"Eat the Music" video

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

       Those who taped, or had friends who taped the premier of the video for 
"Eat the Music" on 120 Minutes last Sunday, have now had time to look at it a 
little.  Supposing those who don't have access to it are curious, I thought I 
might edit together some of my efforts to describe it this week for Andy 
Marvick, who wasn't able to catch the broadcast and was not just curious but 
"expiring from the pain" of missing it.

       It is totally glorious, of course <message from IED>, and let me start 
with the color.  One sign that it is shot on film rather than video is the 
somewhat uncertain translation for video display of the lusciousness of the 
colors, which have been perfected to make the natural ripeness of the fruit 
come through.  Kate is wearing a long fitted fruit-print dress, some sort of 
flowing fabric, perhaps silk.  The skirt is ample, draped to the ankles, the 
top fitted, the neckline deep enough that a little decolletage is flashed 
when she wheels herself from the waist, extending the gesture with her head 
so that her hair is whipped around in circles.  On her left shoulder is a big 
green fabric bow; the dress is mostly oranges and reds and greens on a calm, 
rich, light golden buff.

       The video begins as suddenly and in-the-midst-of-things as the track, 
initially (the first 10 seconds) with Kate squatting in the midst of the 
fruit and swinging her head and hair about in the visual theme with which the 
video will end.  But the actual start has Kate dressed as described, standing 
in the foreground of a small crowd who are dancing before a huge cornucopia 
of tropical fruits, spilling out of baskets into a mass that fills the bottom 
half of the screen.  She is swinging and swaying to the music, and we see her 
mostly in head-and-torso shots, with only a couple of brief pairs of full 
body takes.  She is featured, but not to the exclusion of a whole little 
crowd of fellow party-goers who are all in the moment with her:  blacks of a 
variety of shades and body types that to me spells Caribbean rather than 
South American.  Someone here on lh said she looks gloomy; totally false.  
She is smiling all along, except that most of the time it is the interior 
smile of someone who has attained true sensuous abandon.  This is the most 
erotic Kate I have seen since "Hammer Horror" in performance, or "James and 
the Cold Gun," except now she has brought it a hell of a lot closer to 
herself.  She is not erotic as a sex object (as indeed she has never been), 
but as an sensuous subject, with whom anybody human can identify.

       Early on (1:15) our eye is drawn to one particular black fellow, a 
couple of rows behind her in the crowd, who seems to be in as much of a 
transport as she is.  A symmetry in the construction of the video frames his 
initial appearance as a soloist:  the two pairs of full-length shots of Kate 
lie on either side of his introduction.  But in the early going, the main 
thing thrown before us is the cut to some feet, in red ballet shoes and semi-
opaque tights riddled with runs, shot from just at the edge of a long skirt 
much like Kate is wearing, that are tredding on the fruit and plainly making 
sloppy landings and a general mess.  I couldn't tell whether the print on the 
skirt marked this dancer as the same Kate featured in the video, but it 
doesn't matter, because at no point in the video overall is Kate standing or 
dancing in the midst of the fruit.  She is just behind it while she is 
swaying erect, and she is only in the midst of it when she is kneeling in the 
last half of the video.  So this image of red-shod dancer's feet comes from 
outside the video.  It doesn't seem to have a narrative connection to 
anything else however, only a thematic one (like the lighted candles in MoP 
and the RM video).

