Sound And Vision: Samuel Bayer
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos directed by Samuel Bayer.
Samuel Bayer is one of the biggest names in the music video industry. Going over his many accolades, is going through almost 4 decades of music video classics, with many music videos on there being lauded as some of the greatest of all time, and some mired in controversies. I want to focus on a few stand out music videos in this Sound and Vision to set out what makes a Bayer music video quintessentially his, and to figure out why he never really successfully crossed over into movies.
If Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (below) is one of the very first music videos you directed, you are doing something right. Some sources even state it is the very first music video Bayer directed, who felt he was hired by Nirvana because his test reel was amateurish, and would therefore lead to something 'punk' and 'unpolished'. Kurt Cobain did the final cut for the music video, and edited out some 'Bayerisms', where we cut to imagery of the staff, including a teacher in a dunce cap. Bayer often likes to cut away to stilted, semi-surreal imagery, some of which is still in the video and became classic, like the janitor cleaning up the mess left behind by the rowdy crowd.
A lot of other Bayer-touches also get introduced here already, like the muted, saturated color palette, and the often visceral texture and grain of the footage. For a director who made a lot of music videos for grunge artists, this murky 'grungy' approach makes a lot of sense. Bayer's video reinvigorated MTV, opening up the channel to a whole new demographic. It became the most played music video of all time on the channel, according to the Guiness World Book of Records.
Other videos around the same time and slightly later see Bayer adding new touches to his style, while keeping somewhat in the same lane. The Cranberries' Zombie (also below) is quintessentially Bayer: a muted color palate in two alternating colors (red and gold versus black and white); slightly violent imagery full of religious or surreal symbolism being presented in a stilted matter; the camera ramping focus and/or being overlit whenever a shot transitions; a murky textural grainy quality to the footage; the use of graffiti and/or dirt as a real-life texture in the background.
All or most of this is true for Metallica's Until it Sleeps, Marilyn Mansons's Coma White, Green Day's Jesus of Suburbia, and especially David Bowie's The Heart's Filthy Lesson (also below), a music video steeped in controversy. It is not the only or final time a music video of Bayer became considered 'Too hot for MTV', but it is an especially gory and interesting video, that highlights all these Bayerisms, and what he does so well. As a video it is similar to Mark Romanek's piece for Nine Inch Nail's Closer, and Anton Corbijn's video for Nirvana's Heart-shaped Box, both of which share stylistic DNA with every work Bayer has ever made. It is not so much a case of him aping them, or them copying him, but all of them tapping onto something in the zeitgeist, and seeking out the same source materials to be inspired by. In the case of Bayer that is a lot of the stilted surrealism of early silent cinema, vaudeville theatre, and the works of avant-gardist surrealists from the early 20th century.
Never is that influence more clear than in the music video to My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade (that even got a Bayer-directed sequel in Famous Last Words)(also below), that is heavily indebted to Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. A man on his death-bed sees The Black Parade come by, a huge and expensive set piece that has solidified in the mind of many a MTV-watching millennial emo teen. MTV viewers voted in 2017 as the greatest music video of all time, but it had stiff competition from a lot of other Bayer-directed pieces. There are too many big, impactful music videos to really single out, which is why settling on a description of his style and communalities between some of them is a better route.
Surprisingly, a lot of what Bayer does well is present in his much-maligned sole feature film, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The subdued hues are here, showing the real world in an extreme shade of grayish blue, and the nightmare world as a constantly on fire burnt umber. The grungy backdrop full of gravity shows up in the form of Freddy Krueger's lair, where he turns out to have molested several children. The textural grain and oversaturated images are also there in the editing. But here every choice feels either outdated, where Bayer's grunge-style is coming off as trying too hard to give a gritty MTV-style look to the proceedings.
Some of the choices are downright baffling, like the aforementioned backstory about childhood sexual abuse. It feels way too heavy to bring such real-life violence into what is supposed to be a pop-culture horror romp. Normally Bayer paints in several different shades, both stylistically and in subject matter. But given the serious nature of the topics at hand here, he could have used more black-and-white, especially getting on the wrong foot when he tries to portray Freddy Krueger as a sort-of-victim for a while in the second act.
And for a film where a dream demon terrorizes teens the film is surprisingly lacking in dream-like imagery, something Bayer has shown to be very adept at in his music videos. Was this studio interference? Did he want to root his dream images in reality? Surely, the man who made The Hearts Filthy Lesson and the Boschian nightmare-scapes of Until it Sleeps can come up with something better than some slicing and dicing in a pool and a pipe factory.
Nightmare on Elm Street was a severe disappointment, to both fans of the franchise and Bayer's work, and almost everyone involved as well. Still, I really hope Bayer will try his hand at a film again, as his style is suited especially for horror. Give him an indie to work on, and let him work his magic. I assure you it will work better than A Nightmare on Elm Street this time around. This is the man who directed the most popular music video of all time after all, even leaving it up for debate which one of his that would be.
