In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss a few music videos made by John Maclean.
Recently I wrote two Sound and Visions where the director had a weird claim to fame: John Carney was the rare director who himself was a band member of a famed band (The Frames) who he has directed music videos for; and Yoshihiro Nishimura was the sole director in the Sound and Visions who remade one of his music videos as a feature length film. That is, till this Sound and Vision, cause John Maclean combines the two outliers into one person: he is a band member for both The Beta Band and The Aliens, who he has directed music videos for, AND he expanded one of his music videos into a recent feature length film.
John Maclean started out as a director when making music video for The Beta Band, mostly as a bit of a lark. The best of these have a ramshackle quality, playing like dress-up parties with a bunch of friends. Like the small album film for Los Amigos Del Beta Bandidos E.P. (see below), that even ends with a role-call in a party-setting, and has each of the cast members credited for the (sometimes many) roles they play. That the slight story is full of stereotypical and iconographic characters from all kind of pulp stories, is what partly gives it the Spirit of Halloween-vibes it is aiming for, for instance having a scene early on in which an aerobics instructor in glittery jeggings and with big hair, teaches a group of stereotypically dressed older women (clearly people of all kinds of genders in aged drag) an exercise, before a barbarian warrior shows up.
It is all deeply unserious, even in the more elaborate animated music videos like for The Aliens'Robot Man, in which the repeated lyrics (I'm The Robot Man, repeated ad nauseum), give away especially how serious we should take it all. That particular video has a sense of children playing around with toys, like using glowsticks for stop-motion animated halos. That is not to say that there is no ambition. The music video for Django Django's Tic Tac Toe (see also below), a band for which John Maclean's brother David is a drummer, even has some beautiful time-lapse sequences, in which a tilt-a-whirl seems to come to a grinding halt mid-air, due to trickery with frame-rate. That particular video also uses a haunted-house full of stop-motion-animated and pixelated horror monsters to hint at darker existential malaise.
John Maclean at his best uses metaphors in a way that is both facetious while hinting at grander themes. I particularly like a scene in Slow West, his quirky yet dark Western, that plays like a Wes Anderson-remake of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which a young boy sees his love interest being involved with another man, while he just has been shot. A bag of salt gets knocked over by another stray bullet, literally pouring salt in the wounds of the double-hurt protagonist. It is the kind of silly-yet-cruel irony that MacLean excels at, in both his music videos and features.
One of the more ambitious music videos for The Beta Band, the one for Assessment (also below) hints at another commonality in the works of Maclean. In the music video a glowing tube is passed on as a baton on a beach, by fighters from all over the world and time and space, including cavemen, WW II-army men, Zulu warriors, ronin knights and many more. The one-taker marathon through time ends where it began, ostensibly playing out like a continuous loop.
In the works of Maclean, there is this sense of a shared world, where people come together under often harsh circumstances, sometimes even in death, like in the poetic yet brutal role call of everyone who died in Slow West. It is there in the meeting of minds between the titular protagonist from Tornado and a troupe of travelling actors after her ordeals; and in the kind-yet-dark voice-over at the end of Slow West in which the secondary protagonist thanks the now-deceased main protagonist for giving him the life that he never knew he could have. But there is also this sense of displacement in this world: the aforementioned main protagonist of Slow West is a doe-eyed kid, who believes in love in a world that is all-but-just.
Tornado, from Tornado, is even more of a fish-out-of-water, being a young Japanese girl, in England in the 18th century, a time that was not kind to foreigners nor women. This clashing of times and cultures is a theme in Maclean's films, but it is also there in some of his music videos. Even if the clashes of iconographical characters, like the baton-passing on the beach, feels more tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes in bad taste.
See the stark difference between The Beta Band's Trouble (finally below) and Tornado. Tornado is the aforementioned feature length adaptation of one of Maclean's music videos. Trouble is, like Tornado, the story of a Japanese fighter on a revenge mission in the United Kingdom (this time set in the Scottish Highlands). It is the same concept, even filmed in many of the same locations, according to the audio commentary on the blu-ray of Tornado. But the differences couldn't be starker: Trouble is a slapstick story, full of Sam Raimi-esque camera shots, in which the costumey nature feels like it makes fun of both Japanese and Scottish stereotypes. Tornado feels lived-in, being partly about the culture clash between the Japanese immigrants and the locals, but this time from the point of view of people in the diaspora. It is existentially heavy, almost to a fault. People expecting Maclean's high-energy camera trickery or action-centered humor won't find that here. It is a meditative piece, ignoring genre-tropes to get deeper into the sense of what it means to be displaced and hunted.
The difference between the two seems to be time: Trouble is made by a young man, shooting the shit with his friends and band members. Tornado is the more adult version, reflecting on life and existence the way one does when one ages. The shift from Trouble to Tornado is the one from cultural appropriation to cultural appreciation. From stereotypical and racist dress-up, to an actual collaboration with people from the cultures you are depicting. Playtime is over, in other words.