Andy Warhol was famously (and falsely) attributed with the often misquoted aphorism, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But what no prophecy could have predicted back then is that, “In the future, Madison Beer will make a song called ‘15 Minutes.’” And that she has, with a video to go with it, co-directed, as usual, by Beer and Aerin Moreno. Granted, Beer’s song isn’t a commentary on pervasive “fame,” so much as how quickly one can fall down the rabbit hole when it comes to lust/love/attraction.
Like many of Beer’s videos, it has a dreamy, surreal sort of quality, with the premise centered around Beer stumbling upon an escape room in the middle of nowhere. And, also like many of her videos (including the Jennifer’s Body-referencing “Make You Mine”), there is a certain cinematic air, complete with the action movie-ish titles that spell out her name and song at the beginning. A beginning that opens on Beer standing in a desolate landscape before she whips around to face toward the audience, staring at something else in the distance. That something being none other than the escape room that will dominate the entire “plot” of the video.
As Beer finds herself being inexplicably pulled toward the structure (which looks like the type of place the Unabomber would feel right at home in), she sings the appropriate lyrics, “I couldn’t stop myself, I couldn’t help myself/This isn’t like me, can’t you tell?” It’s then that she gets closer to the ramshackle, bearing a sign that reads, “Got 15 Minutes? Try Our Escape Room.” It comes across like that meme of a creepy “black hole” of an underpass with the words “Free Drugs” and an arrow graffiti’d above it as a means to lure someone vulnerable and naïve enough. Beer, apparently, is just such a type.
Continuing to sing, “Show me around this place/Take me in your embrace/It feels so right but ain’t it strange?” while getting closer to opening the door, the tension mounts as she leads up to the big breakout of the song (its chorus), prefacing it with, “In this moment all I know is…” before the LOSTBOY and Leroy Clampitt-produced rhythm picks up in time for Beer to belt out, “Fifteen minutes ago, I was layin’ in bed/Then I had a crazy thought in my head/So I took the keys and got in the car/Don’t know how I got here, but baby, here we are.”
Speaking to an attraction so intense that she can’t fight or deny it—and is therefore unwittingly pulled to the object of her desire like a moth to a flame—Beer wields the metaphor of the escape room literally as she battles to free herself from this potent attraction. Even though, to paraphrase Radiohead, she did it to herself, it’s true, and that’s what really hurts.
After resisting the wind that tried to push her back and warn her not to go any farther, the scene cuts to Beer suddenly being in the back of a truck that looks like it’s driving through that part of the L.A. River near the Sixth Street Bridge. Pulled back out for a moment to the exterior of the house, the sign informs her, “Your 15 Minutes Starts Now,” at which time she goes back into the house where a digital clock that’s already ticked down to nine minutes left looms behind her. Her outfit has also mysteriously changed to a white cropped tee and white booty shorts that are decidedly diaper-esque. And while she initially looked anxious/frightened to enter the space, she now seems rather excited and titillated by it, holding to a random wheel as she flexes her body and then going over to a pipe (it’s a very industrial space on the inside, evidently) to rub her back against it. Who knew escape rooms could be so “sexy”? Or at least make someone feel that way…
In the next part of the escape room, Beer this time rubs her back against a row of lockers (the closest she’ll get to Britney in “…Baby One More Time” cachet)—because what could one want to escape from more than high school? After having enough of a “moment” with the lockers, she then goes into the next room, passing an analog clock as she does so. As she searches frantically for something that she cannot name, her eyes set upon a wrench that she uses to break the square glass window at the top center of another door, reaching her arm through it to pull on the handle from the other side. Now, in the next room, the clock has gotten down to six minutes (needless to say, time is elapsed in this three-minute-twenty-two-second video).
For whatever reason, she arches herself backwards in something like a “Spider-Man getting kissed by Mary Jane” pose before whipping back up to smash this clock with a crowbar. She then runs back through some of the spaces she was already in to find a piled rope that miraculously pulls her by the ankles at rapid speed through another hallway as the beat crescendos to its most frenetic, EDM (or Charli XCX)-sounding vibe yet. At the other side of the hallway, there appears to be an industrial fan that looks as though it might suck her right into it if she reaches the end of that part of the escape room.
Fortunately, in keeping with the disjointed, surreal nature of the video, before she (not shit) does hit the fan, Beer and Moreno cut to her in the middle of nowhere once again. Right back where she started from. And she’s even back in the same outfit she was in before as well. Because, ostensibly, the escape room unlocks some kind of “alternate dimension” Beer—the one who gives in to her basest, most carnal instincts. For, if you’ll remember, it’s her more moralizing superego self that says at the beginning of the song, “This isn’t like me, can’t you tell?” But in the escape room, all bets are off on “playing it coy.”
Walking and running down the deserted road after “escaping,” she bears an aura not dissimilar from the sexually satisfied one Madonna has at the end of the “Justify My Love” video (she, too, walk-runs down the hallway of the hotel while smiling and laughing). And yes, Beer offers up some kinky lyrics in that spirit as well, at one point urging, “Show me how much you care/Touch me and pull my hair/Give me emotions I can’t bear/I want you to fantasize, and/Think of it every night/Never forget I made you mine” (that last line being an overt allusion to “Make You Mine”).
Unlike Madonna, though, Beer has the lack of impulse control that leads her straight back to the escape room when night falls, the sign outside now suggestively asking, “Try Again?” Beer then looks knowingly into the camera before the shot cuts just before we see her leaning in the direction of the entrance. This after repeating the chorus one last time—which, in some sense, evokes the Lana chorus from “Bartender” that goes, “I bought me a truck in the middle of the night/It’ll buy me a year if I play my cards right/Photo free exits from baby’s bedside/‘Cause they don’t yet know what car I drive/I’m just tryna keep my love alive.”
To conclude the song, though, Beer takes a page out of the Kylie Minogue playbook by repeating, “La, la, la-da-di-da, la, la-da-di-da.” And yes, “la-di-da” is the best way to sum up being inexplicably under someone’s spell, drawn into their world to the point where you feel like you’re in an escape room—that’s how difficult it is to pull yourself out.
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