In the epoch of screens, hatred, to an undeniably obsessive degree, is so much more convenient in the wake of a breakup. This much is made clear not only in the lyrics to Ellie Goulding and Juice WRLD’s “Hate Me,” but in the video for it as well. Directed by Saam Farahmand, the spartan tableau of a red backdrop with Goulding balancing a phone on her fingertip before the appearance of the famed knife emoji manifests in a very large (ergo “rideable”) format is indicative of what can be described as a synesthesia of rage.
It definitely speaks to the line, “Miss me so much, you been going psycho.” For perhaps it’s true, that the more we declare we hate something or someone, the more there seems to be a morbid fascination with said being. Hence, the chestnut, “It’s a thin line between love and hate” (this, in point of fact, is declared in the variation on that saying in the lyric, “It’s a thin line between all this love and hate/And if you switch sides, you’re gon’ have to claim your place”). For the intensity of both emotions requires a certain amount of caring and passion that “lukewarm feelings” simply don’t generate.
Like deleting every photo of your ex ever taken in your phone as a means to prove how “over it” you are. Yet if you were over it, wouldn’t you expend your energy on something more productive, more conducive to proving to your ex just how much better off you really are? Goulding seems to thinks so as she takes pictures of a voodoo doll made in her likeness, one that appears to prove the point that as angered as her ex is over her decision to leave him, she makes up for it in the weight of goading nonplussedness. Shrugging off his “lies” about “hating” her, she taunts, “Chase me, chase me, tell me how you hate me/Erase me, ‘rase me, wish you never dated me/Lies, tell me lies, baby, tell me how you hate me.”
In between her blithe wound-poking (she does have a giant knife, after all), a man proceeds to punch through a giant slowly cracking screen that represents the black hole one can tend to fall through in their phone-driven, internet-stalking rage. For no, the twenty-first century is not the best time period to exist in when it comes to making a “healthy break” that doesn’t involve the abstraction of “blocking” someone when, in truth, we can never erase the memories as we think we can with this attempt at an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind act.
Metaphorically swiping left at the end of the video, Goulding is living her best life while all the dweebos of the video angrily sing her song with their headphones on. Basically, it all goes back to what Julia Stiles told Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, “But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.” Alas, ’tis but the curse of the jilted and not the jilter.
