Desiring and Being Desired: Colonizing the “Other” in Duran Duran Music Videos

It’s been an unusually busy week with my freelance work and volunteering, and miraculously, I have a job interview tomorrow that I wanted to prepare for. So, I’ve decided to look back, way back, into my academic past and pull out this essay from my Representations in Visual Rhetoric class. I was 22 when I wrote it, so it’s not exactly my best work to date, but it is music-related, and I think it’s still interesting from a visual rhetoric standpoint. And it proves you can work pretty much anything into an A+ academic paper. It’s all about the reaching.

Despite resisting any impulse for dramatic revisions, I’ve taken out any citation references because they’re not really necessary in a blog post. And if it gets too pedantic and boring, skip to the bottom and get some Duran Duran songs.

 

Being Desired: Colonizing the “Other” in Duran Duran Music Videos

When Music Television (MTV) debuted in 1981, it was a revolutionary concept that married advertising and music in a 24-hour format; before MTV, music videos were largely taped live performances broadcast on late-night television shows. By making music into a fundamentally visual experience, the advent of music video created a medium that primarily appealed to pathos in creating pleasurable images that were intended to generate desire for the music as a product and/or the objects in the videos. Music videos also manufactured specific realities in which certain beliefs operated, which were then naturalized. One such reality was one of white dominance; when MTV was in its first ten years of operation, it replicated an FM radio’s white rock focus, largely excluding other races. Within this format of the early 1980’s, Duran Duran, a young, New Wave band from Britain, could garner success greatly built on visual images.

Duran Duran, consisting of members Simon LeBon, John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Andy Taylor and Roger Taylor, formed in 1980, and by 1981, they were hugely popular in their native Britain. After recording their sophomore album, entitled Rio in 1982, Duran Duran attempted to duplicate their popularity in Britain in the USA; however, their album did not initially sell well. Notably, when they decided to use the music video format for each of the singles released from Rio, and soon after these music videos aired on MTV, the album increased its sales in the USA. Arguably, the music videos persuaded their audience to desire Duran Duran’s music, and in doing so, served a promotional purpose; however, through these visual pieces, Duran Duran also became pioneers in the music video field. Duran Duran were among the first bands to shoot their music videos on 35mm film rather than on video tape; they were also one of the first bands to shoot videos in exotic locations, to create mini-narratives, and to use quickly-edited clips of surreal images. In revolutionizing the music video medium, Duran Duran also produced a certain reality with an accompanying set of beliefs. By analyzing the visual rhetoric present in the three major music videos from the Rio album, I will argue that while the videos are meant to persuade desire for the band and its music, they create a British colonial reality in which the racial “other” is objectified, depicted as subhuman, and subjugated. These colonial “subjects” and their environment are also often portrayed as corrupting influences. Though these videos manufacture a colonial reality, conflicts arise because the medium of music video is promotional; ultimately, Duran Duran become both the agents and objects of the gaze. Though the linguistic content of song lyrics inevitably anchors visuals and can affect interpretation, I will focus primarily on the rich visual content of the videos for “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Rio,” and “Save a Prayer,” which were all directed by Russell Mulcahy.

The choices of setting – Sri Lanka and Antigua – for these three videos, while often visually pleasurable in their lushness and exoticism, seem to point to colonialism. Both Sri Lanka and Antigua were British colonies for a lengthy time, only gaining their independence in the 20th century. Duran Duran’s nationality as British reinforces their dominance over these settings. Also, the choice of using a woman as the primary “other” implies the colonial ideology in that the uncolonized frontier always appeared as a fertile female figure; and the female also often represents the inferior half of a gender binary.

