Criminal - Fiona Apple
Influences, Controversy and Analysis
by Adriano Gomes da Silva
Fiona Apple – a short
biography
Fiona Apple is
an alternative singer-songwriter, born in 1977 in New York City. Her debut
album, Tidal, was released to great
success in 1996, selling almost three million copies in the United States.
Apple was
classically trained on piano as a child, having started writing her own
compositions at the age of eight. Although her music can be categorized as
pop/rock, it also has a strong influence of jazz.
By the time
the song “Criminal” was released as the fifth single from Tidal (more than one year after the release of the album – in
September of 1997), Apple had already gained notoriety because of her brutal
honesty and unstable behavior in interviews. She had openly talked about the
rape she suffered when she was 12, and also about an eating disorder she
developed. It was also not unusual for her to cry during interviews and say
things like, “I’m going to cut another album, and I’m going to do good things,
help people, and then I’m going to die”.
This was the
public image of Fiona Apple when the “Criminal” video was aired on MTV: a
troubled, fragile, and talented girl with a traumatic past.
Mark Romanek – a short biography
Born in Chicago
in 1959, Mark Romanek started his career as a movie director. He made the film Static in 1986, with his longtime friend
Keith Gordon (the son in Brian De Palma’s Dressed
to Kill) in the lead role. His first job as a music video director was in
1986, when he directed the video of the song “Sweet Bird of Truth”, the band
The The.
His big
breakthrough in the music video world came in 1992, when he directed the videos
of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” and En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind”. Since then,
Romanek established himself as one of the world’s most sought-after music video
directors, having worked with Lenny Kravitz, David Bowie, Madonna, R.E.M.,
Michael Jackson and Nine Inch Nails in the following years. Two of Romanek’s
videos, “Bedtime Story” (Madonna) and “Closer” (Nine Inch Nails), have been
made part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Influences on the “Criminal” video
In the audio commentary
of “Criminal” (included in the DVD “The Work of Director Mark Romanek”), the
director cites the photographers Nobuyoshi Araki (1940-), Wolfgang Tillmans
(1968-) and Jürgen Teller (1964-) as influences on the visuals of the video.
The three are known for their provocative and groundbreaking photos (which, in
Araki’s case, include suggestions of bondage and other sexual fetishes). Romanek
also cites the “snapshot quality” of the three artists – and this influence can
be clearly seen on the cinematography of the video, with a main, sharp and
direct light on the singer (instead of the more diffuse lights commonly used in
videos).
Another major
influence in the look of the video is the “heroin chic look”, quite popular in
the middle of the 90s. Featuring waif-like models and allusions of drug use,
especially heroin, this fashion aesthetic started with the Calvin Klein ads
featuring a young and thin Kate Moss. In contrast to the supermodels of the
time – Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell –,
who were fully-formed, and had the aura of impossible-to-reach women, Moss had
the look of a “girl next door”, with the body of a teenager (she was 19 years
old when she made the campaign, so technically a teenager). And while the
aforementioned supermodels looked positively healthy, the heroin chic look had
models looking stressed, tired – the look of an after-party, much like the
“Criminal” video.
Controversy caused by the video
The biggest
controversy around the video was around the fact that, for many journalists,
Fiona looked underage – giving the video “overtones of child porn”. The singer
was described as being “slinking around miserably in her underwear” and looking
like “an underfed Calvin Klein model”, a “malnourished post-grunge Lolita”. Enough
controversy to secure the video a spot in Time Magazine’s list of “Top 10
Controversial Music Videos”.
In an article
entitled “Why Does Fiona Apple’s ‘Criminal’ Video Still Feels Shocking After
All These Years?”, published in April 2014, Giana Ciapponi mentions the heroin
chic look controversy and the singer’s appearance (she’s described as having
“teensy anorexic limbs”). At the same time, Ciapponi argues that, compared to
current videos of female pop artists, “Criminal” is much less explicit: “it's way
more subtle than today's straight-up nudity bandieed
about like so much popcorn”, citing Rihanna and Beyoncé’s videos as examples of
too-explicit current pop music videos.
Analysis
The “Criminal”
video takes place entirely inside a posh house, decorated with a 1970s vibe.
Because of the lack of natural light (among other aspects), it’s impossible to
tell if the video takes place during the day or during the night.
At first
glance, the video seems to depict the morning after a big house party. But this
can be also tricky to tell: do all the actions really happen after the party?
Wouldn’t some moments – like the home video shooting, for instance –be more
likely to happen during the party?
Romanek blurs the timeline, leaving to the viewer the power of creating an
order for the events.
