This video by Evanescence for the song 'Bring Me to Life' is set during night in a dark dingy city very much like Gotham from Batman. The very opening of the video shows the dangerous, scummy nature of the city with a flying twisting zoom that leads the audience in between the rooftops and the high rise buildings drawing them into the narrative. The audience can hear a police siren in the distance which reappears throughout the song and they also hear an electrical sputtering/sparking as the camera passes a lit up sign on a roof, showing the poverty and disrepair of the city. Due to the dark, dirty mise-en-scene and the pathetic fallacy this video is reminiscent of urban thrillers, especially when the camera finishes its twisting journey through the rooftops, connoting a turning narrative, narrowing in on a window in a high rise, with the curtains flapping in the wind we see the femme fatale lying in a fitful sleep in bed. An image of this woman falling off a high rise block of flats reoccurs through out this video becoming its motif and also symbolising the dark decent of the city as well as adding an extra meaning to the song title bring me to life, this could be interpreted as bring me to life after I have fallen off a tall building and died or it could be interpreted as meaning that her life in this city is so boring and bleak that she needs bringing to life with an exhilarating fall and a short sharp end, however it could be interpreted as the bad dream the femme fatale is having in her fitfull sleep. During the falling shots, the camera is focused on the girl and is falling with her but by focusing on the girl it shows the floors of the building behind her wizzing past and giving the audience an indication that she is plummenting extremely quickly towards the earth.
After short intermittent cuts of the woman falling and her restless sleep in bed the shot travels back outside the flat and it tracks upwards to a window a few floors up during this time the music has paused so that only the wind and a distant siren can be heard to emphasise the fact that this city is dangerous and cold, we are brought to the room by a very fast zoom that matches the fast start of the music after the pause and because the music is coming from the band inside the room it creates a pull towards them; which is a perfect link to what happens next as the woman wakes up and climbs out of the open window up the outside wall of the building to their window; throughout this video we do not know whether she is still dreaming, sleep walking or awake which adds a sense of mystery and urgency to the danger she is in. To add to that, high angle shots show the severity of the drop and the crawling city beneath.
On her journey up the building she passes a window where a man and a woman are silently sitting stock still on a sofa a feet apart as if they were robots, this is just at the moment she sings 'Make me real' which adds to the sense that life is fake and boring. In contrast with this at the next window a halloween party is in full swing, with people in creepy masks, symbolising many different things like fear, horror, danger, death and also the type of dead people that live in this city reflecting its own gloomy appearance. On top of this the masks are deathly white which reflects the dead rotting of the city and the closeness of the female singer's death, they add significantly to the haunting image of this video. She also passes a window in which an old man is sitting silently in a chair with a TV screen on that he is not looking at, also like an android, so from these fleeting shots of the type of people found in this city or in fact within the womans dream/mind are very negative contrasting the boring programmed people who look dead with the scary, unhappy, deadly people at the Halloween party. The lyrics make this analogy a bit more comprehensible when it is sung 'Save me from the nothing I have become' and 'I have been living a lie, there is nothing inside' which reveals the true meaning of this video, that in one respect it rebels against modern life as it prevents us from being individuals and in doing so makes us all the same and making us into 'nothing'.
Once she reaches the floor on which the band is she looks through the window at them and by using long lingering shots of her showing the ferosity of the wind whipping her hair about her we are given a rather romantic image that suggests that the man and woman are entwined somehow added to the fact that in the lyrics she says "I'm lost without your love, darhling". This thought is thus amplified when the lead singer in the room lovingly looks at her through the window and opens it, however it is this action that makes her fall off the ledge she is standing on, but as in a lot of films she manages to grab hold of the ledge by the tips of her fingers and the man climbs out of the window to help her up, we see this from a low angle point of view so the audience can see the female as well as the male and they are aware of the danger he puts himself in although he does not seem to be very urgent; this may be down to poor acting or because it is meant to be a dream and the vital things like running never seem to happen fast enough or simply because it needs to fit in to the music.
Towards the end the video makers are explicitly shwoing you that it was all a dream as you see a close-up of the woman in bed, this does bring to mind the cliched phrase "and it was all a dream" this point after close analysis it seems that this is probably just a dream, however this video does seem to work because of the shortness of this clip that only strongly infers that it was a dreama dn the fact that she is still in a troubled sleep and the next shot is a slow zoom out from her open window with the curtains flapping in the wind which again repeats the image of the dark, dingy city with the police siren wailing, this explains that nothing has changed and life is still the same dangerous dull monotony.
As is normal in music videos this video is filled with mid-shots of different members of the band and their intruments, but due to the continually changing pace of the song and its ups and downs the editing is mixed between fast shot cuts and slow shot cuts. The fast shot transitions seem to happen when the band is on screen because the beat is produced in their room and the fast paced vocals comes from the man in that room whereas the female singer (Amy Lee) creates lingering notes and less fast paced vocals as the man which is reflected in the shot transitions where the ones focused on her narrative are slower than those of the band. This is contradictory to the narrative even though it fits with the music because the lady's storyline is fuller and faster, however the shots are more varied whilst on the female narrative so as to fit in with the music and lyrics.
Many of Evanescences videos are quite dark and deep which is a reflection of the bands genre and style. As a gothic rock band their songs and lyrics tend to be quite gloomy for example songs like 'Sweet Sacrifice' (video shown below) which includes lyrics such as "You're gonna drown in my lost pain" and "I sleep to die".
This video is just an example of the type of disturbing images are recurrent through Evanescences videos.
To prove that the dark images are a generic theme within the gothic rock genre I have found this video by Seether for their song called 'Remedy' and as you can see in all these videos the characters appear to be possessed by something crazy with plenty of disturbing images or thoughts.
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