"Paradise" by Coldplay
Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G4isv_Fylg
Fan Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1nwdQRBCTs
The song is about a young girl experiencing difficulty somewhere in her life, but at night she is able to dream of a better life. The fan video exemplifies this as a girl whose home life is turbulent, with fighting parents and an angry father. She escapes to a fantasy world where her family was happy and it was "paradise". The song is all about her escape to this special place.
The beginning of the original music video shows a person in an elephant costume in a cage at the zoo. He then escapes and he rides his unicycle to meet up with his three other elephant friends. This visual could mean that we are all caged in some way looking for escape, and the unicycle could symbolize loneliness, and therefore the paradise is being with friends and those that love you. The setting is mostly in Africa, which is very much deserted in the video, once again signifying being alone. At the end there are a rainbow of colors as the elephants play a concert showing unity and happiness.
The colors in the fan video are very similar to this in the sense that when the girl is alone the colors are very musky and dark until the "paradise" brings in light and at the very end when she sees her once happy family it is brighter and happier.
While the original video is more abstract, and the fan video is much more relatable, they both carry the same sort of message. They begin with a sense of loneliness and end on a happier note.
Hello, Julia,
ReplyDeleteI think these are great videos for this paper. I think they say something interesting about both entrapment and about individual freedom and belonging. The elephant needs to get to African (his homeland) and the girl needs to get to a past memory (where she felt she belonged). What does this say about happiness and belonging? Why does the girl not escape to thoughts about the future instead of the past?