Music Video Analysis - 30 Seconds to Mars: 'The Kill'

Thought beats or seeing sounds in your head:

The main singer is telling a story with his lyrics. The intro to the video has a sort of creepy background music, although it is very slight, it adds to the effect of mystery and the unknown and he verifies this by saying, “This place is creepy, unbelievable we’ve got it for 3 days, all to ourselves, there’s not gonna be a single fucking soul here". Later in the video at 1.28 to 1.34 you hear a banging, as if a ball is banging off a wall, with each bang, a new image flashes up until it confirms that it is in fact, the main singer throwing a tennis ball at a wall.

Narrative and Performance:

The bands performance is a stage performance in a posh hotel, which is actually just one of the intertextual references to the classic horror movie, The Shining, the whole music video is based around the film. Several scenes are actually versions from the movie, such a the bathroom scene when a woman is walking out of the shower, or the bar scene in which one of the band members goes to have a drink and of course the famous ballroom scene, which is repeated throughout, where the bands performance is held in front of a 20’s style audience. Another famous scene used is when you see the lead singer typing on a typewriter, when you see the words it is a page of the same sentence repeated, ‘This is who I really am’, which is in reference to the film again, where the main character types a repetitive page saying ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’.

The star image:

The star image of the music video is the lead performer, Jared Leto. He is an actor turned rock star and his changed image has all eyes on him. By singing lyrics such as ‘Finally found myself,’ and ‘This is who I really am’, he is differentiating from his original actor appearance and showing the viewer that this is who he is.

Three ways to which music videos relate visuals to a song:

In my opinion this video is an Illustration, by saying ‘This is who I really am,’ he also sees a tuxedoed version of himself, and proceeds to say ‘I tried to be someone else’.

Technical aspects of music video:

There is subliminal imagery throughout the video, of gruesome images like corpses all bloodied up, which makes us think of the song title ‘The Kill’ and is also another reference to The Shining. The mise-en-scene in the video is that of a typical heavy rock band, all black, and the mise-en-scene of the setting is built to look like the hotel from The Shining. In the ballroom scene when all of the characters from the video or dressed up, it is made, again, to look like the scene from the movie. They’ve also adopted split-screen visual, especially at the end.