblical fantasy epic Noah, to the gritty realism of The Wrestler, to the histrionic PSA of Requiem for a Dream, it's an aching sincerity. Aronofsky doesn't do irony well, which is why it's weird to see him doing a crime caper comedy currently. Aronofsky wears his heart on his sleeve, even when veering into darkly gory territory like mother!, that for all its symbolic excesses still is without any hint of distancing remove. Aronofsky says what he means and means what he says. The subtext is text and vice versa. The same you can say of the severely underrated album Lulu, by Metallica and Lou Reed, that was so divisive upon release that it became a cult classic almost by default.
If Aronofsky does do something well in his films it is swing for the fences. In his three best films, mother!, Noah and The Fountain (I said what I said) Aronofsky is firing on all cylinders. He swings big, and although in the eyes of some he might miss, you can't mistake it for any other persons work. The same is to be said of the unholy amalgam that is Metallica and Lou Reed's Lulu, a mishmash of haphazard metal tunes with Lou Reed's dryly spoken word aphorisms on top of it, where he mumbles inane yet brilliant lyrics inspired by Pandora's Buchse about semen and gore. It's a lot. It is also unlike anything else in the contemporary music landscape.
People didn't know what to do with it and memed the hell out of it. Lead single The View has a particularly weird lyric where James Hetfield yells about being a table, which has become a stand-in for everything that went wrong with the album's release. It became the butt of many internet-jokes, but the lyric itself is a big swing and achingly sincere. And guess what? We have Aronofsky to blame for it. The album proper had a ready made first single, Iced Honey, one of the better pop tunes in the later career discography of both Lou Reed and Metallica. It would've made a hugely different impression if that was the first single on the roll-out. It was, originally. But Aronofsky, while on the set for a live video shoot, opted to go for The View instead, as he felt it had an energy he liked. Cue "I am the table" as the thing that is the first takeaway for everyone talking about the album.
Still, the video itself is pretty great, dealing in a style similar to Aronofsky's debut feature Pi. The live footage is shot in grainy and gritty black and white, focusing on the silhouettes of the members with a lot of backlight. Their stark shadows being lit-up by a blinding outer rim of light.
It's impressive visually, and that continues when Aronofsky throws in overlaid shots of Reed and Hetfield in profile. By laying several shots over each other, shaking the camera ever so slightly, you get an effect that seems equally inspired by the cut-up photography of David Hockney and the out-of-focus nightmare paintings of Francis Bacon. It's visually striking, giving a vibe that is equally heavenly and hellish to the proceedings. It's Aronofsky in his wheelhouse. While it is easy to dismiss many of his films for their bleeding heart, they deserve to be taken seriously (not The Whale, tho). The same goes for Lulu, an album that deserves to be seen as more than an anomaly in the career of both artists.
