Day 3: The Coat that Rocked
Day three of the 30-day Depeche Mode challenge – Your favorite music video: “Barrel of a Gun”
You’ll have to watch the video here if you’d like to revisit it. Warner has disabled embedding.
From the colorful, blue-tinted vintage feel of the opening sequence to the gritty, unstable black and white closing scenes, “Barrel of a Gun” is visually compelling. It’s sometimes otherworldly and sometimes gross, but to the end of telling a story – something missing from most videos these days. The dynamic range of Dave’s expressions in this video is characteristic to Anton Corbijn’s contributions to the Ultra period (see “It’s No Good” and “Useless”) but outside the era, is unique among DM’s long history of otherwise subtle portrayals in even their best videos. Taking it a step further, Anton gets weird(er) – going way out there with the creepy eye-on-eyelid paint, the vintage camera with natural vignette effects, and a Christmas-light coat. Further adding to the deliberate oddity, the stop motion animation of Dave’s gravity-defying hair, the writhing, crawling shots and the erratic camera work fall in tempo with the wretched guitar effects and shambling bass line. Off the wall visuals compliment haunting sounds, using vision, hearing and motion to communicate an wholly eccentric atmosphere.
I don’t like things that are weird for the sake of being so, or for the sake of being art. In this case, the weirdness has purpose – it’s an essential part of the story of the video and the meaning of the song – and looks beautiful to boot.
… And seriously? The coat rocks.
