Peter Gabriel’s Elegy for Anne Sexton: Image and Music in ...



Peter Gabriel’s Elegy for Anne Sexton: Image and Music in ‘Mercy St.’





Matt Mahurin's video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Mercy St.’ begins with a man taking a boat out onto the water. He carries some unidentified cargo that might be a person – alive or dead. A woman, possibly institutionalized, prepares for death through the practices of Catholic faith. Moving at different paces, the relation between these two strands is never clarified. At the video's end the man remains on the boat, but the woman is still unknown. The figures become more iconic as the video progresses; their appearance changes, but it's uncertain whether any transformation has taken place.

Screened only a handful of times on MTV, the ‘Mercy St.’ video was not tied to a hit single or Gabriel's appearance. Moreover it deals with serious themes, contains frequent temporal disjunctions, and makes an unusually broad range of music/image connections. The video’s obscurity and complexity notwithstanding, ‘Mercy St.’ is one of the most handsome and forceful in the canon, and makes a good choice for close analysis. Many of the devices that structure ‘Mercy St.’ illuminate the genre, and hint at what music video has the potential to become.

The song’s subject is the poet Anne Sexton, and the video can be described as, in roughly equal parts, homage, elegy, pastiche and biography. Sexton was an untutored housewife and mother who, under her psychiatrist's advice, began to write poetry at twenty-eight, and quickly achieved renown. Her books of poems (one for which she won a Pulitzer Prize) are most admired for their powerful and surprising metaphors. In 1974, at the age of forty-six, she committed suicide.

Reading ‘Mercy St.’

This chapter analyzes the ways ‘Mercy St.'s’ audiovisual codes operate in a temporal flow. A sequential reading, following the song's form, is interspersed with fuller descriptions of music/image relations, as well as fragments from Sexton’s poetry. Such an approach aims to suggest a viewer's experience of music video. Watching often encourages multitasking: following a narrative or processual trajectory, piecing together music/image relations, and placing lyrics, we make sense of the whole. The individual descriptions of musical parameters can be used as a tool for reading music video in general. The excerpts of Sexton’s poems may encourage the reader to find out more about her life and work.[1]

‘Mercy St.'s’ multivalency makes any streamlined approach difficult. The video narrates a woman’s experiences as she struggles with mental institutions, the memory of incest, and the threat of suicide or being drowned; the story is told out of sequence and in fragments, and the viewer must struggle to learn the piece. The song itself is unpredictable, based on a drone that allows for various materials to be brought in and out of the mix, and containing irregular section-lengths. In addition, Mahurin’s imagery and Gabriel’s music share an affinity of tone and affect, allowing space for any individual element or image to depart from the norm. The sporadic appearance of a boat going out on the water provides one thread of continuity. Without much to serve as a guide, however, the viewer must crawl from one shot to the next: each shot must be interpreted in light of musical and visual cues, as moment by moment, relations among music, image, and lyrics shift. Instances of Eisensteinian montage disrupt the audiovisual flow (viewers forge new meaning through the collision of independent shots). Alternately left out and given clues, pushed away and drawn in, the viewer's subject position becomes unstable. Two-thirds into the video, direction changes course: after an allusion to annihilation, the image and music drive forward, to either a light at the end of a tunnel or death. In the final analysis, the video may concern itself less with revealing anything for the viewer than with its own ‘blanking out’ or withdrawal. The tension between six storylines and one philosophical perspective (the last grounded in nothingness, and told graphically rather than narratively) contributes to the video's prismatic opacity.[2]

Introduction

‘Mercy St.'s’ opening quickly establishes itself as ‘other’ to Anglo-American pop through its modal harmonic materials and Brazilian percussion. (Hushed, solemn, and vaguely religious are good descriptors for its affect.) The video’s first shot contains a thin man or woman in half light, with a flowing garment and bare feet, walking on sand. Taken with the introduction's music, this image suggests a mystical figure in a desert setting. Upon closer examination, however, other elements block any idealized reading. The figure, for instance, wears two Band-Aids – what type of wounds along the edge of the feet might need covering? Are they stigmata, or do they suggest ritual or aestheticism? Are they a reference to Oedipus (fig. 13.1)?[3] Subsequent viewings suggest that the Band-Aids serve both graphic and narrative functions. The director’s manipulations of shape will suggest a concern less with people and events than with a form that empties out.[4]