“Hungry Like the Wolf,” shot on location in Sri Lanka in 1982, tells the mini-narrative of Simon LeBon’s encounter with a native woman of Sri Lanka and the remaining band members’ search for him. The contrast between Duran Duran and this exotic environment becomes highly visually apparent; shots of the natives and the surroundings appear impoverished, primitive, and dirty while the members of the band appear clean, affluent and colourful, increasing Duran Duran’s salience, thus dominance, in each frame. For example, the video opens with a series of quick cuts, including semi-naked natives walking in crowds and an elderly beggar woman sitting in the street; all of these people look dusty and are dressed in muted colours of beiges and browns, blending in with the buildings and streets. Then the first shot of the band members is one in which the camera is shooting from above the street scene and behind the band members; they stand apart in their blindingly white shirts and jackets and Nick Rhodes’s bright pink pants. The perspective of this shot also allows for a sense of domination over the scene, which becomes associated with the band members. Immediately following this shot are ones showing John and Roger Taylor running toward the camera through the crowds; again, they are contrasted with their surroundings through their bright white clothing and John Taylor’s exposed white chest. This type of contrast makes Duran Duran far more salient than the other components of the scene. While most of the scenes of the street and markets appear primitive with their carts, Duran Duran rides in a jeep, signifying increased affluence and technology. The similar dress and hair styles, along with their race, seem to make Duran Duran a cohesive entity in the video, synecdoche that implies that they belong with each other but not with the other people in the video.

As already mentioned, perspective is used to present Duran Duran as dominant, and along with placement, it reinforces the band’s presence and the colonial theme. There are numerous close shots of LeBon’s face and there are several shots of the other band members kissing unidentifiable women. These types of perspectives and placements highlight the band’s dominance and keep the “other” in the periphery. There is a scene in which a young native boy revives LeBon by squeezing water from a rag into his mouth. In the scene, the boy is in a highly salient position in the upper right portion of the frame and he is also above a prostrate LeBon, implying the boy’s current power over LeBon; however, the camera soon zooms in on LeBon’s face, literally pushing the boy to the margins. Once the boy’s purpose is served – the enabling of LeBon to continue – he is discarded. This scene is similar to an earlier scene in which the camera starts with a close shot of an elephant, but than ultimately pans up to LeBon, who occupies a higher, more dominant, position in the scene. The elephant, perceived as subhuman, is squeezed out of the frame once it has been used for its exotic appeal. There are also shots that are filmed from a camera angle below LeBon as he looks up and around, making him appear more dominant.

The audience’s perspective also often switches between Duran Duran’s perspective and the “other’s” perspective, which complicates the visual message being communicated. The scenes in which the audience sees through LeBon’s eyes and the other members’ eyes makes the audience co-colonizers; the audience catches glimpses of the chased “other” and becomes just as frustrated as LeBon seems to be, and the audience wants to pin the “other’s” identity down and thus dominate her. Conversely, there are perspectives in which LeBon makes direct eye contact with the audience as he strides toward the camera, which makes the audience the object of his dominance and his demand. There are also scenes in which it is not clear whether the audience is seeing from LeBon’s perspective or the “other”; for example, the scene in which the camera follows LeBon as he runs through the jungle. The camera bumps and jars the viewer as through the viewer is also running, but it is not clear whether the audience is supposed to be running with or after LeBon. This conflict in message seems to be related to the promotional nature of the medium; though it constructs a reality in which the object of the audience’s gaze is the “other,” it also constructs a reality in which the object of the gaze and desire is Duran Duran and where the audience wants to be desired by Duran Duran. I will discuss this further later in the essay.

The representation of the native woman in this video is notable in how she is compared with other things. Firstly, she seems to be associated with the little native girl that dominates the entire first frame of the video, and whose laugh corresponds to the audio track. The little girl and the native woman become related in that they are both depicted as running out of the frame as if leading a chase. In this association, a colonial ideology emerges; a common relation between the colonized “other” and children since both are perceived as uncivilized and primitive. Because it seems both the native woman and the little girl are leading a chase, they become associated with prey, and in combination with LeBon’s wild pursuance of the woman, the native “other” also become animalistic. This animalistic trope is reinforced by the juxtaposition of extreme close-ups of the woman’s eyes dissolving into the eyes of a leopard. Animals, along with children and the colonized “other,” are also associated with savagery and inferiority. As the woman moves into a jungle environment, she acquires painted markings on her face and body, an indication of either primitive ritualism or the markings of an animal, and the woman’s unhuman movements – her head often moves like a startled bird or deer and she often opens her mouth as if roaring – further identifies the woman as bestial.
The native woman receives far less screen time than Duran Duran does, and when she does appear, she only appears fleetingly, slipping quickly in and out of the frame. Her first appearance in the video is somewhere in the street; her head tilts back and slips down and out of the frame, exiting by moving from the ideal portion of the frame into the least salient portion. The scene is so quick it is almost subliminal. This scene also contrasts with a later one in which LeBon’s head rises slowly upward into the frame from underwater, which implies a dominating of the frame. In addition to the shots in which the woman’s head slips in and out of the frame, there is a series of spliced shots of the woman running through the trees where only pieces of her are seen through the foliage.

