I attended high school in an era when music videos were still a thing. In Edmonds-Woodway High School homeroom, which occurred after lunch every day, my classmates and I would pay mild attention to VH1 and MTV while catching up on homework. This is where English teacher Bruce Mindt introduced me to the “2 second rule” of music videos. He pointed out that in no music video was there a longer than 2-second shot of anything. He would sit in the back of the room and annoy us all by shouting “one thousand one, one th-, one thousa-, one thousand one, one thousand tw-, one thousand one…” restarting his cadence every time the camera cut to another shot.
Michael Bay’s direction of Do It To Me is as good an example as any of this principle. The song clocks in at a modest 95 bpm, but the camera is constantly crashing between black and white and color, close and wide shots, women and men.
The thematic interest is paid to Richie, shot entirely in black and white, and his various female love interests, shot all in color. He is dressed simply in black, while she appears in a series of tantalizing gowns and flowing sheets. I suppose the video might have been “romantic” or even “sexy” to a person of the incredibly awkward early 90s, perhaps mostly because it sensualizes a set of black women in a sepia-based color palette that can’t have been common on television at the time.
Richie’s music is clearly white-people music. He was the whitest, yachtiest, soft-core-iest member of the otherwise funky Commodores, and he made a living clashing a jeri curl and a bushy mustache and overtly sexual lyrics with smooth, unthreatening sounds. He’s the type of black person America was comfortable with in 1992, as was Will Smith, a common component of Bay’s earlier films.
It’s tough to derive in hindsight whether Bay’s involvement with performers like this is an example of “pushing the envelope” within a society that we now look back on as pretty darn racist, or if he could have paid attention to more subversive or challenging black themes. His music videos consistently capture black artists playing white music (Richie), white artists playing black music (Vanilla Ice), otherness (The overt sexuality of the Divinyls, the bestial foreignness of Meatloaf), and strong women (Wilson Phillips).
Bay doesn’t seem like an envelope pusher when you look at his movies, but there is subversion to every one, from the complicated government / military themes in Bad Boys II and The Rock, to the symbolic, difficult love stories in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.
In an era where America is challenged to confront whether they prefer a brash, challenging populist or an unexciting wonk who works within the system to get things done for President, it’s fun to think about the ways a mainstream movie director can tell us stories about the way we live our lives, especially when we aren’t overtly challenged to think about it.
He never has and probably never will stop making popcorn movies, but his work within the popcorn movie medium reminds me of the disrespect many people still give video games and comic books when they are referred to as storytelling devices. The medium outweighs the content.
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