As The Weeknd seeks to expand the universe of Dawn FM into the animated realm, he picks up the expectedly surreal (especially for anyone who watched his After Hours “series”) “narrative” where it left off in “Out of Time” for the “How Do I Make You Love Me?” video. Not exactly the most “electric” single choice, The Weeknd makes up for it with the accompanying animated visuals (which he also wielded for After Hours via “Snowchild,” “In Your Eyes Remix” and “Save Your Tears Remix”). Waking up in the hospital where we last saw him being handled by Jim Carrey (who serves as the “soothing” DJ/narrator on the spaces in between the album’s songs), The Weeknd is now not only animated, but he also has a bronze mask affixed to his face. For, as we can tell by now, The Weeknd possesses something of a fetish for masks. As we all should at this juncture, what with contagion being billed as the “new normal.”
Yet this one takes a special “cake” for being his most disturbing yet, regardless of its “cartoon” status or not. In fact, that’s perhaps what makes the mask and the “storyline” come across as even more fucked up. For, in the spirit of Radiohead’s seminal 1997 single, “Paranoid Android,” “How Do I Make You Love Me?” seems to embody a similar aura to what Thom Yorke wanted to convey in the video through the Magnus Carlsson-created character of Robin. After seeing Robin air on Channel 4, Yorke enlisted Carlsson to come up with an equally as absurd series of situations for Robin and his fellow “deadbeat” friend, Benjamin, to endure. Even if “endure” is too strong a word, as things just seem to happen around them while they remain totally blasé about it all.
For The Weeknd, the absurdism begins when he realizes he’s got the aforementioned bronze mask on and that, for some reason, when members of the hospital staff pull at his arm to keep him from absconding, it comes right off to reveal an underlying “additional” arm inside of it. Shorter in length, but still—a functional arm. A small moth lands on the hand of the severed arm as The Weeknd jumps out the window and plunges to the pavement. He lands in front of a woman waiting in a car, who screams in horror as more moths and such fly out of The Weeknd’s face. Then that moth from inside the building enlarges, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man-style. To the point where it’s bigger than the size of any average parade float. The Weeknd seems to take inspiration from the creature after one of the many people being blown in his direction by the moth’s giant wings turns out to be the woman he was karaoke’ing with in the “Out of Time” video.
He watches her face deflate before his very eyes and then gives her a kind of “blow-up kiss” that somehow transforms her countenance into his real one. As this “The Weeknd float” expands to proportions well beyond what the moth was, the bronze-masked version of The Weeknd dips inside a sewer to avoid being crushed by the overpowering, very full-body float.
Once down in the depths of the underground realm, he unwittingly steps on the face of what turns out to be a decidedly Joker-esque being who attacks him long enough to rip his leg off and reveal another “layer” beneath that one, as was the case with his arm. All at once, The Weeknd is thrust into the elevator of the karaoke companion’s apartment building (guess she’s alive, after all). The Weeknd then starts to “walk” like a chimpanzee toward her door as we see her cutting off the dead roots of a plant she’s tending to—obvious symbolism for whatever shedding/renewal is going on with The Weeknd’s own body.
As he bangs his face on her door to the rhythm of the song multiple times, his bronze mask finally breaks to reveal the rapidly decaying old man face beneath it. More moths and other insects crawling out of the holes in his visage freak The Weeknd’s erstwhile love interest out as she opens then quickly closes the door and locks it. Sadly, she didn’t give The Weeknd enough time to reveal that he’s become his child self again, fulfilling the dream of Meryl Streep’s Susan Orlean in Adaptation when she wept, “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.” Join the fuckin’ club.
“Release yourself to escape reality,” The Weeknd urges at one point early on in this song. And it seems he’s taken his own advice in the form of these Cliqua-helmed visuals (with direction by Jocelyn Charles). Ones that still, however, don’t quite give Radiohead a full run for their money in terms of the insane, nonsensical events that take place throughout the slightly longer “Paranoid Android” video (complete with its own take on severed limbs as well). And perhaps that’s because Robin and Benjamin are in the “real world” as opposed to whatever fantasy vision of it The Weeknd is in. The year “Paranoid Android” was released, Yorke would remark upon how the video seems especially ludicrous because it’s “really about the violence around [Robin], which is exactly like the song. Not the same specific violence as in the lyrics, but everything going on around him is deeply troubling and violent, but he’s just drinking himself into oblivion [something, incidentally, The Weeknd can relate to]. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s why it works. And that’s why it does my head in every time I see it.”
People’s heads will also be done in by The Weeknd’s “How Do I Make You Love Me?,” but when it comes to comprehending the origins of animation in music videos being essentially “required” to be fucked up (a belief not every musician has always shared—see: Madonna’s simple and straightforward “Dear Jessie” and “Get Together” or A-ha’s “sweet” “Take On Me”), one would do well to remember that Radiohead started it all in terms of making the animation genre associated with all manner of shocking incongruity.
