Cyborg Music Video Mondays- Bjork's "All is Full of Love"

Sorry for the long post, they won't all be this ridiculous!

Bjork's music video for her song, "All is Full of Love" was one of the  first music videos that I became absolutely obsessed with as a kid.  This song, from Bjork's 1997 album Homogenic (so named because Bjork wasn't fluent in English and invented a word that pretty much is supposed to mean 'homogeneous') is about being 'given love' as long as you're receptive to it.  One of the things that fascinates me with the minimalist lyrics is the almost ominous passive construction ("you'll be given") which leaves you to ask... by whom? 

The music suggests a similar ambiguity.  After a brief and stagnant introduction of synthesized middle-register stings, the rhythmic ostinato is introduced.  This ostinato is a little bit unsettling, emphasizing the back beat with a mechanized grinding sound, almost a scream.  When Bjork starts singing, she seems to be competing with this pulse.  Her line emphasizes the first beats, and her long, sinewy lines seem unrestrained by the mechanical grind underneath.  While most people who I talk to about this song say that Bjork's melody sounds timeless, or at least adrift, but I've always thought that her melody was maybe unaware of the machinations that frame her voice.  I guess I've always been a little bit of a morbid child, but I was absolutely obsessed with the incoherence between Bjork's line and the rhythmic backdrop.  This, in addition to my 12 year-old self still not totally comfortable with being 'given' love (cooties, anyone?), made listening to this song a pretty uncomfortable experience for me, and it still sort of is.  

Looking at the music video again, I'm starting to think that scared-puppy childhood Sam may have been on to something... but first, a little background.  This music video, which was released a year later was a collaboration between Bjork and Chris Cunningham, who is perhaps most well-regarded for his videos with Aphex Twin.  In a really fascinating "making of" video, Bjork explains that her original concept was that she wanted to "describe some sort of heaven," with the caveat that "there would be lust" and that the clean white surface of the figures would melt away into the passions of this eroticism.  Interestingly, her original concept of the figures were China dolls, not androids.  those were Chris's idea, as he studied industrial robotics as a kid.  The process involved programming real robotics, and using video editing in order to impose Bjork's lips onto the robots, making this video the result of an awesomely collaborative cyborg experience.  In the end, what's 'real' robotics, what's heavily edited CGI, and what's Bjork's essence all become blurred by the very nature of this process.

One of Chris Cunningham's Sketches

But, for those of you who don't know, Chris Cunningham is basically Satan.  I mean, he's absolutely brilliant, but he's made some of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen, and he definitely highlights some of the tensions that I explained earlier in this post.  In this video, a white female-bodied android is constructed by a machine.  Everything is very white and sterile, resembling a sort of Heaven, but also a Hospital.  This song is basically a love story, as two female-bodied androids encounter each other in this sterile womb and fall in love with each other.  Behind the love story between the two droids, we get the ominous presence of the machine, the mother creator.  The two androids do not seem to notice that they are being constructed at the very same time that they are falling in love.  They are being programmed to love each other, and they are unaware of this process. 

This of course, supports the ambivalence I felt regarding the lyrics and the music.  There is in fact an important disconnect here between the conscious and the unconscious.  Bjork sings in the passive voice, because she is not able to be truly aware of who is actually the giver of love, but in the diegesis of the music video, we get to see it.  The machine-creator completes its task unnoticed to the androids, but is very obvious to us as viewers, similar to the interaction between the mechanical backbeat and Bjork's freeflowing melody.  

But in the end, why was I so morbidly uncomfortable with this idea?  I think it was because this video questions the nature of freewill in a very powerful way, but also in a very beautiful one.  It is only through ignorance of the machine that these two bots can fall in love.  ("You aren't receiving... Your phone is off the hook... your door is shut").    But I think that that reflected my anxieties as a kid more than it does now.  In the end, there's something very poignant about machines falling in love.  More, machines being created to fall in love.  I mean, the line between machine and human is a very fragile one, and this video can give hope that love for love's sake can still exist in the age of machines.  This is not a love about procreation, it's about being free of all anxieties and loving without resistance.  Love for the sake of pleasure, not procreation.  Creation.  If only Chris Cunningham didn't have to make everything at least a little bit fucked up.  But if we can make life only a little bit fucked up, I'd take it.

Robert Longo- "Machines in Love"