Dying Out of Love
As improbable as it seems, this music video consisting of mostly millennials lying on their beds alone was conceived of entirely pre-quarantine. I know this because I’m in it for a second (at 1:34), and so I know when the mood board and brief were sent out; it was over a year ago. (Covid19 just turned one this month, we think.) The images Petite Meller emailed me and the other people in this video were paintings, editorials, art photos, and cartoons depicting teens in beds and baths or on floors, morbidly bored or paralyzed by sullenness. I filmed my boyfriend and I lip-synching an early version of this lovely song in my old apartment, in a bedroom that was painted pink when I moved in. We sent it to her (in the wrong ratio), and waited.
It was some time after that when she asked me to send another try, and this was still so long ago that I was on an end-of-summer trip, with no knowledge of a coming pandemic. I had gone to Paris for work and from there to Gijón, Spain, to visit Amalia Ulman on the set of her first feature film, El Planeta. I was in a beautiful Spanish hotel room when I filmed myself lip-synching alone, staring out the window at a stunning view of the ocean and terra cotta rooftops. I sent it, and still saw nothing for months. El Planeta is finished now, set to premiere at a festival.
(Petite chose the first video we sent to include in the video anyway. She’s one of those people who are accidentally zeitgeisty, having constructed a look that now feels like an Instagram Stories filter way before that was a thing. It might end up distracting from her brilliance, these coincidences.)
I know the timing of these selfie videos and the timespans between then and now even without looking at the email receipts because I was in Paris again for work after that September trip, in February, when I should not have been traveling—when people were simply not sure what to do and how drastic or reckless our measures would seem in retrospect. This video is finished now. Surreally, it was published deep into our so-called quarantines, and it looks kind of like everything else that is being published now, except prettier.
It’s unfortunate that Dying Out of Love’s making-of cannot be accounted for easily in sharing the final product, because the fact that it was thought up way before we were all on so many video calls and creating podcasts and newsletters from our bedrooms is an interesting example of prescience, not psychic prediction. We were all already behaving this way, because of everything else going on, we should all remember. Zoom and OnlyFans were not created in response to the pandemic. As Dean Kissick writes in his column The Downward Spiral this month,
In a sense [the conspiracy about a 5G network causing Covid19 is] wrong because 5G has no proven adverse effects on our health. But on a higher level it’s true, because networked society is melting, or providing us with a conduit to melt, our minds like an ice cream cone dropped on the sidewalk. It’s dumb that people believe that 5G caused the pandemic, that they’re burning down mobile phone masts like wicker men in the Highlands, but they only believe this because of a networked hysterical conspiracy that runs on all our phones on 5G. It’s a post-rationalising prophecy that reveals a greater truth.
Personally, the pandemic has made me feel sick from over-saturation, and so I quit my social media accounts. But of course now I’m replacing those mouthpieces with this one, and worse, I’ll give it a monetary value. I’ve sold out in more ways than one already, but it’s still an inner-negotiation. One thing that worries me is working without an editor, just putting that out there. I would tell you what ideas I have for this newsletter, but I never stick to anything I tell myself, only to what others ask of me.