Breakdown of "Eat Your Young" MV - This is going to be a long-ass post because I went into hyperdrive...
My friend basically asked me to explain the MV of Eat Your Young and as you would have it... I did.
This will be very long, and It is completely okay if you don't read it... if you do, wow do you have time on your hands or you hyper-fixate like I do... [there may be typos because I was texting them the rant.]
[Disclaimer: there may be continuity issues, apologies in advance... and this is in no way a "concrete" interpretation, it is just what I felt and was excited to share. Feel free to drop in corrections or your own POVs... I would loveee to read them.]
First, the mv starts with two settings
we have the older people sitting, facing a stage with two human actors
the second setting is the children, facing away from the adults, and towards a puppet show setup.
This shows how the adults and children are shown different things, which divide their worldviews so much that they often don't see eye to eye.
Going a little deeper into this, the adults are shown a play where the actors are humans who have agency over their actions⊠it's more, "normal", or "serious"
whereas the children are being shown shadows and puppets, controlled by someone hidden away from them, they don't know who is controlling them, just that something "fun" is happening. This speaks to how we tell kids to blindly have faith in the "adults" since they know better.
Now, looking at the play on stage,
A man and a Woman, meet up, a few times (shown by them circling each other), fall in love, and then he proposes, and she acceptsâŠ
next, they need to choose the roles that they need to fulfill.
Notice how he picks her clothes, and she picks his⊠It shows that we want to tailor the person we want according to our own desires or needsâŠ
They try out combinations to see what fits the best, and land on "housewife" and "soldier" [indicates these are the conventional roles during WWII].
So she goes to her work and he goes to his.
They say goodbye to each other, full of love, hope⊠It's intimate.
(the onlookers are unfazed, like it's something that's "normal", although, being that vulnerable is always taken for granted).
The woman is reading a magazine "Looks", and there is a statue, "Venus de Milo" in between her and the mirror, Venus is the Roman goddess of beauty, so she's the epitome of perfection.
She's basically trying to become perfect for her husband who is still at war⊠so that when he comes back home, he would still finds her appealingâŠshe ends up painting her face grey like a marble statue, which points towards the unrealistic standards we hold ourselves toâŠ
He comes back from the war, with an arm lostâŠ
The woman is "perfect"
it makes him ashamed, but it comes out as "disgust"⊠so what does she do⊠she becomes the broken statue. Loses her "perfection" and just becomes an object for his needs and wants.
(notice how when he enters without an arm, an arm enters the puppet stage
and when she covers her arm, another comes out in the puppet stageâŠ
I think it is a way of saying that the "hands that are lost, are showing the way to the kids, in a way they are being told things by hands that do not exist" types.
Those hands are "enticing" the kids rn⊠playing with the shadows and all thatâŠ)
Back to the stage that the adults face, they see that the couple has given birth to a boy
The man and the woman "loom" high above the kid, as a sign of being bigger than he is.
The man shakes the boy's hand. Usually, a parent would "hug" their child⊠but that wasn't the case for that generation. They needed to be "tough" because how else with the kids learn to deal with the harsh world.
The parents then give the kid toys⊠he picks up a doll, and the father, clenches his fists and then takes it away because boys do not play with dolls⊠Pushing the gender roles to the max, the boy becomes violent⊠where he starts smashing shit so what does the mother do? She disciplines him and takes away his "angry" hand (which then reappears in the puppet shows... The puppet show was only showing the happy side of the family⊠nothing goes wrong until the kid's hand comes in and just smashes everything and removes the "disguises" of the parents.)
The father then picks the role for the kid, and then the kid disappears (which I believe indicates that we lose ourselves trying to fit into the mold our parents choose for us)
The play ends with a hook behind them⊠that kind of hook is usually for hanging big fish (or meat)⊠and they've basically "eaten their young"
on the puppet show side, the kid's hand pulls out a fridge which shows the kids the ugly reality and therefore they are scared and they run backward
but instead of it being towards the "adults" it's into the darkness.
