The Shining is FABULOUS.

I thought maybe once in a while I could actually post a relevant independent post rather than write about Johnny Cash. Seeing as one of Godwin's points is that there's intertextuality in videos, I thought I'd look at a video and look at the intertextuality in it and see whether it works. I am very tired (and Red Dwarf X has just come on [they're all looking so old now, aren't they?!]...), so this may not make much sense but bear with me because I will fix it if it's absolute rubbish first time.

The video I will be look at in this post is the video for The Kill (Bury Me) by Thirty Seconds To Mars. Don't judge me for loving this song. 

I think you can tell why I've picked this video to do. The intertextual references are clearly references to The Shining and we all know that I LOVE THE SHINING. If it were up to me, everything would be based on The Shining and everything would be perfect. I absolutely love the book and the film and the fact that this video is based on it makes me happy. Thus, I picked this video.

Location.

The setting for the music video is clearly influenced by The Shining. They are both set in abandoned hotels (which are established as abandoned in the first scenes of both) with a ballroom. The use of the ballroom is the distort reality in the film, as there are people there even though the hotel is abandoned. Because the film has hours to distort reality; however, the music video only has a few minutes. One of the elements of Gothic (heh heh heh English Literature) is dopplegangers or doubles, something the music video has picked up on to quickly distort reality. I'm not saying that twins are freaks of nature, but it's always weird to see two identical people, let alone a whole room full of them. The film distorts reality because of the themes; the video wants to distort reality possibly to fit the lyric 'this is who I really am inside', which suggests a facade put on by the singer to distort people seeing who they really are.

The room.

In both videos, characters are warned away from a certain room. Here is only one of many personalisations from 30STM in this video. In the film, the room is 237 (even though it's 217 in the book, but the hotel didn't want people afraid to stay in the actual room 217...), but in the music video it's 6277. This is a good example of not just stealing, but changing it to be personal. If you type '6277' into a predictive text phone, 'Mars' should come up. Clever, right? Well, I thought so.

Copying for the sake of it.

This is where I start to not like this video. It seems like it's actually being very clever, making The Shining references, but it actually just becomes lazy. Each band member copies an iconic moment from the movie, but the video relies on the viewer's knowledge of The Shining to fill the gaps that they leave out. I appreciate the music video is extremely short in comparison to the film, but relying on another text just seems lazy. The copying of the 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' is an example of this. There's no reason for it. It's just the band wanting to re-enact The Shining. Go do that in your own time, boys, and make a video that doesn't rely on previous knowledge of another film. And, considering their main fanbase are 14 year old "alternative, RnAdOm, NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME" girls, most of them won't have seen The Shining and probably won't even know who Jack Nicholson is.

I'm going add more to this post, I'm just way too tired to finish this right now.