In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss two distinct music videos by Nicolas Winding Refn.
Nicolas Winding Refn has evolved a lot as a director since his early years. Starting out with grimey crime dramas like the Pusher Trilogy and Bleeder, he has worn his influences on his sleeve, embracing classic cinematic auteurs like the many directors name-dropped by the protagonist in Bleeder. Think the Kubricks and the Scorceses. But the more outré trash and avant-garde-auteurs like Andy Milligan, Kenneth Anger, Ron Ormond and Doris Wishman always have been a frame of reference as well. Somewhere around Valhalla Rising and Bronson Refn started to coalesce his references into his own singular style, that became increasingly focused on a skewering of masculine machismo. Often combined with a fetishy focus on costuming and set-design, neon-drenched and leather-clad, that felt like the straightest possible version of Tom of Finland and Jean Genet. For someone who is ostensibly not-queer, Refn is pretty heavily inspired by the queer greats, like many of the aforementioned names. Lending from them a manic trashy and fetishy quality, that elevates his work beyond just mere muscle-porn.
The early Refn, who dabbled in the realm of trash and fetish, but hadn't truly found that singular voice yet, is present in his first music video. The one for Bleeder's Psycho Power(below). Refn by then was already a cult director in his home country of Denmark, hence the music video being released on home video there, which was a rarity even then. Bleeder's Psycho Power has nothing to do with the film Bleeder, even if the bandname suggests as much. On the other hand, it is a music video in which a group of sexy nurses torment a group of psychiatric inmates, before the tables are turned, and the inmates violently kill the nurses. As a music video it's pure trash, but not of the elevated kind. It's too cliched for that, resting too much on sexist and ableist stereotypes, never moving beyond the very predictable central premise. We have seen this sort of thing before, ever since Edgar Allan Poe's The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether was adapted many many times.
The second, evolved version of Refn, who has turned his many forebears into a style entirely his, is seen in his second (and to this date last) music video, for Travis Scott's Delresto (Echoes), which was also incorporated in the longer album film Circus Maximus. In this music video (see also below), there are hints to other films, like Eyes Without A Face in the mask of the driver and many carsploitation movies in the central premise, of a driver going haywire with someone (Travis Scott) in his backseat. There are also hints of Westworld and Total Recall, with the driver being cybernetic. More interesting tho are the intersplices of old movie clips, including a few seemingly taken from Ron Ormond's The Believers Heaven.
Refn has been instrumental in preserving works of many trash auteurs with his imprint By NWR, which has restored works from Andy Milligan and Ron Ormond. Ormond, a trash filmmaker turned into an Evangelical 'true believer', started making Christian exploitation films like If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do, The Believer's Heaven and The Burning Hell that need to be seen to be believed. Taking some of the clips out of these films out of the context they came from, gory christian propaganda, truly shows the beauty in them.
That is what Refn has done as a filmmaker since Drive: taking iconography from others, shooting them through his own lens, revering and fetishishing them. And by replacing their context, he finds beauty in these often-reviled visuals. A hazy dreamlike, almost feverish quality. In Delresto, the carsploitation is only the starting point, and the central premise is just a vehicle to bring the imagery forward. The story might be as cliched as in Bleeder's Psycho Power, but there is now an elevation going on that wasn't there yet when Refn made the earlier music video. It is the difference between a filmmaker starting out by aping his predecessors, and a filmmaker who has internalized his forebears and made them his own.