In ‘Hardcore Henry’, director Ilya Naishuller adapted the grammar of the first-person video game to action and science fiction cinema. The originality of the proposal opened the doors of Hollywood (‘Nobody’, ‘Road House 2’) and the music industry: in ‘False Alarm’, by The Weeknd, the Russian director followed exactly the same formal strategy, a first-person shooter like ‘Call of Duty’.
Vince Staples seems to have been inspired by the works of Naishuller for the making of ‘Blackberry Marmalade’.
Filmed in the famous Frank’s restaurant in Burbank, an icon of old Californian diners that has appeared in ‘Euphoria’, ‘Lost’ or in the Childish Gambino clip ‘Sweatpants’, the video begins with a very eloquent shot of the United States flag. What follows is a choreography of violence filmed from the protagonist’s subjective perspective, forcing the viewer to adopt the killer’s gaze.
But, beyond the technical virtuosity, the clip works as a fierce satire of certain deeply American imaginaries: gun culture, violence turned into spectacle, and shootings as an extreme expression of the frustration of the contemporary individual. The old diner, an emblem of everyday America, ceases to be a space of comfort and becomes a scene of absurd carnage.
The punchline comes with a quote from Martin Luther King: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” The quote, from the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963), introduces an uncomfortable irony: the moral idealism of civil rights activism reappropriated in a context of criminal violence, as if the nation had perverted its own myths to the point of replacing the moral radicalism of social justice with other forms – individualistic, conspiratorial, nihilistic – of extremism, emptied of all emancipatory logic.
