Sunday, February 14, 2010

Land Of Confusion

To watch video see site below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oepXF2B5NK4

In 1986 the band Genesis released their album Invisible Touch, which included the hit single "Land Of Confusion." For the music video to this song the band recruited Spitting Image; a British satirical puppet show. The name of the show is a word play on the phrase, but intended as an insult. Their Puppets were very detailed grotesque caricatures of celebrities and politicians of the time. The shows most popular character/caricature was U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who plays a significant part in the Genesis video; the video presented as his nightmare.
Puppets are always creepy.
This video contains more caricatures then I can count, so I'll just focus on a few. The band is caricatured by over-exaggerating their facial features, and their mostly kept aside from the rest of the video except for a parody of another music video; which was the all-star recording of the charity single "We are the World."
Heavily feature in the video are the Reagan family; Ronald, his wife Nancy, and for reasons I can't explain a Gorilla. Reagan is always shown as acting somewhat senile, confused, or absent minded. throughout the video he is drowning in a pool of his own sweat as a result of his nightmare. He dresses up as a cowboy, which reference his past film career and what was viewed by many to be his "Political Cowboy Attitude." He is also shown dressed up as Superman, a play on the "here he comes to save the day" or "heroic" perspective people had towards him, which came from political victories from on his foreign policy. An interesting touch is a sequence which depicts him as "Living in the Stone Age," which was a point made by his critics from his "back to basics" policy and slogans. At the end of the video he wakes up from his nightmare and attempts to call the nurse, but accidentally hits the wrong button and launches nuclear weapons, to which he replies, "Wow, that's some nurse."
One of my personal favorite caricature in the video is Leonard Nimoy as Spock trying and failing to solve a Rubik's Cube. Here is an incomplete list of people caricatured in the video:
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