Comments
10 years ago
This is a deep song. The reason for the rooms located next to each other is that they are a family, living in the same house, but the different colored lighting in each room is indicative of their mental distance despite their physical closeness. The son has locked his feelings away from the outside world, and then internalization frustrates him as he tries to fix himself alone, hence the line "a run-down broke machine". He becomes angry with himself and tears down himself and the world around him, discarding the progress he might have achieved, as the little boy version of himself representing his hopes and dreams cries at the sight of such. I relate to this a great deal.The daughter has a self-esteem issue connected to her appearance, which may have been the result of bullying by her peers or her parents. Whether or not she is physically drowning is somewhat irrelevant because she most assuredly drowning mentally, constantly trying to find the light of perfection, a land where who she is becomes good enough.The father in the video is a clearly religious man, and his self-punishment may be the result of infidelity, or molestation as some people have pointed out so far. Or it may simply be sexual immorality of a more superficial kind, such as the very idea of committing such acts. His frustration with himself he takes out not only on himself, but also his children, and the video shows his son taking abuse in particular.The son is shown walking outside his door, and the camera zooms out to reveal a field of identical stone heads making identical, distressed faces. This is to convey the idea that no one can truly see inside your world, and when you don't let anyone in, people only see the outside, and all that conveys is a distressed look. They might suspect that there is more to it, but if you don't respond, they will move on. But you can't move on; you're still stuck in your own personal hell you've either inherited or created. You are afraid to let someone in, because who you are isn't "normal", and they'd just think you were crazy and weird and leave you. "It's why you never tell me, what's on your mind"So you push it down, and you don't let jt show, and you eventually reach a point where either you have to tell someone, or you decide that the "quick alternative" is a better choice. Or door number three, you engage in behavior that takes you away from reality while simultaneously slowly destroying whatever life you had on earth. The truth, the realness of it all becomes too difficult to bear without the crutch, until you crash and burn. Sound familiar? It should: two men named Layne Staley and Mike Starr took door number three not so long ago. I'm not saying they had any of the issues the people in the video have, but they share an inability to deal with their problems, because they shut people out.The big closing moment of the video for me is the desert scene. Anyone else think the desert looks familiar? It should. Take a look at the album cover for Dirt, and then look back at the video. See the resemblance? Think about the songs on Dirt. Have you listened to all of them? If you did, you might notice that all of the songs ooze self-loathing, misery, sadness, anger, and fear. Now look what happened to the woman in the video. She embodies the victim of these feelings, and in the video we finally see her pick herself up, and she no longer feels like Dirt, both its literal form and the emotions associated with the album. She no longer drowns in her own desert. We can infer from the ethereal nature of the scenery that she probably succeeded in taking her own life with the mirror shard, thus ending her suffering here on earth.