A few comments on “Rabbit in your Headlights”

First, watch the video if you haven’t. ;)

I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, and finally got around to write about the music video to “Rabbit in your Headlights” by Unkle. In fact, I discovered it as no.1 music video of all times in Markus Kavka’s list – deservedly so, I think.

Let me say a few words about music videos in general: Basically, I love them. They are the perfect medium for me, combining my passion music and film together – even more, it’s a combination of music and short films. Short stories and short films can be much more powerful than novels or ‘normal’ films to me; if I think about Hemingway, the impact of Kiriko Nananan’s stories on me, the greatness of Faubourg St-Denis from Paris, je t’aime – some very short stories are so much more memorable than long, epic ones. In theory, music videos should be my favourite medium of art, but unfortunately, it isn’t due to practical reasons: MTV keeps showing the same videos over and over again, there is nobody who actually shares my interest for music videos, I just don’t know any good music videos. In the end, I was amazed at the aforementioned and “Rabbit in your Headlights” was quite an eye-opener.

I read Le Kavka’s comment on the video and therefore knew about the powerful ending; I also had high expectations because it was his no.1. In the end, I think that the video succeeded in exceeding my expectations due to four elements: A great song, an intense atmosphere, a perfect fit of the video to the music and finally, a strong meaning and symbolism.

This exceptional meaningfulness of this video because it really surprised me out of the blue. I got a feeling that only I see and interpret this much into this video and nobody else does. Also, I have never seen a music video that was so subtly meaningful but at the same time, the meaning was so obvious to me. Before, I have actually never even seen a music video that had any meaning.

While I was watching the video, I was glued to the screen, fascinating looking at what I saw and immediately put my interpretation into it without even putting to much thought to it. Consequently I felt like I was watching Donnie Darko and this is what I came up with:
The whole story revolves around the life of the protagonist and his perception and attitude towards society. He stands in the middle of the street, an allegory of the society that is, in his eyes, menacing him. The cars are like a river and you are expected to go with the flow and know your place (you are a pedestrian, you have to make place for the cars!) Most people don’t care for this loner and those who care are rejected by him, because he doesn’t want any help from these people. In some respect, he is a little bit like Milan Kundera who feels out of the circle of the communists in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; with the difference that Milan Kundera actually wants to be in, but the protagonist of the video doesn’t. He can be standing for an artist or a genius child that got underestimated, wrongly judged and ultimately destroyed by society – somebody who does not fit into it by his different nature and realises that he cannot, because he despises it. He also is miserable and hateful, and at the same time strong and young (it could be a coming of age thing, I think he reminds me a lot of Melchior from Frühlings Erwachen/Spring Awakening, who is outstandingly smart and finds no solution to the questions he is asking himself, because society forbids him). Taking his clothes off also shows how vulnerable he is by his nakedness, but the display of his muscles shows his strength and his strong will of not giving in to this society. Finally this is what enables him to destroy one of the cars, one of the elements of this despicable society by his bare body, which is a metaphor of the strong will and creative energy of this person; he is like the slave in Kaiji’s E-card game. There is this element in the game that says that only the miserable slave would rebel against the emperor and only the strongest degree of anger and despair enables him to defeat him. But here is even more: Only one outstanding, brilliant, special slave is able to dethrone the emperor and can make a “car” explode.

Does that make any sense? I’m sorry for taking so many examples that I have not clarified. Somehow, I am wondering if there is somebody out in the world who sees the same thing in this particular music video. Hm.

PS. I have not mentioned the notion of the “rabbit”. As I always associate rabbits with innocent beings, it is a hint to the interpretation that the protagonist is innocent and therefore society is wrong. Without the “rabbit” in the lyrics, it could also have been that he is ‘only’ an idiot and miserable despite society’s well-meaning efforts to include him. After all, some people really try to be miserable and blame others for it. I kind of like the dual perspectives of this, so I left the “rabbit” out of my interpretation.