In the second shot, we see the lower half of someone’s legs. As the legs rise in the frame, they stop moving, perhaps suggesting a loss of consciousness. When the motion ceases, however, the surdo enters, sounding almost like a heartbeat. This seeming contradiction in affect – the music asserting vitality as the image shows death – raises several questions: is it the image or the music that provides the video’s impetus? Which figures are animate, and which inanimate? The heartbeat alongside the dead body may suggest the spirit’s release from the body, allowing it to wander across the landscape of the video. A ghostly cinematic point of view is reinforced in shots 13, 23, and 33. Do these shots belong to a ghost, a youthful or older Anne Sexton, Peter Gabriel, the spiritual guide, the boat rower, a father, the viewer, or some combination of these figures?

Contour

By tracing the contours of movements of objects within the frame across several edits, one can gain an even greater appreciation for ‘Mercy St.’s’ melodic materials and their affective characteristics.[5] The song’s introduction presents a four-note ‘cambiata’ motive several times in different registers,[6] and the movement of the objects in the frame trace that of the cambiata's: the rise and fall of the shadow in the first image of the foot follows the contour of this motive, sometimes appearing a bit before or behind the melody, but still responsive to it. A second synthesizer part enters, playing the same cambiata figure in a lower register. Similarly, the line of the shadow crosses the foot and repeats its rise and fall. The low bass note is matched by the feet hitting the sand. Just as the foot’s next step launches the following image, the bass ‘pushes off’ into the body of the song.

A related example lies at the point in the verse when Gabriel sings ‘with no leak at the seam’. This melody begins with a rising skip of a third, and is repeated three times with an overall contour that emphasizes downward motion. The image draws our attention to the melody’s gradual descent by presenting three shots of objects falling slowly through the frame.

my real dream,

I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill

searching for a street sign—

namely MERCY STREET.

Not there.

Verse 1: Shots 1, 2

Verse 1 begins by establishing a fragile connection between music and image. The vocal line is doubled at the octave. Similarly, images of houses have a pale border both above and below, and these parallel lines slowly fall through the frame. Aspects of the ghostly houses serve more than musical functions: the houses are shot through a mirror or puddle, and this mirror image raises questions of both the identity and the position of the viewer. The lyrics (‘Looking down on empty streets, all she can see’) also lead one to imagine a subject and the town or city that surrounds her. Because the second falling house is older and less distinct than the first, it may suggest the memory of an earlier house, perhaps evocative of childhood (fig. 13.2).

Verse 1: Shots 5, 6

The next shot, of a woman’s head low in the frame, plays on the video’s first shot. In the first shot, the foot creates a hole in the sand, and its corresponding sound – the bass’s initial attack – a kind of sonic pothole. Here, the sound seems to flood over the woman’s head, suggesting the inverse shape, a dome. Following this shot is one of a woman praying as she falls through the frame, yet we do not know if she is the same one who traversed the sand, died in the water, or looked onto the city streets. We may be reluctant to consider her as the video's protagonist.

Bridge Fragment

The verse’s B section (composed of images of feet stepping in sand and hands pushing the boat, shots 7 and 8) exists as a fragment inserted between repetitions of the verse and can be heard as the kernel from which the more substantial bridge grows. Because Gabriel’s hushed, semi-spoken singing sounds tender and conspiratorial, one might guess that Sexton remembers a moment from her childhood or a secret wish: she and her brother steal away to take a boat out to sea. Since this small section will grow over the course of the song, something illicit yet beloved develops in the video. Perhaps this is one reason why the video does not have a completely dark tone, despite its focus on suicide. A woman’s half-lit face (shot 9) closes the section. The face is shown in three-quarter shadow – a shocking effect. The image, here, seems to run ahead of the song.

The image-music connections also become more like puns. The whistling sound might fit the wind blowing across the woman’s face. The strong attack and nasal vowel of the word ‘comes’ recall the feet stepping on sand and the surdo’s ‘heartbeat,’ respectively.

We are fishermen in a flat scene.

All day long we are in love with water.

The fish are naked.

The fish are always awake.

They are the color of old spoons

and caramels.

The sun reached down

but the floor is not in sight.

Only the rocks are white and green.

Who knows what goes on in the halls below?

