In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss a duo of music videos by Olivia Wilde.
Olivia Wilde might be known mostly as an actor. But after three films as a director that show a wide variety of styles and genres, it is clear she is the real deal of a good actor-turned-director, a feat which is still quite rare. You might think that her three films and two music videos don't have a lot in common. One is a highschool-comedy, one is a scifi-thriller, one is a razorsharp black comedy set in one room and the music videos are a skating-video and a dance-choreography shot on a phone. You would be wrong, as there is a clear throughline throughout all of them, that also might be the key to why Olivia Wilde turned from acting to directing as well: all of the art she has made as a director is about breaking free from confinements.
Most of the characters in her work that need to let loose are women, confined in strait-jackets of societal expectations. For her debut as a director, Olivia Wilde had a mantra: 'high school is war'. This is certainly true for the protagonists of Booksmart, who for all their highschool careers have been the perfect student to make it into a good university of their choice, only to find out that their peers who they are at odds with because they were party animals also made it into the same schools. Hence: a night of free abandon, one big party to still having been able to say they partied in high school.
In the wrongly lambasted Don't Worry Darling, a hugely underrated modern riff on The Stepford Wives, it is patriarchy that literally brainwashes women so they become more subservient to their male partners. In this simulation, that looks a whole lot like the cinema from the 1950's, one woman, played by Florence Pugh, finds out that her husband, played by Harry Styles, has digitally lobotomized her and put her in this simulation. It is a film that is all about rape culture, without ever using that word. It shows that the patriarchy leads men to see women as an object to use, and whenever a woman breaks free from this oppression she is seen as harsh, aggressive, paranoid or calculating. Ironically, Olivia Wilde became a victim of this same behaviour during the press-tour of Don't Worry Darling, during a much-publicized divorce from her then-husband, in which she was painted as volatile, promiscuous, unprofessional and more, without any reason or foundation to any of it. Even before that, as an actress Wilde is intimately familiar with the societal pressure of what a woman "needs to be", because this patriarchal pressure is projected tenfold on our female celebrities..
In her latest film, The Invite, relationships are a battlefield, and this time the theme of abandoning and abandon as a form of freedom is extended to the male lead as well. The Invite makes the case that sometimes divorce or another form of recalibration is needed if things do not work anymore. The pursuit of freedom means having to leave things behind, or research for what is lost. That this quite radical vision for a mainstream comedy takes the form of one of the sharpest and acerbic films of the year, makes Olivia Wilde three for three as a director, even more so if you count the music videos, which are lighter, smaller version of this theme.
In Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros' No Love Like Yours(below), which was shot on a smartphone when that was still quite new, Edward Sharpe is seen as a man in pursuit of something. He is an individual, showing up to a joyful march of blind-folded troubadours as an outsider. At the same time, he is the centerpiece of a choreography full of dust-clouds and dancers in an abandoned warehouse. Both scenes paint him as central, yet on the periphery. He is still while the others move, he is seeing while the others are blindly celebrating. He joins the cult-like-group (shades of Don't Worry Darling) when the march turns out to be funereal, climbing into his own casket, joining the party in a transition to his own death. It is the ultimate pursuit of freedom as a form of leaving something behind, a transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead, in a mythological folkloric piece.
The video is full of little surrealist touches that Olivia Wilde likes to put in her work. Don't Worry Darling has a similar focus on choreography, in Busby Berkeley-like sequences whenever Pugh's character is brainwashed or breaking free from the simulation. Booksmart has the infamous drug-induced Barbie-doll hallucination, and while The Invite might seem relatively subdued, it often uses extreme angles and even splitscreen to heighten the sense of alienation in the characters. Meanwhile No Love Like Yours might be the most overt piece of surrealism that Wilde has made, but even her music video for The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Dark Necessities (also below) throws in everything and the kitchen sink. Quite literally, as the kitchen sink is where Flea performs his bass-playing, sitting among a pile of dishes.
It is the scenes in which the Peppers play around that the music video has Wilde's typical eye for interesting framing, showing a lot of playfulness and fun in the ways she lets the camera glide over the band-members. But the theme of freedom and a feminist approach shows up in the interstitial scenes, in which a group of women skaters ride through an all-but-abandoned L.A. late at night. There is a lightness and freedom and a fuck-it-attitude to these scenes, like getting a inner-lip-tattoo for the hell of it. The camera focuses on the bruises and bleeding wounds of the women, but it is never in a negative way, but mostly matter-of-fact. Olivia Wilde seems to be saying, "yeah, you might bruise yourself along the way if you want to be like these women, but well, doesn't it look like a hell of a lot of fun?".
She knows what she is talking about: pursuing her career behind the camera ánd in front of it cost her a lot. Emotional and psychological bruises, public humiliation and scapegoating, and being celebrated for a return to form even though she never lost that form. She deserves better, and so do all of her peers. Someone needs to lead the way though, like in Booksmart, The Invite, Don't Worry Darling, No Love Like Yours, Dark Necessities, or the way Olivia Wilde has been carving out her own career. Now let us follow.