Blog 2 Redux: Nine Inch Nails' "A Perfect Drug"

Mark Romanek- "The Perfect Drug"- 1997
Album: soundtrack for Lynch's "Lost Highway"



Mark Romanek’s music video for “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails contains a vague narrative, but atmosphere and emotion figure more prominently than plot in this gothic work. It is a montage of neo-romantic characters, landscapes and objects that are combined in an expressive way. The shots can be put into two different categories, split by the dominant color and feeling. One collection is mostly blue, and slow enough for the viewer to notice the surreal and at times pensive variety of actions and characters. These shots are mostly sorrowful.

The second collection is green, and the shots seem almost too fast for a viewer to consciously follow. This collection makes up a sequence that starts at 2:33, and it is why I chose this video to analyze. It represents an absinthe trip. It is only made possible by the uniformity of all the shots: they are all brief, and they are all shot in a special way or put through a filter to make them high-contrast and to replace any highlight values with bright green (instead of the normal white) and all the shadow values with black. These quick shots are made more chaotic by frequent flashes of video black in the middle of the brief cuts, which gives a strong strobe-light-like effect. In fact, it almost seems as though more screen time is taken up by black flashes than by images of characters in this sequence.

Drug trips can be portrayed in many ways, and it seems odd to present an absinthe trip in such a frenetic manner (absinthe is more of a depressant than a stimulant, since it’s mostly composed of alcohol.) These shots are edited in this way because this work is in the genre of a music video, and this genre demands the visuals to be strictly tied to the changing dynamics of the song. The complex, high-energy drum solo accompanying the visuals is undoubtedly the reason the edits are so fast. The staccato drums’ prominence in these measures requires that the accompanying edits follow their hyper rhythm until 2:59, the end of the sequence, and the introduction of a softer percussive sound that leads to more melody and vocals. Emotionally, the quickness of the shots, combined with the ferocity of the drums and the rage of the overlaying synthesized guitar sound, complement each other to communicate a feeling of angry, confused angst. I believe that this video is an effective work because it successfully delivers the emotions of sadness and anger that the song's instrumentals also convey.