Continuity

In ‘Mercy St.,’ repeated or varied visual patterns create a subtle mode of continuity that compensates for the video’s narrative lacunae and more drastic visual transformations: it does not rely on character or plot to create stability. The video establishes continuity from shot to shot using a variety of techniques – graphic matches, repetition of visual patterns and schemes, and preservation of tonal values. Continuity is first established in ‘Mercy St.'s’ opening through an unbroken line across edited images; the verse’s middle through number and light; and the chorus through matching shape.[7]

At a near-subliminal level the many images of crosses (10 in total) provide continuity.[8] At first, the imagery is so submerged in the tape that these crosses seem purely coincidental. Later, however, it becomes clear that Christian imagery is central to the video. Images of passage also carry us forward: figures always appear in the middle of some activity – swimming, rowing, pushing, pulling, waving, falling, stepping, pacing, reaching, dropping, murmuring, carrying, towing, passing, kneeling, tapping, circling, gliding.

Whereas many videos derive their strength from a tension between musician and videomaker, ‘Mercy St.’ benefits from the affinities between Mahurin’s and Gabriel’s work. Mahurin’s dark imagery complements Gabriel’s hermetic style; this basic similarity provides continuity when elements diverge from the mix. While the ‘Mercy St.’ song is brooding and grim, constructed without clear outlines, Mahurin's charcoal drawings frequently contain a rounded representation of an isolated figure standing stiff-limbed against a richly textured background (an overcast, sooty sky). Dim but luminous light breaks through the background.[9]

Verse 1: Shot 10

For the first time, the lyrics come to the fore, yet just as suddenly they recede into the mix. The image responds to the line ‘Nowhere in the corridors.’ During the emphasized word ‘nowhere’, a hand searches upward against a black background with lace streaming from the fingertips, before image and text fade away. As the second hand takes the lead, a countermelody in the synthesizer comes to the fore. The phrase ‘There in the midst of it’ follows the image of the boat going out, and the word ‘there’ and the boat’s bow seem to pierce the darkness. The coming forward and fading away of the text ‘nowhere in the corridors of pale green and gray’, and ‘nowhere in the . . .’ suggests a treacherous journey or an unreliable guide. The boat holds what appears to be a severed head. Gabriel’s lyrics ‘like bone’, though barely audible, reflect the image of a granite-like head.

In north light, my smile is held in place,

the shadow marks my bone.

What could I have been dreaming as I sat there,

all of me waiting in the eyes, the zone

of the smile

Lyrics

Lyrics fragment into chunks ranging from two to six words each. Even adjacent words drift away from one another, while other more distant words, linked by some tangential feature in the image or the music – a repeat of a hand tapping another, or the return of a riff – are eerily bound together. Although the lyric’s sense fades, the words change into sensual objects, the harsh word ‘bone’ and the softly labial ‘Mercy Street’, wrapped in sound and linked to individual images, become talismanic. The hook line, ‘looking for Mercy Street’, exhorts us to remain patient while the murky image and music unfold, because we are seeking something, possibly a street, possibly redemption.

Verse 1: Shot 12; Chorus 1: Shots 13-17

The face of a woman who may represent Sexton becomes an unyielding mask, a dead end. The close-up of the ocean provides a surprising moment of renewal, suggesting the fullness and breadth of the self, the bounty of nature. Half a measure later, the synthesizer plays a four-note flourish that suggests running water. The flourish confirms the sense that this pure image of water provides a respite from the video’s largely ominous tone. The video soon returns to its former tone, however. The shot of the mysterious man in a large black coat throwing a rope into the boat gives a sense of foreboding: his return to the boat seems to discourage any hope of a positive outcome. An earlier shot reveals a human figure in the back of the boat, but does not adequately explain the severed head in the boat’s bottom and the corpse tethered to the board. Additionally, the chorus is livelier and fuller than the verse, the movements just described – of the father and the boat – serve to bracket a segment of the melody. Here, effort is needed to keep the melodic line moving upward and the weariness of the voice reflects this difficulty. This audiovisual ‘snapshot’ points to other moments of weariness and labor in the verses.

Chorus 1: Shots 13-17

The chorus’ music is lilting and soothing, yet the image leaves us to our own devices, as the instances of close synchronization between music and image become more sporadic. Despite the lack of direct music/image pairings, a more subtle kind of connection derives from the repetition of simple shapes. Three breaking waves correspond to the fully orchestrated chorus while isolated pairs – two houses, two hands, two feet, balled head and hand – match the thinly textured verse. As in many music videos, this repetition of small numbers of objects in successive images helps us to chart the flow of the song’s form.