This viewing of selective pieces of the woman becomes even more apparent in the metonymy of the scenes where her hand is featured. There are two scenes in which the woman’s hand is foregrounded and salient, and it is also decontextualized from her body. The first scene shows her hand curling over the trunk of a tree in a possessive manner. Her nails are painted red, which increases the hand’s salience even further. This scene is followed by a transition that looks like savage rips across the screen, which makes a connection between the woman’s hand and a claw, a motif that reappears later in the video when a scratch appears on LeBon’s face. The second time the woman’s hand appears, it follows the scene in which LeBon is wading through the river; her hand slides into the right side of the frame, again part of the jungle environment. This metonymy reduces the identity of the woman into a part that can be reified and then fetishized. There is a similar scene of fetishization in which the frame is taken up solely by the torsos of women. These torsos, like the woman’s hand, are supposed to stand in for the whole, but in doing so, they imply that the women are objects to be gazed at in an act of sexual desire. This gaze is further established in the semi-nakedness of the woman, the savage “other.” The woman rarely looks directly at the camera like LeBon does; instead she appears to be looking past the camera, perhaps at LeBon, so she does not make demands of her own and becomes an object. The fact that LeBon appears to be obsessed with chasing the woman already fetishizes her as an object to be gazed at and then possessed.

LeBon’s apparent obsession with hunting the woman again points to a colonial ideology, specifically the belief that the wildness of an uncolonized land and its people can change a British person who stays there too long. This fear of becoming the inferior, savage “other” stems from the fear of losing control and dominance. As the music video progresses, LeBon appears to become “infected” with the savagery of the “other.” It is implied by his encounter with the native woman and the subsequent chase that the woman has made him irrational and wild with desire. The scene in which the camera pans from the elephant up to LeBon exposes the detail of the sweat and dirt on LeBon’s face. These details appear to indicate a contrast with LeBon’s initial clean condition, the condition of the band as whole. After the quick sequence of shots documenting LeBon and the woman running through the jungle, there are two shots that appear to come earlier in the narrative because both LeBon and the woman are in a restaurant and neither look dishevelled. These contrasting shots also make the change in LeBon that much more salient, and the turning of his head corresponds with the next shot of the woman turning her head, implying the first eye contact with her. Immediately following these shots, the audience is transported back to the jungle where LeBon’s face is now painted, indicating his devolution to the animalistic.

The climax of LeBon and the woman’s encounter in the jungle is an extreme close up of both of their faces as they open their mouths at each other and the shot freezes for a moment. By ceasing movement for a few seconds, this particular scene has more salience; it is also repeated later in the video, increasing its presence further. This scene positions LeBon slightly higher than the woman, a more dominant position for the ensuing battle between them. The scene quickly changes to a close up of LeBon’s head being thrown backward, revealing three parallel scratch marks on his neck that look like they have been made by an animal’s claw. Without visually showing the woman’s act of scratching him, it can be inferred that she did it and the scratches become an index of her. By not showing her actually injure him, her act of aggressive dominance becomes invisible and less powerful. The scene continues with LeBon and the woman crawling on their hands and knees – the posture of an animal – and wrestling with each other. LeBon is at first overthrown, his ripped shirt exposed as he comes down, but the next shot is a repeat of an earlier scene in which LeBon overturned a table in the restaurant. When the camera comes back to the wrestling scene, the woman is on her back below LeBon; this juxtaposition of scenes seems to be associating the woman with the table, once again turning the woman into an inanimate object that can be dominated through force.
The transtextuality of this video’s association with the film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark further reinforces the theme of conquering and controlling nature and foreign lands.

