For his 2014’s electronic-pop hit Bugatti, Canadian producer and DJ Tiga releases a very interesting video showcasing an obsession for pop culture that pervades his music and his visual style. Defined hallucinatory or like THUMP comments on Youtube, “like a Wes Anderson movie on techno and acid,” Bugatti’s cinematographic style revolves around repetition, different camera angles and subliminal sexual messages.
In the first 50 seconds, before any vocal part is introduced, we visually follow the track’s drum rhythmic in a sequence of aestheticized images of retro-vintage technologic objects (an old grey computer typewriter, an old computer screen-box with floppy disk, an old TV monitor) plus a domino construction, an ice cube falling into whisky spilling it outside the glass, shave-foam being spread out of its container, an analog clock moving from 11:59 to 12:00 pm, ski scenes and a female mouth exploding a chewing-gum bubble sticking to its lips.
This listing gives us the thematic universe the video will further develop and the cinematographic details it will work on. When we see a hand closing the door, we see it from different perspectives: a right hand closing the door from the right to the left and the opposite, a left hand closing it from left to right. When we see a floppy disk being inserted in the computer, we also see it coming out. The hands tiding up the shirt around the neck are showed both from a male and a female. The blu TV screen is always being both turned on and off at the same time. We see the turning on moment (hell blu to blurred blu) and the off moment (a sort of grey cross appears on the screen before pitch black). But we don’t see the ice cube jump out of the whiskey glass, which would turn the video into the surreal realm.
Girl comes up to me an says What are you driving And I say Bugatti
At this point the female sexual world breaks through and appears the be the main focus of the central part. Female lips in red lipstick, stylized women with sunglasses on a ski vacation, women’s red heels. Multiple women, mostly undressed, sing the lines of the text while Tiga only appears to say “Bugatti”. The epitome of this ends up with a secretary’s ass getting spanked, with the following scene always being the boss pouring ketchup on his hamburger in a disturbing sexual subtext. Furthermore, we see a women spreading and closing her legs through the lenses of three TV-screens. During this whole second section the loop-like style is more tighter and repetitive. Same scenes are shown multiple times without breaks or variations in between as before. The effect they give is more claustrophobic, as though we cannot escape what we see and the underlying meaning of the sequences. The double perspective or finer detail of the first part is lost here, the structure is neat and impeccable but much more one-dimensional and we appear to be stuck in time and one point of view: girls getting undress for the pleasure of mens.
By minute 1:36 the video enters a new section where we see a comeback of the detailed-approach of the beginning and a multi-perspectivism which gives the video a more abstract and complex tone. At what seems to be a house party a 360 degrees camera movement (which until now has been predominantly still) shows both men and women consuming mostly alcohol. When being framed, they consume and the camera moves on. After this we move in an imaginational club with Tiga dancing in the middle affianced by two rows of partygoers remembering many fashion-spots composition (https://youtu.be/JiSQHJ_a5Z0 Tom Ford SS16). Great attention is given to the cloths, mostly white pants and scintillating colorful tops and jackets.
Just after this scene finally the bass line kicks in and all the visual element start coming together. The domino line gets kicked down by some women’s feet wearing heels, a women looks outside the window moving her eyes left and right, a reference to James Bond is seen and some Bond-like figures fall down like domino, Tiga is shown to sing from a frontal and sideway perspective. The mirror motive starts dominating the scene. Tiga is shown wearing eyeliner and we see him through the mirror. He suddenly turns back and looks into the camera. The look in the camera movement is more and more frequent, Tiga surrounded by other people in yet more colorful stylish clothes sing and move their head according to the camera point to view, each time introduced by a clear cut.
An Andy Warhol figure is shown drowning in ketchup — a reference to his famous video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejr9KBQzQPM Andy Warhol eating a Hamburger, where he dips his Burger in Heinz Tomato Ketchup, following his obsession for tomatoes started with the Campbell’s Tomato Soup Cans prints. We see a girl playing an 80’s car videogame from a videogame machine called BUGATTI (the only textual reference to the title in the video). We see burning scenes (cigarettes, a man, a bugatti car-model). We see shooting scenes. A man shooting to his shadow, the shadow shooting back. A women-shadow shooting to a man-shadow and a man-shadow slapping a women-shadow in her face. The pink gum explosions, the whiskey, the telephone all come back and get intersected with other scene in a growing tempo ending. The video ends with two mens giving a handshake. One starts burning and the other pulls the hand of the first one but instead separates his whole arm and walks away.