Chorus 1 closes with a long shot of the father pushing the boat with his daughter in it. Because this cut is so abrupt, we may feel set adrift. Within the rhetoric of narrative film, a long shot at the end of a section typically suggests that the viewer possesses some insight and is prepared to move on to the next sequence; here, however, we have no idea what the man is doing or why. The image might show a pastoral scene with a father spending an afternoon with his child just as easily as a suicide or murder. Perhaps the man is the spiritual guide in shot 1, or the rower who carries a drowned body tethered to the bow in shot 2. The viewer must watch, without knowing the meaning of the scene and yet sensing that the song’s chorus is drawing to a close. This produces a sense of anxiety, even impotence (fig. 13.6).

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone

.

Sectional Divisions

Repeated viewings of ‘Mercy St.’ show that its verses are oriented toward the individual, the intimate, the secret and the illicit; those in the chorus explore personal relations and provide the narrative; and the music and image of the instrumental sections are objective and resolute. This represents an unusual rhetorical structure for a music video. In most videos, the verse traces the plot and the chorus presents a more general observation. In this video, the chorus carries the burden of the narrative. In the first chorus, the father takes the girl out to sea. They acknowledge and confront each other in the second chorus. The third chorus shows the father abandoning the daughter or assisting in her death. Though the verse shows the effects of Sexton’s grief – her prayers, her writing, as well as her shock treatments – these images tell of a general truth more than a particular story. We know that the heroine is doomed, in part, because the placement of the imagery against the song departs so far from most pop songs.

Individual sections of the song grow and diminish. The verse becomes shorter each time it appears. By contrast, the chorus seems to grow out of the B section of the verse. The chorus also contributes to the song's transitory nature: ten measures long, instead of the expected eight, it creates a subtle hesitation and keeps the song slightly off-balance. In response to the stretching and shrinking and general unpredictability of sectional lengths, the video plays with the length of time occupied by sequences of images. Most shots last about five seconds, but a few last much longer. In verse 2, the shot of the hand fills the frame for twelve seconds – the total amount of time taken by three shots from the previous verse. This shot suggests that the video's materials can be stripped bare.

Each kind of section – chorus, verse, and instrumental – can be understood to have its own affect. The final chorus gains strength through greater expressivity and grain while the verses gradually seem to wane. By contrast, the instrumentals hold fast. They maintain a consistent length and seem isolated from other sections. The final instrumental's performerly touches – the Andean flute melody becomes more emphatic and the percussion more prominent – function simply as a means of enhancing the instrumentals' resoluteness. The instrumentals hint that a sense of extreme distance, of being ‘beyond’ things, is a state one must experience. Both final sections feature high-angle shots that observe rote activities.

The beginnings of musical sections are marked by threshold imagery (a hand pulling out a drawer) and the ends of sections are matched with images of closure (the father leaving). Formal shaping within sections is partly determined by the image of the woman’s head. Partial views – the crown of her head or her half-seen face – occur mid-section. The ends of sections are announced by her face filling the frame. Her head position cues us to the level of musical continuity: when it faces the camera, there is a sharp break between verse and chorus. A less frontal head signals a smoother transition.

I was forced backward.

I was forced forward.

I was passed hand to hand

like a bowl of fruit.

Instrumental 1

One hand passes a piece of cloth to another, but the image and music seem disconnected. On the one hand, the visual activity may tempt us to anticipate an approaching event, perhaps a funeral or wedding. On the other hand, the melancholic flute draws our attention to the past, perhaps by way of an allusion to the panpipe solo in Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘El Condor Pasa,’ a version of a traditional Peruvian tune.[10] In addition, the plaintiveness of the Andean flute melody suggests subjectivity and, more strongly, a sense of loss, encouraging us to review what we have seen thus far. Because the image’s and music’s temporal cues conflict, the viewer’s attention is drawn in two directions.

Suddenly

a wave that we go under.

Under. Under. Under.

We are daring the sea.

We have parted it.

We are scissors.

Here in the green room

the dead are very close.

