For my first attempt at cultural criticism, I’ve chosen Coldplay’s song The Scientist. This has always been one of my favorite Coldplay songs, but it took on a completely new meaning for me after I watched the video.
It’s not a wildly popular song and the video isn’t provocative or controversial like those of club favorites like Rihanna or Lady Gaga, but it is incredibly haunting. The first time I watched it, my heart stopped for the last 10 seconds when the meaning of the video became crushingly evident.
Spoiler alert: if you haven’t already seen the music video, please watch it now.
On the surface, this classic is just another break-up song. We all know how those go – nostalgic, regretful, tugging unashamedly at our heartstrings to form a product we can identify with in good times and bad.
The beginning of the video is a little curious, starting out with the artist lying on a mattress, giving no clues as to the intent of the song. You realize within the first 10 seconds that the whole video is showing a sequence of events in reverse, but it’s playing tricks with your brain because lead singer Chris Martin is lip-synching the lyrics correctly, not backwards as it should be if this were truly a video on rewind.
The theme of taking a scene in life and rewinding it back also isn’t too revolutionary, so the viewer isn’t too surprised to see this video accompanying this song.
But when you see the girl’s body lying in the weeds, you’re sucked in – wild horses couldn’t drag your face away from your laptop screen until you’ve found out what happened to her. This isn’t a break-up song, this is a mourning song. Now the line “Tell me you love me/ come back and haunt me” makes so much more sense.
And when the girlfriend takes her seatbelt off (but the video shows her putting it on because it’s in reverse), I breathed an involuntary “oh wow,” realizing the point of the video.
Anyone grieving the loss of a loved one can draw a lot out of this song, but the audience is wider than that. After you’ve seen the dénouement of the video, the first half seems absurd. How could he just walk away from that tragedy? And why does he look happy (jumping over walls, looking like he’s out for a walk in the park…what?) That’s when I realized it’s a metaphor for anyone or who can trace his life back to a certain point – maybe it seemed insignificant at the time – that changed everything, possibly for the worse.
And that realization brings the whole video’s message into focus: it’s looking at your life in rewind, examining every tiny detail and looking at the results with the bigger perspective of the fact that life goes on. “Nobody said it was easy/ no one said it would be so hard.” This is true of everything in life: relationship ups and downs, jobs, illnesses, raising children.
If you look back at your life and you find that moment that changed everything for the worse (maybe you realize you did inadvertently cause someone’s death by rolling the window down and making them cold), the weight of the feeling, be it guilt or regret, can crush you. But what this video is really about is moving on. It’s an ode to the process of recovery and figuring out how to live with a memory so haunting that it should consume your every waking thought. But if it did, then you might as well have died with her.
After the initial anger, guilt, regret and sense of loss have faded, there is peace.
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