Dreamworlds

Dreamworlds III

Through the use of clever editing techniques Sut Jhally displays to the audience the impact sexuality has made in music videos and what it has done to us as a society. I will now take this time to analyze the different techniques that he used and for what purpose he used them.

The first of many techniques has Jhally taking the videos out of their original context. To do this he separates them from their music, instead placing ambient background music behind his narration. As he speaks the audience is presented with the imagery without the standards music and without this it forces the audience to see the image as it is rather then dismissing it as just a music video. With this the world of the music video becomes more real, in that it begins to exist outside of the music it was originally created for. Rather than playing background to the music playing we now see the action of these videos as an independently existing world, the dreamworld of the adolescent male.

Also at a point within the video Jhally imposes words over the still image of a woman from a music video. The words he uses are qualities of any respectable human being but as he places more of these words over the sexualized still image of the girl from the music video her image begins to blur. As these qualities get pointed out and disputed the dreamworld begins to fade. For women in this world, there is no room for the intellectual or emotional sides of the woman; there is only the sexually charged adolescent’s image that survives. The most impactful technique Jhally employs in this has yet to be addressed though.

Nearing the end of the film Jhally drops all subtlety and begins drawing connections from the happenings of these music videos to real life events. He edits the film so that scenes from the Jamaican pride day riot are cut intermittently with scenes from the music videos that the narrator has spent the entire film talking about. By doing this we soon begin to recognize many of the actions that are performed on the assaulted women. Many of the men perpetrating these acts of assault are directly mimicking the actions of the artists in many of the music videos that we had just viewed. Suddenly we see just why these music videos exist solely in the dreamworld as the real women are brutally and savagely assaulted. It’s now clear to the audience just how far from reality this dreamworld exists, and also we have now bore witness to the fruits of such hyper sexualized music videos.

Though near the start of the film many can dismiss the imagery of these music videos as a simple attempt to catch viewers and draw in a audience but the closer the images come to reality the harder it gets to ignore. If this dreamworld were to become a reality, it easy to see the nightmare it would inevitably become.