Brandon Soderberg has a great post on No Trivia about the Spike Jonze/Kanye West video that debuted last week, “Flashing Lights”, and how it relates to the director’s other music videos for hip hop artists. There’s a lot of great analysis in the post, but I thought it was interesting that, in what’s essentially an auteur analysis of Jonze as an anti-Hype Williams, Soderberg give authorial credit for one of “Flashing Lights”‘ key elements not to Jonze, but to Kanye:

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has the thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the rock video chick or the sexless but cute and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

The video is so much about costuming (everyone’s talking about what happens with the shovel, but it seems even more significant that before the model enacts her revenge, she shrugs off a fur coat and what appears to be a designer dress, only to set them on fire before returning to the car to perform the video’s violent climax) that Soderberg is totally spot on to read what the model wears as a vehicle for the clip’s ideology. But how are we to know that this was a decision made by the author of the song and not by the clip’s ostensible director?

Certainly, the song’s lyrics don’t suggest that the man who brought us “Gold Digger” has come up with anything unusual to say about the function of women in the life of a hip hop star. After explaining that he likes to go to Florida and order hors’ d’ourves with a woman who likes couture, Kanye wistfully wonders, “Why can’t life always be this easy? You in the mirror dancing so sleazy.” (As if life is usually difficult, as if there are a shortage of women who will go to Kanye’s hotel and get sleazy.) The reverie is apparently interrupted by the titular flashing lights of the paparazzi, with whom it seems that the girl is possibly in cahoots (she “loves to show off”), and whom Kanye notes that he “hates more than a Nazi.” At that point, the song becomes something of a lament––celebrity kept Kanye and his lady apart, but as he’s kicking back alone in first class, he regrets it. Certainly, if the trunk of a Lamboghini qualifies as a stand in for first class, the video wants us to know that regret isn’t motivated by romantic nostalgia alone.

But maybe it’s mostly tempting to give Kanye the credit here because, based on his two completed features, it would be hard to imagine a filmmaker apparently less interested in the psychology of sexual relations than Spike Jonze. Somehow, I don’t think Where The Wild Things is gonna change that.

[via The House Next Door]