Music Video Textual Analysis: 30 Seconds to Mars

The Kill, 30 Seconds to Mars (2007)

The music video for The Kill, from American rock band 30 Second to Mars, enjoyed widespread popularity and became a YouTube hit. The band was awarded with an MTV2 VMA for best music video for the song.

Intertextuality runs firmly through the video as the narrative is largely based up the film The Shining, Stanley Kubrick (1980). Many scenes are directly sourced from the film, including a man dressed as a bear performing a sexual act and the woman in the shower. This will helps give viewers a sense of familiarity with the music video, even if they have never seen it before, assuming they have seen The Shining albeit.

Cinematography at the start of the music video helps to emphasis the expanse of the hotel with wide and long shots. Imparticular, the tracking shot of the guy on the skateboard helps give a sense of foreboding to the long corridors. Performance scenes of the band often use low angle shots, giving the band a sense of importance and separate them form the narrative within the music video. The lead singer Jared Leto, however, is often shot with high angled shots, making him look more susceptible and weak. In my opinion this helps reflect the nature of the song, of someone being troubled and victimised.

The title 'The Kill' appears at the start of the music video, giving it the feel of a feature film. Scenes are often cut and jumped forward, for example at at 1.15 the Leto progressively makes his way towards the table in jumpy cuts and the same is repeated again later in the corridor. This helps add confusion to what he is doing, what is he trying to find? Towards the end of the film, scenes are edited into a split screen. The use of this editing technique further supports the idea of split personalities, as well as giving the hotel guests an eerie and supernatural feel.

The film is structured mainly as a narrative but with performance scenes throughout. The performance scenes are in itself a genre characteristic of rock music videos. Other features that are typical of the genre are alcohol, women and sex. However, these are not shown to excess in a conventional rock style way, and many scenes like the ballroom are not typical of rock videos at all. Close-up's of the band represent them as more alternative rock, as there make-up and hair is styled quite gothic. This fits in with the image of the band outside of the music video as they don't aim to be mainstream. I believe the intended audience for the music video is the 15-30 age bracket. The older portion of the audience will enjoy the bands exophoric reference to The Shining.