Here in the pitiless green

where there are no keepsakes

or cathedrals

Arrangement

By reflecting the sense of fullness or emptiness in the musical texture, the image hews to the music. At the opening of the chorus, the song becomes more densely orchestrated, while the instrumentals are more sparsely textured. This reduction in sound does not work as it might in disco, for example, in which the listener can find pleasure in the sparser texture of the break by inhabiting the song’s underlying groove. Rather, in ‘Mercy St.,’ the more thinly orchestrated sections constitute moments of abandonment. As the synthesizer pad is removed, the bottom drops out. Additionally, the voice cracks and threatens to break apart, becoming almost inaudible. The video responds to these moments of fullness and emptiness. As previously mentioned, in the beginning of the choruses, the image becomes more dense (the shots of water), and in more thinly textured sections, it seems to wane (a searching hand or a murky cross). The image plays with the music’s threat of absence by itself threatening to blink out. The edits shift from patches of slow dissolves, to quick fades to black, to firm cuts to black. ‘Mercy St.’’s most frightening moment may occur when an image of the father and the boat dissolves into a long stretch of pure black.

The image's content reflects that of the melody's. As the video unfolds, things lose their specific characters, becoming simply undefined shapes. First we see a house, then the shadow of a house, next a rounded head, and finally a hand and a head. This last image, however, is more like two abstract circles of light than a human body. By the time we see the head, it seems like a raised surface with indented areas. Because the video begins with a small cluster of images, the moments when the material flattens out are even more disturbing.

Similarly the vocal line, because it eschews either teleology or embellishment, comes to resemble the video's simple forms. The singing at times is only murmured; the melodic line falls or wanders. The chorus's vocal line, on the other hand, is distinctly hymnlike, composed of several simple lines, with clear voice-leading and without ornamentation. The voice moves impassively through the musical texture toward its own destination: it reminds one of Lutheran hymnody in its steadfastness and purity. Its refusal to be altered begins to seem recalcitrant.

The image not only simplifies, it becomes indistinct. Though the image relies upon simple forms, photographic techniques render them as vague contours and fields. It can be hard, at first, to make out the figures, both those that are high key against a black background and those shot in very low light and a middle gray. Similarly, the arrangement is deliberately indistinct at times, despite the clarity of its registral scheme. In the song’s highest register, the arpeggiating synthesizer part blends with the triangle instrumental, the parts fading in and out of the mix rather than entering discretely. Gabriel’s baritone is often recorded with a lot of reverb, doubled at the octave, and multitracked. In addition, three different analog synthesizer patches overlap in the mid register, all of which project long reverberations. A heavily processed sound that seems like backward distorted guitar – but may in fact be a saxophone – helps to close sections. The conga, surdo, and fretless bass form a murky rhythmic stratum in the lowest register.[11]

For months my hand had been sealed off

in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.

Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,

and that is why they have locked it up.

But when I looked in it lay there quietly.

Verse 2

Verse 2 is immediately preceded by an image of textured black along with the ‘backward guitar’ sound. The opening of this verse pulls the viewer over a threshold: its music contains more reverb, additional vocal samples and an extra synthesizer pad. Objects and figures fall more aggressively from the top of the frame. The hollow space of the drawer and the blurry images of the hand and paper complement two features of the reverb – its distorting effect as well as its sense of space. Not only the music (the isolated words, like ‘nowhere,’ overdubbed on separate tracks), and the lyrics (‘word upon word’), but also the images point to distant memories (fig. 13.8).

Verse 2’s audiovisuals may evoke moments when dream images seem to take control of the body. The open drawer suggests an abyss. The hand loses control and drops the drawer and the knees give way and land on soft grass. The flickering light on the sheet of paper resembles water, and the creeping shadow dimly recalls the shadow of the foot in the opening shot. Because the paper’s text, which potentially contains secrets, is illegible, one becomes a voyeur hungry for more information.[12] As in verse 1, verse 2’s lyrics ‘like bone,’ ‘handle the shocks,’ and ‘father’ seem to pierce through the texture. The image of feet, wrapped in cloth and stretched out on the linoleum floor, as well as the fragmentation of the text, suggests a woman who is institutionalized and attempting to escape her past, as well as the anointing of feet as part of a funeral rite.

The section closes with three staggered entrances across media: image, lyrics, music. A woman prays, the text ‘Mary’s lips’ comes to the fore, and the synthesizer’s arpeggiated figure returns, matching the repetitive motion of the lips (fig. 13.9).

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