a music video worthy of film comparison
by armond white

03.12.03

ahhh, film. director mark romanek mixes staged footage, old documentary, hollywood clips and sundry movie excerpts into an emotional impasto for johnny cash’s music video for "hurt." there is a conscious use of film as the repository of memory and feelings that seems a perfect expression of the song’s mournful nostalgia when, in fact, nostalgia is transcended (if that’s the right word) by the way romanek’s collated imagery burrows deep beneath it.

cash’s version of "hurt," a nine inch nails tune, is merely a stunt: an aged country artist fits his tired, aching feet into stylish doc martens. with cash’s basso profundo crackling through songwriter trent reznor’s fashionable gloom ("i hurt myself today/to see if i could feel") something not exactly trustworthy seems to be going on—perhaps a repudiation of country-western sincerity. the smartness of reznor’s tropes keeps a longtime cash listener at a distance, disbelieving that the man in black has, so late in life, fallen for trenty self-pity. but the music video itself provides a genuine experience.

flashing back through cash’s career, romanek also flashes through our pop lives—cashing-in on our memories or resolving newly created interest in the singer’s past. the "hurt" video operates as a johnny cash cinematheque; a career retrospective that recalls one of those michael jackson history-era montages only this time emphasizing the artist’s personal recoil and regret. it’s mighty unsettling when cash warbles, "you can have it all/my empire of dirt" and romanek then shows us a lifetime’s accumulated trophies — insubstantial tinsel including a framed gold record. as newcomer reznor sang the line, "dirt" was dirt. with cash it’s a heavy summation of the now-meaningless accolades the music industry and his fans have bestowed. the lyric becomes weighted with doubt as if cash suspected he had wasted his life and never communicated what it means to feel to millions of people. that, of course, is ridiculous. just listen to the 1963 "ring of fire." cash, who was always a half-camp figure, occasionally got to the sweet part of hurting that george jones and merle haggard and conway twitty could summon while clearing their throats. distinction came from cash developing a marketable image and it’s our share of that man in black identity that romanek activates.

romanek’s tendency toward art pastiche (best-known from videos for nine inch nails’ "closer" and madonna’s "bedtime story") rarely approaches realism, but this time the texture of real life—the showbiz ups and downs that cash has lived and that have been captured on film through the years—are his subject. here romanek is a combination curator, esthete, mortician and visual eulogist—multitask skills that turn out to be extremely humane. in the midst of the video’s cash memorializing, romanek pulls a heartbreakingly intimate stoke; he shows cash’s wife, singer june carter standing nearby, quaking with concern like someone who has spent a lot of time making sure a loved-one doesn’t stumble. instantaneously, it’s a perfect vision of marriage—companionship—that asserts the truth of cash’s personal good fortune against all the reznor-penned pessimism. soon, there’s an obscure shot of a woman’s portrait in a picture frame that may be one of june’s ancestors from c&w’s fabled carter family (or cash’s own mother). the mystery reverberates, as do the flashbacks of young june resembling her would-be pop-star daughter, the talented carlene carter.

it’s all proof that romanek is such a thorough film archivist that he can’t help coming up with visual evidence of life to contrast the song’s infatuation with death and ruin. (a weird, incidental detail shows cash sitting at a banquet table, pouring wine over the victuals. the wasteful gesture aptly conveys imperial decadence, but it goes against the good sense of the best country-and-western living, preferring to epitomize drunken excess.)

in his current red hot chili peppers video that remakes the pop-art sculpture of erwin wurm, and an audioslave video that’s simply intoxicated with the brilliance of pyrotechnics, romanek has displayed a renewed engagement with the excitement of visual stimuli. altogether, it’s a welcome rebirth, because it was no fun watching romanek in the kubrick laboratory of one hour photo. though this, romanek’s second feature film, was photographically resplendent, it treated the subject of its protagonist’s photomania in bizarre terms. (the robin williams character responded to childhood abuse by photographing and brutalizing an ideal american family—interweaving psychotic and sitcom cliches.) if that was romanek’s attempt at joining the feature film mainstream, i want to tell him that he’s a better artist when he doesn’t doubt his fascination with visual iconography. "hurt" makes you stop and think because romanek is unusually sensitive to the heritage of visual art; he can give tradition new meaning, perplexing meaning.

in "hurt," romanek uses clips from cash’s feature film debut a gunfight, also cutting-in dramatization of a crucifixion—the latter footage is in line with reznor’s s&m proclivities but it simultaneously pays homage to cash’s old-school christian symbology. it’s predictable stuff, yet it coheres in a way that’s far from facile. (romanek’s ideas on regret, suffering and redemption are much more sophisticated—and potent—than the crappy, soulless postmodernism in todd haynes’ far from heaven.) romanek’s use of cash memorabilia as guilty (christian) americana recalls the authenticity of robert frank’s epochal photo book the americans. that means the images in "hurt" are authentic—not faux americana like david fincher’s travesty of robert frank in don henley’s "the end of the innocence" video. romanek allows one to make personal, individual sense of a lifetime of media recording.

at this moment of media changeover, when video is displacing film’s poignancy and majesty, romanek has achieved an irrefutable testament. "hurt" proves that the past century of film—not digital video—has captured the essence of one man’s mortality completely enough to argue against his own three and a half minutes of cynicism. johnny cash may be wrong to peddle his own agita, but romanek provides precious evidence of the man’s life; its impact recorded in the lines of his face like the post-atomic flashes of bodies on walls.

ahhh, film. ahhh, life.

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