White Knuckles MV: My Interpretation
It’s funny that when Tegan was asked which song she could relate the piece “My Evil Twin: Mirrored Madness” to, she picked Closer. Tegan said that the art piece attracted her and she felt intrigued by it. When I saw it, I felt so attached to it. I wrote poems about it and I tried to analyze it on my own. The subject of twins and the self and the other is of great interest to me, as most of you know, so seeing the White Knuckles MV today was basically a gate to many theories and more thoughts about everything I have tried to link together. The music video is full of connotations in my opinion. It discusses the relationship of two who are stuck together but also separate in different ways.
My Evil Twin: Mirrored Madness: The art piece was created by the Canadian artist Janieta Eyre, who is famous for her contemporary art of women separated in two halves. To forget all analysis and focus on the piece and how it is related to the WK MV, we’ll have to focus on the idea of the two halves in the entire MV—the binary oppositions. There is a boy and a girl. There is Sara and Tegan. There is black and white. Two are running towards each other. There is also a mirror, which is highly connected to the title in my opinion. Sara has stated many times how androgynous she is and how occasionally she feels like a boy. I’ve noticed that the music video starts with the man then with Sara, then with the man and then Sara. When it’s time the girl appears, Tegan appears after her for several shots until it is Sara’s turn. I believe the man represents Sara and the woman represents Tegan. The dancers represent their inner selves, the struggle inside, the longing to be separate and whole, the idea of connectedness. You can see the dancers trying to be whole and complete by hugging themselves, but they are unable to feel whole, because each is only one half and in order to be a whole they have to merge, which happens at the end with Sara and Tegan merging, as well as the dancers (or the souls of TnS).
Mythology: This moves me to a very old theory that I always thought of. Remember the demos? The Red Demo, Orange Demo and Yellow Demo? Remember what was drawn near Sara and Tegan’s names? A sun and a moon. The sun in mythology and literature is a boy, the god is Apollo. The moon is a girl, the goddess is Artemis. Apollo and Artemis are twins and are in love. The dancers or the souls look a lot alike, they have the same hair, almost a similar body type, and the physical appearance is not different; much like Tegan and Sara themselves. Again, back to the boy and girl theory above, the dancers represent Tegan and Sara. Not only that, but the setting is the forest; Apollo & Artemis were also the gods of archery and hunting, which usually takes place in the forest. “I cried wolf, howled it at the moon.” Suddenly, the moon here has another meaning to me, because it could really mean Tegan, who’s given the logo of the moon in the demos. (I also remember Sara tweeting a picture that said Apollo a few months ago, correct me if I’m wrong).
Colors: The colors are also very important in my opinion. Why black and white? Well, the art piece previously mentioned is black and white, which could be influenced by it. Why else? Because black and white means two, it means opposites, means the original colors. These binary oppositions are important because, again, twins are opposites but they work together, they complete one another. But both Tegan and Sara and the dancers are dressed in white. White symbolizes not only innocence, purity, and goodness; but it also represents protection, safety and wholeness; and so they end up being whole at the end with their hug, it’s like they are actually merging into one.
I believe the MV can be interpreted in many ways, but I am sure it has very deep meanings and they had a part in it. I’m sure they suggested an idea or proposed it somehow. It’s very interesting and it can also work with many literary theories more than the binary oppositions one. I also think that Tegan and Sara started wearing black and white not because they just decided to one day, but because it means something to them more than style. And the music video is in black and white not because they wear these clothes and that’s their style (I mean, obviously Stop Desire is going to have so much colors) but because these colors have deeper meanings to them. Also, at the end the mirror is fixed again, so that rivalry is gone, they are going to live with their black and white, good and bad, with the differences, with this oppositeness—they are going to live in that mirror even though it causes so much madness and conflicts, they don’t need to separate because they’ll end up “dancing” on their own, trying to feel whole but are unable to. And I believe that’s what the relationship of twins is like. It’s complex, it’s more than love, it’s more than sisterhood or brotherhood, it’s more than friendship; it’s mainly a cycle of loss and confusion, chasing after the other while being far away, kind of like the cycle of the sun and the moon.
Also, I remembered the MVs of Walking with a Ghost, Hell, Call it Off, and Goodbye Goodbye in terms of the clothes and the mirror aspect. I believe that the entire Sainthood era dwells on these ideas implicitly because they were still in the process of fixing that mirror.
You can find the video of Tegan talking about the piece here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9piyOVt1AOI
An article about the art piece: http://canadianart.ca/must-sees/my-evil-twin/
Another article that talks about Janieta Eyre’s twins art pieces, which is actually VERY interesting and says a lot about twins:
http://canadianart.ca/reviews/janieta-eyre-galerie-samuel-lallouz/
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