Has anyone seen the video for the Arcade Fire song, "The Suburbs"? I was extremely confused by this video the first time I saw it, and then I suddenly figured it out the next day.
Here's the thing. The video is saying: this is what you are doing/have done to Iraq. It all falls into place when you think of it this way, but one thing in particular that I like, which had me scratching my head the most the first time around, was the random big kid kicking the shit out of the boy in the fast food joint at the end -- the boy in the fast food joint represents the average Iraqi, who just wants to work and provide for his family, and the angry bully kid is the violence that has been unleashed in the country by our occupation, i.e. the ransom kidnappings, burglaries and other lawlessness caused by the destabilization of the region. The boy's friends are powerless to help him, and they end up flagging down an army guy for help, like, "Look what you've done to us, now we need you for security."
Other symbols include the bb guns in the beginning, I suppose representing the flimsy justification for occupation, the fact that there was violence there already, or a loose metaphor for WMDs.
Anyway, my friend Dapper Jent seems to agree with me, and he found this blurb somewhere on the internet:
"The music video is composed of excerpts from Jonze's short film, Scenes From The Suburbs, which will debut at the Berlin Film Festival, and has a running time of 30 minutes."
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