Music Video: Riptide (Vance Joy) GapFill

Vance Joy’s Riptide could be described as an  observationalarbitraryillustrativeexpository video due to the ways in which the images denote the lyrics of the song. It also makes use of montage editing in order to construct a series of images that are linked symbolically, rather than narratively. Unlike the majority of mainstream pop videos, Riptide is   a narrativea commerciala performancea conceptual music video. The video’s use of distinctive visuals and cultural references makes it an interesting discussion point in terms of female representation. Specifically, it is up for debate as to whether the video perpetuates traditional  mainstreamsocialistmatriarchalpatriarchal values, or whether it subverts them.

The second image in the video is an invasive  extreme close-uptwo shotclose-uptracking shot of a terrified-looking woman, strapped to a chair with a menacing metal instrument fixed between her teeth. The video returns to images of young women in peril, most notably when we see a young blonde woman desperately attempting to escape from a tree she has been tied to. These images appear to act as cultural references to horror cinema (particularly from the 1960s and 1970s). Throughout this period, horror films were heavily criticised for the emphasis they placed on women’s suffering. In their book Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,  Miriam MargoylesLaura MulveyJudith ButlerKeith Allen analysed the way in which films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho would present a woman from the perspective of   a homosexual malea childa heterosexual malean elderly male who wanted to kill them. This kind of  DutchPOVbird’s-eyeworm’s-eye shot found in these horror films is recreated in Riptide, particularly in the shot which tilts from a woman’s high heels up the back of her legs as she walks through a dark alleyway. On one level, these shots could be read as a respectful  homageparodyallegorybricolage to films of this era. On another level, one could argue that the lyrics of the song anchor the images in a way that critiques the  postmodernismimperial gazeEurocentric culturemale gaze. Further criticisms (which continue today) focus on the ways in which films and televisions present the bodies of female murder victims in   a voyeuristica sexualiseda comicala respectful way. The shot in which a pair of lifeless, feminine hands are dragged out of shot invokes this problematic trend.

Going beyond the references to horror cinema, the women who appear in the video tend to be blonde and Caucasian, and are shown to be sexually desirable. The numerous shots of striking women being filmed through a camera lens present them as  musesmatriarchal agentsiconsvillains who act as the source of inspiration for artists. The ways in which the blonde women are presented have   a traditionalista pornographica modernista scopophilic quality, particularly the slow zoom-in to a woman’s back as she removes a bikini. The feminist theories of both bell hooks and  George GerbnerAlbert BanduraLiesbet van ZoonenStuart Hall can be used to discuss the extent to which the visual representation of these women is ironic. For example, hooks claims that feminism is a struggle to end patriarchal oppression in Western society. One could argue that the shot of a long-lens camera zooming in on a woman, who herself is staring into the camera lens with a pair of binoculars, subverts the  objectificationmicrotargetingperformativityempowering of women by demonstrating that a female gaze also exists and should be explored more.