Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze is a music video director and has worked on various projects, the main feature to his pieces are usually an air of surrealism to capture the viewers attention. The levels of surrealism though can change greatly from video to video due to the artists wishes or song style.

From looking at a variety of his pieces, I can see that Spike Jonze seems fond in using aspects of violence, surrealism, pranking and naivety

Phantom Planet - Big Brat

Although this video begins by frequently displaying the artists performing within a house, the theme heavily becomes based around violence, pranks and possible naivety. For the majority of the video, various people (possibly the artists themselves) are creating horror themed props and costumes, and by the end of the video use these things to shoot a short film. Violence in this video is portrayed through the use of "zombies" and their actions, ripping off peoples arms in silhouette as well as their general grotesque appearance. The naivety element for this video appears through the actors tame responses when being attacked, even though this is an entropic video, the naive acting and camera styles/grey scale make it rather typical of a low budget horror film.

The Vine - Ride

Although this video is focused around the musicians, it is extremely entropic through its totally surreal style. Through carefully cut continuity editing, one minute the band is playing alone in the hall, the next they are surrounded by fellow musicians. This, unlike most of Spike's videos, does not incorporate violence or pranking, but plays more heavily on entropy. Because of these low levels of Spikes characteristics, I am lead to believe this video could have been done in partnership with the band themselves, rather than total director control. This video may not include Spike Jonzes common trait of violence due to the target audiences tendencies in taste, therefore this was more a marketing product, over creative.

Flashing Lights - Kanye West

This is by far his most violent and surreal video, as it depicts a woman beating a man to death with a spade in the boot of a muscle car. This violence is totally unexpected as it contradicts the female stereotype of non violent in manners such as this. As she killing the man in a muscle car, it also suggests that the car is his, since this is typically a car aimed at men. Although no blood or graphic scenes are shown, it is clearly an extremely violent scene. The video also seems to have little relevance to the song itself, making the video even more entropic in theme

Heaven - Unkle

In this video, pranking and potential violence plays hand in hand with sheer surrealism as skaters do tricks, while the ground they just covered explodes in an extremely dramatic way. This skate board theme may go back to when Spike Jonze was a skating photographer for Transworld as well as his street skateboarding videos and his film work with Jackass. This amazing footage captures the viewers attention through its entropy and its near violence, several of Spike Jonzes key themes.

Crushed by Eyeliner - REM

In Crushed by Eyeliner by REM, the band perform in a club/disco scene. The camera angles and quality used connote naivety, as if someone went around a club with their video phone. This naivety adds atmosphere to the video, creating the sense of actually being there. There are also small amount of violence, shown through various fist fights although these are not major aspects of the theme, they merely aid in atmosphere construction. All of the aspects contributing to a realistic atmosphere give this video a redundant theme, rather than surreal like most of Spikes videos. Either again, he was not given full creative control, or this displays him to be flexible within his styles from video to video.

Feel the Pain - Dinosaur Jr

In this video, the theme begins to be quite deep and surreal due to the low levels of lighting and odd actions being performed. This theme is suddenly broken from being deep to light hearted as the two men emerge on a golf cart from the back of a truck. Through the rest of the video a light hearted, surreal theme is maintained as the two men go around the city playing golf on the street. Spike Jonzes violence trait is also added at various points as passers by are struck down by the golf ball. Although this is quite violent, it is still seen as light hearted and funny, thus adding to the surreal/entropic style.