“We are no longer in the 90s,” says the executive played by Kevin Smith to justify his reluctance to invest a budget in a video clip. The subtext cannot be more obvious: we are not in those 90 that locks Smith himself as director during the explosion of American indie cinema. That nostalgia, dyed of disenchantment, resistance and a lot of self -referential humor, permeates the narrative of the “novel” spirit, eight minute, ‘Childlike Things’.
FKA TWIGS, along with his partner, photographer and filmmaker Jordan Hemingway, and together with the renowned playwright Jeremy O. Harris (scriptwriter of ‘Zola’), ironic about the “end of the video clip” as an artistic work, while claiming it. ‘Childlike Things’ tells the efforts of the British singer to convince a musical executive skeptic that her song, her choreographies and her charisma deserve an audiovisual piece in conditions, and not a simple 15 seconds Tiktok. Adding more irony to the story, the Executive Pro-Videoclip assistant is played by a Tiktoker: Jake Shane.
This dialectic between artistic risk and corporate pragmatism articulates the entire video: a satirical combat between the richness, complexity and music subtlety, and the crude “BPM increase” to make the song “more catchy”; between “putting a rapper” because yes, and that feat. I firm a rapper girl who phrase in Japanese (North West, daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian); Between the gray and stylistic monotony of the discussion between artist and executive, and the colorful vibrant and dynamism of choreographic sequences.
The result is a story that laughs at the system from within, parody the conditions of its own production and, in the process, it becomes precisely that whose disappearance laments: a video clip like those of the 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax54oynkjjc
