As Per Tradition, B.A.P's First of the Year is PHENOMENAL:
Absolutely fantastic! This MV is a wild ride of deep psychology. The imagery we get, right from the beginning is spectacular. The barren wasteland, the dreamlike color desaturation, the exhausted runner . . . all classic representations of a strung-out lover chasing after a lost dream. It's especially catching when combined with the dollhouse imagery and the mirrors & glass and the film vs reality depictions. It's incredibly hard to tell what is a flashback and what is a fantasy in this MV and that's what makes it truly special: I'm fairly certain that the relationship being mourned as love lost never really happened.
Think about it. The barren wasteland is our first image, and it's followed up quickly by the dollhouse (classic metaphor of a fantasy perfect-life). Then we see the boys inside the house, but again note that it's only after the dollhouse image. As put in terms of Sherlock references, this is most likely a psychological organizing system fandom knows as a 'mind-palace'. It's pieces of memory sewn together to create a semi-physical space, in this case a dollhouse that manipulates the real memories into a romance that never happened. The photos and film bits are all real memories, brought in from the outside, but the fuzzy flashbacks (like the carousel scene) are all fabrications. The use of specific colors and saturation levels gives the whole MV a very dream-like quality while still managing to delineate between scenes and compartments of reality perfectly. The mirrors and glass are prismatic reflections of the self, the girl shown there is only the notion of her as it exists within the Self of the narrator.
Having defined himself through his relationship with this girl, the narrator is completely unable to function without her. She might not have even dumped him, or realized that he liked her at all. And yet his obsessive fiction of his involvement in her live has led to a reality that can't carry on without her presence (we're talking less kid with an imaginary friend and more like a Schizoid social-cognitive disruption resulting in a detailed paracosm). My headcanon is that the girl is from a higher grade level, who tutored him regularly, and just graduated without him, moving on with her life, and he's having a psychotic break in lieu of her presence.
It's really a fascinating look at the psychological process of grief and paracosmic fictions. He goes from longing to be with her again, blaming himself for her absence and wishing he could have been better to make her stay, to blaming her for deceiving him. During this section, we see the hourglass for the first time; indicating that a deadline had been put on the relationship from the very beginning. He blames her for his inability to move on, recognizing that this cyclical obsession is in fact a problem that needs to be addressed. And in killing the Self of mirrors (and the self IN the mirrors of the dollhouse), he's breaking out of this obsessive fiction. Now, it's hard to tell if he successfully moves on, but I'd guess that the cricket sounds in the end are an indication that he's lived through killing his unconscious and has perhaps woken up in the middle of the night and this whole encounter has been one long, revelation-in-a-dream and now he can move on properly. The last we see of the hour glass has a little bit of sand left in it, so maybe he gets to see her off properly and mourn her stepping out of his life in a healthy manner? It's all speculation from the moment Himchan pulls the trigger.
It follows the pattern for One Shot almost exactly (discounting One Shot's alternate ending). This MV is a deeply emotional experience, rooted in psychology, and ending with a death. Like One Shot's MV, there's an emotional reversal on the bridge, triggered quite successfully by the slide into a different track off the album (for One Shot it was Coma and for 1004 (Angel) the bridge brings in part of Save Me as the emotional-turn trigger). The choreography is kickin' and contributes well to the story, being blocky and rough and very visceral, in close contact with the earth and physicality; and most importantly full of fantasy elements (air-guitar and mirror-motions and such). The song itself is pretty fantastic on it's own; the beautiful slide of the acoustic (and the grunge-y reverb on the footsteps) into electric guitar, the elegant leaps from melody to rap and the tension of being halfway in-between. It moves well and evolves and is all around a lovely piece of work.
The only drawback whatsoever is that there's no fully active story line. If we take it as an series of events occurring in a dream that he wakes up from (purely speculation) then it has some active plot, and certainly I'll not be one to undervalue the idea of having an active plot take place entirely in the narrator's mind (as the thoughts and thought-patterns do shift and evolve), but it's still not quite enough to be a fully fleshed plotline.
Think about it. The barren wasteland is our first image, and it's followed up quickly by the dollhouse (classic metaphor of a fantasy perfect-life). Then we see the boys inside the house, but again note that it's only after the dollhouse image. As put in terms of Sherlock references, this is most likely a psychological organizing system fandom knows as a 'mind-palace'. It's pieces of memory sewn together to create a semi-physical space, in this case a dollhouse that manipulates the real memories into a romance that never happened. The photos and film bits are all real memories, brought in from the outside, but the fuzzy flashbacks (like the carousel scene) are all fabrications. The use of specific colors and saturation levels gives the whole MV a very dream-like quality while still managing to delineate between scenes and compartments of reality perfectly. The mirrors and glass are prismatic reflections of the self, the girl shown there is only the notion of her as it exists within the Self of the narrator.
Having defined himself through his relationship with this girl, the narrator is completely unable to function without her. She might not have even dumped him, or realized that he liked her at all. And yet his obsessive fiction of his involvement in her live has led to a reality that can't carry on without her presence (we're talking less kid with an imaginary friend and more like a Schizoid social-cognitive disruption resulting in a detailed paracosm). My headcanon is that the girl is from a higher grade level, who tutored him regularly, and just graduated without him, moving on with her life, and he's having a psychotic break in lieu of her presence.
It's really a fascinating look at the psychological process of grief and paracosmic fictions. He goes from longing to be with her again, blaming himself for her absence and wishing he could have been better to make her stay, to blaming her for deceiving him. During this section, we see the hourglass for the first time; indicating that a deadline had been put on the relationship from the very beginning. He blames her for his inability to move on, recognizing that this cyclical obsession is in fact a problem that needs to be addressed. And in killing the Self of mirrors (and the self IN the mirrors of the dollhouse), he's breaking out of this obsessive fiction. Now, it's hard to tell if he successfully moves on, but I'd guess that the cricket sounds in the end are an indication that he's lived through killing his unconscious and has perhaps woken up in the middle of the night and this whole encounter has been one long, revelation-in-a-dream and now he can move on properly. The last we see of the hour glass has a little bit of sand left in it, so maybe he gets to see her off properly and mourn her stepping out of his life in a healthy manner? It's all speculation from the moment Himchan pulls the trigger.
It follows the pattern for One Shot almost exactly (discounting One Shot's alternate ending). This MV is a deeply emotional experience, rooted in psychology, and ending with a death. Like One Shot's MV, there's an emotional reversal on the bridge, triggered quite successfully by the slide into a different track off the album (for One Shot it was Coma and for 1004 (Angel) the bridge brings in part of Save Me as the emotional-turn trigger). The choreography is kickin' and contributes well to the story, being blocky and rough and very visceral, in close contact with the earth and physicality; and most importantly full of fantasy elements (air-guitar and mirror-motions and such). The song itself is pretty fantastic on it's own; the beautiful slide of the acoustic (and the grunge-y reverb on the footsteps) into electric guitar, the elegant leaps from melody to rap and the tension of being halfway in-between. It moves well and evolves and is all around a lovely piece of work.
The only drawback whatsoever is that there's no fully active story line. If we take it as an series of events occurring in a dream that he wakes up from (purely speculation) then it has some active plot, and certainly I'll not be one to undervalue the idea of having an active plot take place entirely in the narrator's mind (as the thoughts and thought-patterns do shift and evolve), but it's still not quite enough to be a fully fleshed plotline.
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