Our music video is intending to be a creative experiment in shot construction and lighting with a simplistic narrative as a driving force, one that positions the music video within a particular feminist view. However, our music video for ‘Electrical Ways’, at this stage of planning, is only just scraping the surface of the female experience in the 21st Century.
One of our inspirations comes from ‘Love Actually’, in scenes where Bill Nighy’s character, Billy Mack, is performing in his music video for ‘Christmas Is All Around’. He is surrounded by female performers who are clearly there to include sexually exploitive material – wearing very little and suggestively licking their lips. We are aiming to create a similar sort of scenario where the lead singer thinks he is a ‘sex god’ rockstar, however, the female in our video – the blow up doll – is uncomfortable with it all. The female doll in our music video is included to provoke particular questions about femininity and what it means for women to be objectified as sex objects, intentionally being used to represent the all too real experience of many women.
In ‘Music Video and the Politics of Representation’ buy Diane Railton and Paul Watson, Pink’s ‘Stupid Girls’ music video is aligned with much of recent feminist academic work on music video in that “it is concerned, on the one hand, to identify and critique images in which women are variously misrepresented, falsely represented, negatively represented, or simply not represented at all, and, on the other, to celebrate positive images of women.” (pg 18). Our music video is hoping to follow this example by showing how women are negatively represented and treated in a critiquing manner, whilst also addressing positive images of women – if you accept the blow up dolls deciding to fight back and murder their misogynistic boyfriend in the end as a positive representation.
As is also addressed in the reading, we are trying to touch on the fact that these images of women may not simply be either positive or negative, and that women may be a whole range of things without being labelled as one or the other – bad or good. We are trying to allude to the fact that these blow up dolls may accept rubbish treatment from their boyfriend, and they may decide to kill him, but either way it is their choice and they cannot be reduced to one ideology of what a female should be or do.