An interesting thematic element that intercures through the whole video is the ski. People are shown wearing winter clothes, ski glasses and ski boots. Winter is the season of the video and contrasts to the hot and nakedness of many women represented in it, the dichotomy blending together perfectly in the women in a white bodysuit opening the zip in a strip-tease-like attempt to show hear breast. Outside of the window of the Twisted scene the setting is in the mountains and it’s all cover in snow. On the hot side we have fire, the red of the tomato elements, the red lipsticks, shoes, fingernails and so on. The two universes blend together, as in the strip-tease-like scene we already cited or in the natural fact that all this winter elements are constructed: it is a matter of style if Tiga wears scarf and heavy knitwear and we constantly are confronted with this clothing season. Most simplistically, the fact that they wear sunglasses all the time gives us the idea of the coolness of winter collections merging into the coolness of summer collections. This stylist element also reverberates thought the thematic, motivic and semantic level.
The mirror motive that starts appearing near the end of the video has to do with the seen/unseen dichotomy. It’s interesting to note that the women looking through the window does it with the shutters down and only leaves her eyes undiscovered. It is symptomatic because you can’t see without being seen back, at least through your eyes. This is made clear by the turn from looking into the mirror to the camera scene where Tiga stops putting eyeliner and enigmatically turns to the viewer, where the viewer gets the feeling to have been guiltily discovered snapping into other people’s affair. The unseen influences what is seen and we find this every time that Tiga moves his head at the camera movement’s command — that is, our point of view’s command. But mirror also has to do with the idea of the copy. The shadows are all copies we find in mirroring effects or light effects in general (which all undergo the abstract viewing category). Same here, the copy interact with the original, the best example of which is when the shadow kills his original. Even the shadow can see somehow.
The importance given to the copy (or the simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms) is empathizes by how we see the women’s vagina in the first part of the video. Spreading her legs he never see it directly but only through a complex game of filming and screening that ends in a triple TV screen monitor. The indulgence by which the un-perfectly image of the monitor screen is showed (we can see lines of blurred colors running horizontally through the screen) marries the obsession for retro technology and its fashionable idea. The telephone, the TV, the tele-command, the videogame stall all are surpassed media already, thus being elevated to a status symbol. This idea of ironically recognizing the influence of the past and at the same time killing it while only maintaining a vintage aestheticized view of it is embodied by the countless Andy Warhol influences. Andy Warhol marked an era but it’s time to drown him in his own obsession, namely the tomato sauce.
It is not a case the we see a Bugatti car model getting burnt. The last part of the video is all about destruction and nihilism. Coke spilling over its glass, fishes being blended up in a smoothie blender, a women becoming countless fire offers for her cigarette (and, for the law of the double or the contrary, countless cigarettes for the fire in her mouth), again the whiskey, some dancing scenes, some paparazzi photograph of models, a men a women that inevitably falls down, a women’s shadow lying on a table and arching her back in a sexual pose, telephone digits, bubble-gums, ass spanks, fire, and so on. Nothing new as a narrative that underpins our western society and all its sadomasochistic weirdness and dadaist anti-meaning. The way it is cinematographically thematized though, appears to be compelling and complex. All the elements built up before the end get blended together in a faster tempo masturbation where we see the lines between incredibly dull and unmeaningful and incredibly charming and meaningful blur.
Especially the internal law of the video that everything can be shown by its opposite angle, and that everything interacts both ways is shown with great attention to detail and goes through all the levels of the video. We have a perspective doubleness between left and right when the hands opens the door. We have a metaphysical doubleness when the shadow kills the shadowed. We have time doubleness in which everything can be looped and showed again and again. We have a mythological doubleness when he symbolically kill Andy Warhol drowning in him in splashes of tomato ketchup. We have a viewer doubleness when Tiga looks back in the camera. Around minute 2:20 the eye movement of the women behind the shutters directs the Bond-like figure and the domino pieces to fall down in both directions, as time can go both directions.
In the end, great eye for detail and synchronism between internal narrative and external musical momentum make for a very interesting video, which has all the elements to become a cult music video, if it’s not already. As a Youtube commentator wrote below the THUMP reference to Wes Andersons’ style: “that's pretty insulting. Wes Anderson couldn't dream of something as good as this video.”