Heart-Shaped Box – Nirvana (Directed by Anton Corbijn)
In September 1993 Nirvana released In Utero, an album in which at the time people said defined the generation. To support the record they release a single music video directed by Anton Corbijn for the song Heart Shaped Box. The album itself already had controversial artwork and controversial language for instance the song ‘rape me’, therefore it needed a perfect video to match. Although visually colourful the video is disturbing and the assumed meanings within this video are dark. 
Majority of the ideas for the video actually came from front-man Kurt Cobain himself and not Anton Corbijn. Influenced by themes already explored in Nirvana’s music previously. The video features the old man on the cross, a fat woman in an anatomic body suit, a young Ku Klux Klan girl supported by mechanical birds, fields of poppies and butterflies. In other words the video is absolutely mental. There are lots of interpretations of what both the song and the music video are about.
It’s a common belief that the song is about Kurt Cobain’s intimate relationship with Courtney love. Others say it’s about child cancer.
Some believe the video slamming the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion. This is shown through the old man wearing the Santa hat and then later the catholic mitre aka. The Pope hat. Furthermore, the little girl is dressed like the KKK but also like the pope comparing the two. She is even jumping to save to save the hanging foetus.
There’s also a lot of surreal Wizard of Oz imagery for instance the poppy fields and crows, the witches hat, the cross may be the scarecrow. Maybe Cobain is trying to compare Christianity to a popular fantasy. None of this would be surprising as Cobain was once religious before turning away from the church.
I don’t think anyone knows except Cobain exactly what everything in this video means and how it all comes to together. He was famous for having multiple meanings to a song and other times no meaning at all. However, there are a lot of elements in which you could guess the subtextual meanings. For instance, the poppy fields most likely represent his heroin addiction.
What makes this video amazing to me is the process it went under post-production. Cobain wanted the video to be shot in Technicolor but for some reason this wasn’t possible. Coribjin shot the original video in colour, transferred it to black and then sent it to Mexico where each single frame was hand painted in a style that mimicked Technicolor. The process took weeks. This colouring style was influenced by old school Hollywood film such as Wizard of Oz.
In the book Experience Music Video, Carol Vernaliss explores the idea that music video is primarily anti-narrative. Heart-Shaped Box definitely seems to gain energy from defying narrative conventions. The video holds back information, confronting the viewer with ambiguous unclear depictions. And that’s part of the reason why this video clip is so appealing to me. Even though I struggle to make sense of it, the lyrics, music and image all seem to combine seamlessly to create an interesting piece of media.