"Queen of Hearts" by Scott Cudmore for Fucked Up

"David Comes to Life" is that rare thing, a concept hardcore album. A narrative is carried by 18 individual songs over four acts. The first half tells the love story of David and Veronica, while the second half scopes out to a metanarrative in which these individuals are only characters. Fucked Up are not your typical hardcore band on the musical front either, blending harmonic pop sensibilities with the shouted vocals typical of the genre.

The video for the single "Queen of Hearts" is shot in a wide aspect with filmic continuity signalled from the beginning. Two establishing shots set the scene as the interior of a classroom, with a distant building on fire outside. This relates to the factory bombing that is a plot point of the album. As if this wasn't unnerving enough, there is an extended silence before the teacher, in a detached but pretentious tone, tells us that "this is before the war actually started, remember?" This is the second premonition of unease.

The music is at first diegetic, issuing from a tinny boom-box. As the children start singing, the sound swells to its full dynamics, a transition to what might (in a simpler video) be nondiegetic. But in this case the tension between the two is unresolved. The version of the song we hear in the video was actually sung by these children, whereas the album/single version was sung by the band's vocalists Damian Abraham and Madeline Follin. What we see in the video is not what we hear from the music in that other context.

It's important to establish that the anger inherent in hardcore music is normalised by the traditions of that genre. We expect a male hardcore singer to growl and spit out the lyrics. The anger is not taken at face value but is part of the role of such a singer, who stands in for the listener, channelling their frustrations. An empathetic music video would show a band in a live context, at one with their audience. Musicians and audience mix in the mosh pit, there being no traditional staging of band as "special" in relation to their listeners. All are part of the same community, a safe place where violence can be rehearsed without punishment. In these sorts of situations, typical of a Fucked Up concert, the emotions on display mirror those in the music.

But the video for "Queen of Hearts" forces us to watch a group of boys yelling and gesticulating at girls, who must passively accept this violence for an extended period. Even when it is their turn to sing, the girls do so with a sweetness, lacking the grimacing and fierce visages of their counterparts. There is no parity here. The negative energies are directed by the males to the females, the very picture of abuse. It is hard not to be disturbed by this image, which exposes the repetition of unresolved violence inherent in the genre. It undoes the usual contract between band and audience, which guarantees that the listener will be on the safe "inside", at one with the band. Here there is no band. We are on the outside, subject to faces at times framed so they are yelling directly at us, the audience. In terms of the usual contract between band and listener, this video is hence anempathetic. But it can also be read as empathetic, since it represents violence directly, without the mediating screen of "performance" we get when we have paid to see a band. A complex interplay of modes is at work.

The classic film aesthetics, desaturated almost to the point of being monochromatic, is conspicuously indifferent to the aesthetics of the music itself. This incoherence between the mood of the music and that of the visuals is also anempathetic.

At 4:53 we get a distinct change in the narrative, as the teacher seems to shake herself out of some sort of reverie. The students are no longer singing. So was it all in her mind? Hardly, because they still carry the lyrics sheets. Besides, we heard them singing on this alternative version of the song. So what is going on with the teacher is unclear. We now get an extended sequence over the instrumental denouement. The "crew" (are they really?) go about their business and the teacher/actor is congratulated on a job well done. The camera dollies outside and does an 180 degree vertical sweep of the sky to once again frame the fire in the distance. This movement, which we have seen no hint of until this point, implies a change in our frame of reference, even though a cut at the opening of the film established the outside view as the teacher's point-of-view. She is definitely the key to this mystery, the instigator of this cover version, egging on the students to reveal the true violence all too often sugar-coated and accepted.

The video for "Queen of Hearts" hints at the meta-narratives of the album "David Comes to Life", while telling a different story entirely. It's a remarkable achievement. But I'm surprised the band didn't simply call it quits in the aftermath. Once the bubble is burst, there's no going back to fantasy land. This was before the war actually started, but now the war is here.