In watching “Rio,” the music video for the album’s title track, a pattern congruent with “Hungry Like the Wolf” becomes apparent. Shot in Antigua later in 1982, “Rio’s” mini-narrative is less straightforward than “Hungry Like the Wolf,” but it still involves a female racial “other” becoming objectified and made subhuman. Like “Hungry Like the Wolf,” this video has one main female who is being pursued by Duran Duran. Duran Duran members are once again represented as affluent as they lounge on the beach and a yacht; the “othered” woman is seen on a rickety raft, a raft that is later dominated by Nick Rhodes as he plays saxophone on it. Dominating aerial shots of perspective and shots from beneath LeBon once again demonstrate the authority of the band over the “other.”

The video begins with metonymy and construction of a colonizing gaze. The first shot features a black screen with a circle in the upper left focused on the woman’s mouth. As this circle fades away, a new one appears in the middle of the screen with just the woman’s eyes. Lastly, a circle appears on the right with her entire face as she tilts her head backward with an open mouth, an action much like the one performed by the woman in “Hungry Like the Wolf.” The next shot creates the sensation of binoculars by using two circles to view the woman in the distance; immediately following this scene is one featuring the woman – scantily clad – lying with her back towards the audience; John Taylor is foregrounded taking her photo, and the audience soon sees what he sees through his viewfinder as he zooms in on her buttocks. These reductions of the woman into parts, that can be contained in frames and stared at, make the woman into an object to be controlled and fetishized.

The foot and ankle of the woman is foregrounded several times, including one scene in which it is painted with bright pink spots; a colourfully-painted arm is seen controlling the helm of the yacht; and a painted hand “crawls” into the frame and across the deck of the yacht. These body parts become representative of the “other.” One shot of hands pulling the rigging of the yacht features a bright red flower attached to the rope; the flower is highly salient because of its colour and defamiliarized setting, and it becomes metonymic, standing in for the woman. At the end of a black and white fantasy sequence in which John Taylor sees himself as a commando-type character storming the beach, an unidentified woman is laying in the foreground with a margarita on her back. The woman appears to be a tray, an inanimate, passive object of service, much like the association of the woman in “Hungry Like the Wolf” with a table.

Like the woman in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” the woman in “Rio” is represented as animalistic. She is often nearly naked and painted in vivid colours, much like a parrot. When she is painted like this, she behaves differently than when she is clothed and unpainted. When painted she walks hunched forward and on tiptoes, like the posture of a bird, and seems to skulk around the yacht attempting to see while not being seen herself. The audience sees her legs in the background out the cabin window while Rhodes is foregrounded; he looks up to see the woman’ face briefly in the window, but she remains elusive. It seems that the only time at which the woman can assert any power is as an animal-like being; there are shots with the painted woman staring directly at the camera, the most notable one coming near the end of the video where she looks directly into the camera and winks while Duran Duran do not appear to see her at all. If the woman only has power when she is animalistic and/or unseen, the implication seems to be that the woman can only maintain power if she is passive and already perceived as subhuman. The woman in “Hungry Like the Wolf” was also only able to assert power over LeBon when she was in an animalistic state and unseen when scratching him.

There are also several scenes of the woman standing on the yacht wearing streaming, blue clothes with blue markings painted on her face and body. The way that she stands with her arms outstretched and at the edge of the yacht makes her look like a figurehead, an object reminiscent of old colonial ships. Sometimes the sun comes from behind her, obscuring her face and identity; she becomes merely ornamentation.

The framing in “Rio” is notable in its intensifying and containing effect. There is one shot of two unidentifiable painted women who share directional substance with each other and the black bars that come down to frame them. The women are leaning back on their arms and they arch in synchronicity as coloured water is poured on them, creating a strong diagonal. By sharing directional substance with the framing device, they are wholly contained, thus controlled, by the frame. Just as the women are constrained by framing, they are also often contained by being a reflection. In one close-up, Nick Rhodes is wearing mirrored sunglasses that reflect the woman, containing her in the lenses. A second scene features a compact mirror featuring John Taylor and Nick Rhodes in each of the mirrors, but one mirror then tips away, revealing the woman’s face; however, because members of Duran Duran are also contained by these mirrors, the message becomes conflicted as in the first video’s alternating perspectives.

