Since her beginnings with the video clip ‘At the Bottom of Everything’ (Bright Eyes, 2005), Cat Solen has proven to be one of the most interesting visual artists specialized in animation of her generation.
His comedy special ‘Chris Fleming: Hell’ (2023) and, above all, the HBO series ‘The Shivering Truth’ (2018-2020), have confirmed an unmistakable creative universe, articulated around surreal imagery that constantly oscillates between the disturbing and the comic.
Her impressive work for Olivia Rodrigo’s new music video promises to definitively place her on the radar of the general public. Visually, ‘The Cure’ seems to be situated somewhere between the animated worlds of Henry Selick or Wes Anderson, the artisanal and naïve imagination of Michel Gondry, the woolly aesthetic of the video game ‘Unravel’ (2016) and the stylized hospital spaces of ‘The Wellness Cure’ (2016), the series ‘Ratched’ (2020) or Frida Kahlo’s famous painting ‘Henry Ford Hospital’.
All this visual apparatus is at the service of the central idea of the video clip: the physical materialization of emotional anxiety. Rodrigo plays a kind of sexy nurse and pop Marie Curie who seeks the cure for “frayed” hearts. The problem is that she herself suffers from this ailment, which manifests itself through a kind of poetic and textile body horror.
The final twist puts the final touch on the metaphor. When the camera zooms out, we discover that the hospital was nothing more than a gigantic model, a kind of dollhouse built from cardboard, threads and handmade decorations. The appearance of a “real” Olivia, who observes and finally destroys this miniature universe, suggests that everything seen until then was nothing more than the physical representation of her own “unstitched” heart. The only way to heal is precisely to tear down the mental scenario where you have tried to find an impossible cure.
