Thanks for another great music video, 80s_kid. I like this one a lot too, though of the ones you've pointed out so far my favourite is still the one that was directed by Lynne Ramsay (for the video only, not the music).
Cal, I actually think following the lyrics too literally for a music video is kind of cheesy. Most of the really great videos have very little if anything to do with the lyrical content - at least on literal level. The way it seems to work with the really talented directors is that they listen to the song and it inspires certain images. I think the music and mood of the song are a lot more important on that level than the actual lyrics.
Michel Gondry, who directed a lot of my favourite music videos, said in a documentary that he usually doesn't really get half the lyrics anyway. He can just make out a few lines here and there, and then he sort of uses that and the music to make up his own interpretation of what the song is about. Most of the time, it has very little to do with what the songwriters had wanted to express directly, and yet they always respond very favourably when he propose a treatment for the video. It's like he has access to a deeper thruth found deep within the songs - one that transcends words - and that's what he expresses in his videos with images.
In the case of "Human," I think the video is very well suited to the song. On my first viewing, I didn't pay much attention to the lyrics, but the line "It's just human" combined with the images took on kind of profound meaning that I probably wouldn't have gotten from just reading the lyrics or listening to the song without the video.
Also, who's to say that the video doesn't match the rest of the lyrics? It seems to be more or less a song about how humans relate to one another (which is the topic of a lot of songs), and that's basically what I see the video as being about too. The video, to me, seems to be about a kind of very physical desire people feel for one another, a desire that can never really be satisfied. This is perhaps best represented in the scene where you see two kids running toward each other and jumping in the air, but just as they're about to crash into one another, they are sort of pulled back and never actually touch each other.
That, to me, is a rather profound illustration of how difficult it is, as human beings, to really touch one another, to come into contact with one another and share meaningful emotions, whether it's love or hate or whatever comes in between. The fact that the director chose to illustrate this with young actors seems to make it all the more moving.
Who knows whether any of this was actually in the song before the video was made... or indeed, whether any of this was even part of the director's intentions or if it's just me reading too much into it. But who cares, really? I see it there and that's what makes it a good video to me.
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