As I mentioned earlier in discussing “Hungry Like the Wolf,” I will argue that this conflict arises because of the promotional nature of the music video as a medium. As much as Duran Duran gaze at and dominate the “other” in “Rio,” they themselves become an object of the audience’s gaze – the audience arguably being Duran Duran’s target market, who are urged to sexually desire the band. With their colourful, stylized clothing and often vibrantly coloured hair and made-up faces, Duran Duran are highly salient and visually pleasurable, and they are also highly feminized in appearance. This androgynous image blurs the lines of a male/female binary, thus of a colonizer/colonized binary as well. This blurring of oppositional categories can be defined as Goodwin’s “both/and” relationship in which certain contradictions are deflected or condensed into a dream-like site. In “Rio,” the members of Duran Duran are often scantily clad, and in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” John Taylor often bared his chest; this exposure generates a gaze from the audience and perhaps desire, which would incite them to purchase Duran Duran’s album. In “Rio,” various band members are also shown to be knocked down by female “others,” and in one scene, even dragged away in a net as prey. This pattern of conflict is once again apparent in “Save a Prayer,” but because it does not have a female “other” as the object of colonization, it does not follow the same pattern of the first two videos as closely.

While “Save a Prayer” is perhaps the most different of the three videos, it still follows elements of the pattern and themes set up in the first two videos. This video, like “Hungry Like the Wolf,” was shot in Sri Lanka. Its narrative appears to be comprised of scenes of Duran Duran wandering around Sri Lanka and viewing ancient sites spliced with scenes of the natives and LeBon’s apparent lost romance. Like “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio,” perspectives often connote domination; there are several sweeping aerial shots over the landscape and ruins of ancient temples; these shots also often reveal members of Duran Duran standing on top of the pyramid structures, salient because of their bright white clothing. By showing them on top of these structures, the video implies their authority over the land and its people. Further evidence of this supremacy is in positioning within the frame. There is one scene in which the camera pans from a prostrate stone figure from the country’s culture to the band members standing in the foreground. Their foreground and vertical position contrasts with the horizontal statue and makes Duran Duran more salient, thus more powerful in the frame.

In addition to perspective and positioning, there is also juxtaposition of scenes of the natives and the band members, which creates the sense that the natives are far more primitive and ritualistic while Duran Duran are more advanced and civilized. There is a series of scenes near the end of the video in which the camera switches back and forth between night time scenes of the natives performing rituals by a reddish light and scenes of Duran Duran standing between ruined pillars in daylight. The darkness of the native scenes seems to connote a premodern, unenlightened mood while the Duran Duran scenes are bright and open as though superstition could not hide there.

Though there is not a woman to be an animalistic “other” in this video, there is a juxtaposition of scenes: one features a little native boy playing and splashing in the ocean and one immediately following features an elephant splashing in the water in much the same way. Both of the subjects in the scenes share directional substance indicating their similarity. By juxtaposing these scenes in this way, the “other” once again becomes animalistic. The scene in which the elephant sprays itself also points to the “both/and” conflict stated before; in this scene, members of the band are semi-naked playing in the water as well. In doing this, Duran Duran become objects of the gaze and in their semi-nudity, parallel the “other,” especially the female “other” featured in the first two videos. While Duran Duran’s position appears to be oppositional, the two opposing facets of their identity exist simultaneously; they are both passive objects of desire and active subjects of domination. I would argue that this “both/and” relationship appears in these videos because of its association with the fantasy space of advertising. In these videos, the audience can concurrently reconcile desire for the objectified other and for the members of the band.

Duran Duran’s pioneering of music video led to more salience than previous videos in the vividness of their narratives and the verisimilitude of 35mm film. All three videos from Duran Duran’s Rio album create a British colonial reality in which the “other” is objectified and subjugated through metonymic reduction, perspective and positioning. Duran Duran’s dominance and salience in the videos demonstrates their power to control and colonize the “other”; however, their salience also places them in the position of the objectified. Because of the promotional nature of the music video medium, this “both/and” relationship can exist. If one was to examine the lyrics in conjunction with the visuals of these videos, the lyrics could become the caption that both complements and complicates the visual; this aspect of the videos warrants further investigation.

Rio – Duran Duran

Khanada – Duran Duran