       Anyway, insofar as anything 'happens' in the video, it is a powerful 
evocation of Dionysian frenzy.  After the preview of the head swinging, and 
the first theme of Kate swaying to the music and the introduction of the rest 
of the crowd, the first big shift (2:25) has Kate kneeling in the midst of 
the fruit, her dress flowing into it in both color and liquidity to such a 
degree that she almost looks like a special effect, swaying from the hips 
with arms extended in gestures that harken back to "Moving," and with two red 
stripes painted onto each cheek.  Now the black man we noticed earlier comes 
to stand directly behind her, and he swings his right arm in a great circle 
above her head, 'stirring' her into the circling motion that continues to the 
end of the video.  It is a very athletic move on her part, and at its best 
moments (that are not consistently achieved throughout--there is some editing 
out of lack of synchronization) the effect of her fluency and the black man's 
stirring lead is quite uncanny.  Just for the shoot itself, nevermind the 
editing, Kate had to protract this move to an amazing degree.  She pivots 
from her waist, in a kneeling position, settled on her heels thigh deep in 
fruit, and rotates her torso through 360 degrees in a way that itself would 
make you a cripple without a warmup.  But then she amplifies the swing with 
her head, rolling it around from her chest and shoulders to whip the hair, 
with an amplitude that would make anybody untrained into a paraplegic.

       Now the black dancer, who is clearly present as a soloist, not just a 
member of the corps de ballet, enters into duet with Kate with respect to 
technical abandon.  He starts jerking his head around its circle with a 
violence that at first made me assume that some kind of video strobe 
processing was involved, because what he was doing would surely turn one's 
brain to jello.  But I think not; this is just his technical gift.  Kate just 
keepings wheeling herself around with the music, but he, and the others in 
the crowd, grow progressively more frantic and extreme.  At 3:30 Kate is 
shown continuing her wheeling along with two women on either side of her, and 
the black man is back in the crowd.  But at 4:05 he is behind her again, as 
serious frenzy starts to break out.  In a shot that goes by fast, a guy with 
a loose tropical yellow shirt on grabs it at its bosom spots and pulls it out 
to mimic two huge breasts.  One by one, people start falling into the fruit 
pile.  The other soloist goes down before Kate, and the video ends when she 
keels over--but she is not the last of the revelers to lapse.  There are 
still others in the frenzy as the fade arrives.

       The knock on this video that was heard this past week is that "it's 
boring" and "there is no story."  Perhaps the most revealing complaint was 
that that Kate looks "really down" in this video, flashes only one smile.  As 
to looking 'down'; yes, indeed, in the standing-swaying passage, she 
alternately looks out at us, then down.  But this is no sign that she is 
downcast!  Au contraire, she is withdrawing into the interior of the 
sensuality of her movements with the music, the liquidity of the long skirt. 
When she looks up again it is in bold acknowledgement of how she is inviting 
us to regard her, so that far from being gloomy her expression is the serious 
gaze of a woman for her lover.  Finally, her "one smile" (unobservant; there 
are two or three takes of an extended and developing expression) signals an 
abandonment to the interior so intense that she can no longer come out of it 
to meet our gaze.

        Everything about this video serves to help us move INTO it, to find 
our way into what Andy Marvick deftly calls "the moment":  the moment that 
wants to be eternal but falls in with the fruit.  This is why the extended 
version of EtM is more perfect than the single itself.  It can only be 
endured if you stop waiting for something and enter INTO it.

       For me, "The Big Sky" was a parallel experience.  I found the album 
track boring.  The extended remix began to redirect my attention, and the 
video finally had me giddy with joy.

       Have I told you that I 'like' this video?  I don't even know that for 
myself yet.  I'm still working on simply seeing it as a Kate Bush work.  This 
involves looking for the craft involved:  the stagecraft; the choreography; 
the dancing and the mime (with Kate, the eyes especially); the visual 
production (colors above all else); the opportunity for the second soloist 
and the collaboration involved there; and finally, via the squooshing red 
dance shoes, the connection to the still unmanifested album "The Red Shoes."

       Kate Bush remains decidedly impatient with efforts to trivialize and 
patronize her work by personalizing her as a 'pop star'.  Everything I have 
said to this point has tried to be description, not judgment or personal 
opinion.  Let's try our best to discern what she is  doing  before we make up 
our minds about whether we are happy about it.

............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                          pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu
                                                     72020.366@compuserv.com