@r.1599

9 months ago

I love the song, but let's talk about the video: Gotye starts out resting on what is very clearly Earth's moon. Then he drops down onto what looks like a devastated Earth. Its skies are darkened to night. The only things we see on the surface of the planet are a few destroyed buildings. He is followed by a mechanical spider weaving a dark shadow. As he walks, he holds a megaphone up to his lips, calling out a message. He walks through a formation of soldiers forcibly marching a creature with a tank of water on its back, a tear in its eye and moving on trembling crutches. The last of the clean water. It leaves the soldiers to join Gotye. As the trio approach a collapsed home, three little spirits precede it and jump into the beak of a seemingly dead crane that is laden down with a broken fishing shack, a fishing line, and a stork's baby bundle. It has a Radioactive sign on its side, and its eyes have been bound shut. When the little spirits jump into its beak, it rises and joins the group. They continue to traverse the wasteland, the spider walking backwards as it watches the ever-growing shadow that it weaves, cover the land. They pass through the burned remains of a forest, where the eyes of what used to live there watch them. A logger with an axe in its hand and laden down with a cargo of felled trees, joins them. "You just threw away the key." Ahead, the only seemingly living things are the still-polluting factories and an oil refinery, still belching out their poisons long after life has left the planet; in the foreground a crane with a wrecking ball mindlessly demolishes what's left of the apartment buildings; it's made for destruction and is driven to destroy until everything is gone. As the group passes it, it looks up from its mission, sees them, looks over the buildings it has been wrecking, and leaves its work to join them. As they leave that area, the dirty glare of the factory lights and the oil refinery's gas flare gleam sickenly in the distance. Above, to the left, the light of a tiny craft shoots up and out to escape through a thinner patch of sky where sunlight struggles to shine through weakly. It is not night after all; the sun has been blotted out by the thick cloud of pollution. They stop by the sea's edge. A lonely sea monster with the head of a fish rows in on the last remaining piece of sea ice, which is rapidly melting. The sea monster joins the exodus as the spider gently pulls a blanket of shadow across the planet – it is almost completely covered now. They pass through a cemetery where the Big Five (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies) finally grieve and wring their hands while surrounded by the gravestones of the protesters that were killed for raising the alarm. A tortured spirit rises from the ground, his mouth bound and silenced. He has a flower on his head and twisted around his body is the spirit of the thing he died trying to protect: life. With a backward glance back at the tycoons, he too joins the parade. They reach the place Gotye first landed when he jumped down from the moon, and the spider finishes pulling the funeral shroud over the Earth. The members of the little parade climb each other up past the reach of gravity, and float into space. Farewell to the home we destroyed and lost. Is it a kind of suicide? The song is sad but the video is so full of grief.

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