"Eat Your Young" music video & meaning
Performing Gender Roles & History Andrew & Ivanna are acting in a play within a video, emphasizing that gender is performative, not only for each other but for the audience who politely applauds. The play starts with an old-fashioned wardrobe, the man and the woman putting on the appearance of what society wants them to be. The man goes off to war as a soldier, and they both look bored in their roles - there is no excitement, fear, or sadness. The time period for the outfits seems to be WWI, just over 100 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Irish men enlisted in this war, facing the horror of the trenches, as well as violence from anti-English countrymen when they returned home.
The woman looks to older ideals of female beauty; the Venus de Milo was carved nearly 2000 years old and the legends of Venus are older still. She is portrayed by a Ukranian actress, reminding us of the most notable war of the present day. (This video seems to reflect themes from Swan Upon Leda as well.)
The play ends, Andrew & Ivanna bow, and resume their 21st century personas. As modern people who understand the problem of gender roles, and the futility of an endless cycle of violence, they want to believe they are leaving the roles and the problems of the play behind them.
But Eat Your Young is a song for the current times. Our "advanced" society is not peaceful, but has merely outsourced the violence of resource extraction, human abuse and animal slaughter. That meat hook still hangs over head and no one is safe. Hands and Affection The man loses an arm and a leg in the war. The woman loses both her arms trying to fit the ideal of Venus de Milo. This represents a loss of their humanity, and of the power to choose another role for themselves. The man is disabled and will have trouble working in the early 1900s. The woman has chosen a form where she can't do much beyond sit still and look pretty. (As a side note, the staging of missing limbs with black cloth against the black backdrop was minimal but effective.)
