Walken On Sunshine
by Sean Carolan
For the past, say, five years, I haven't felt a need to say anything much about music video. It probably has as much to do with me (my eldest daughter's just turning five) as it does with with the state of music video itself. Maybe I just hit that certain age where the videos start all looking the same. Maybe it's because the channel that used to show videos All Day, All Night, In Stereo stopped doing that. Whatever.
So it was with a certain amount of glee that I stumbled on Spike Jonze's video for Fat Boy Slim's "Weapon Of Choice". This puppy has a lot going for it - a groove that causes your rump to shake uncontrollably; lyrical references to, of all things, Frank Herbert's twice-poorly-filmed novel "Dune"; and last but certainly not least, Christopher Walken.
Like Jonze, I've wondered about lobby people in hotels. They sit in the lobby's opulent leather couches, attired in a rumpled business-dress-code way, looking as though they're waiting for noone in particular. Why are they there? Jonze answers: they're waiting for everyone to leave so that they can execute baroque production numbers, and work themselves into a high-enough state of being that they can ultimately fly around the room.
If that had been the extent of it, it would have been fun enough. Christopher Walken puts it over the top, partly because he's cultivated a public persona that's truly weird, and partly because he nails the "waiting for nothing in particular" look so that it contrasts so completely with his exhiliration as he hovers magically somewhere between the hotel mural and the reception desk.
Jonze executes all this very matter-of-factly, with little-to-no effects added after shooting ended. (Alert viewers will notice where the stand-in switches places with Walken; the fun part is that this is less a product of editing than it is of good choreography.)
About the only thing that isn't a revelation in the video is the song itself...but after all, isn't that what music video is all about?
©2001 Sean Carolan