(One can try
to divide the actions in two groups: one, when Fiona is actively interacting
with other people – taking photos of a girl, having her neck caressed by a
guy’s foot while in the bathtub; and two, when she’s alone in the room or when
the other people seem to be sleeping or unconscious – for example, when she’s
lying in bed with a man. The first group of scenes, with other moving
characters, can be interpreted as events happening during the party. The second
can be interpreted as the day after, Fiona being the only awake person at the
house, thinking about the night before and what she did)
Fiona’s first
words seem to work as a template for the entire video: “I’ve been a bad, bad
girl” (the media certainly seems to have agreed with that, since several
articles on the singer called her “a bad, bad girl”). Fiona’s smile when she
says the line – guilty and mischievous at the same time – forecast the singer’s
persona during the rest of the video. Is she having fun being “careless with a
delicate man”, as she sings on the following line? Does she regret it? She
certainly doesn’t provide easy answers for the viewer, looking alternately sad,
playful, scared and alluring.
The title of
the song comes from the chorus, where Fiona sings: “What I need is a good
defense, cause I’m feeling like a criminal”. But Romanek puts the viewer in a
similar, uncomfortable position: the viewer is a voyeur, checking the sexy bodies of the young people at the party.
The first thing we see is Fiona holding a camera in the direction of the
viewer; she takes a photo using the camera flash (and the flash emulates the
first beat of the cymbal), making the viewer a guest of the party – whether the
viewer wants it or not. The viewer may as well be a criminal, cause he’s a witness
to acts that may or may not be legal. In her book Experiencing Music Video, Carol Vernallis notes: “Connections might
be established between the title and the activities of the characters”. In this
case, the video extends this connection to the viewer also.
The strange
camera movements add to the impression that the viewer is watching something
that belongs to someone else’s private sphere. The camera turns left and right,
in a slow but steady movement, and whenever it reaches far left or far right,
it stops for a millisecond. It’s the standard movement of surveillance
cameras.
Fiona’s eyes
enhance this idea: they turn red when she looks directly at the camera,
alluding to the effect caused by photos with flashes but also nocturnal vision.
It also gives her a predatory look, as if she’s an animal – or a vampire.
During the
entire video, the only face we see is Fiona’s. All the other guests at the
party are either shown from their waist down, or from their back. This gives
them an almost inhuman quality: they can be seen as “props”, as much as the
teddy bears in the corners. This can also add to the idea that the singer is
using them for her own pleasure. As Vernallis points out, these figures “help
to define what the star is not”: Fiona has a face, she can express her
feelings; everyone else appears to be there to serve her.
The most
striking sequence in the video – and the most notorious one – shows Fiona
stripping in the house kitchen. The iris-quality of the images (a slight dark
border that forms a circle around the main image), already present in the
beginning of the video, becomes more accentuated during this sequence. It enhances
the feeling of witnessing something forbidden, sexy but at the same time
disturbing. The viewer may feel even more like a criminal. Fiona’s facial
expressions (and her apparent struggle to remove one piece of clothing) take
away most of the sexual allure of the sequence.
Again, the
ambiguity of the sequence is the most intriguing aspect of it. During the
strip, she sings the lines:
Heaven help me for the way I am
Save me from these evil deeds before I
get them done
I know tomorrow brings the consequence
at hand
But I keep living this day like the
next will never come
Her defiant
way of singing “like the next will never come” adds even more complexity to the
persona we see in the video. She refuses to be categorized as a victim; and
even if she’s a villain (or a criminal) and pleads guilt, she’s not saying
she’s going to change and become a better, more responsible person. She surely
looks fragile in the images, but the message is blurred.
As Vernallis
points out, Fiona’s persona in the video share a common theme with protagonists
from other Mark Romanek videos:
His
characters possess special powers and often partake in illicit behavior. Yet,
although viewers may be curious about the characters, they do not know enough
about them to form more than the beginnings of a story.
During the
song’s bridge, two sequences intertwine: the singer is shown in the back of a
car, half-naked, and also being filmed with a cheap VHS camera. Images of Fiona
in the car appear on a TV that emerge from the floor, as part of the VHS tape;
she’s also filmed in bed, before turning the camera away. Right after this
moment, we see a VHS tape next to a clock. Vernallis notes that “many videos
for women artists cut in their most provocative images during the bridge”. In a
way, this sequence may indeed be more provocative than the striptease in the
kitchen: could it be that one of the house guests made a sex tape of the singer
(this theory can be enhanced by the presence of a figure who sits in a chair
directly facing the bed)? Through this prism, the video looks like a sad
prescient of the “slut-shaming” cases that abound in the 2010s: girls who go to
parties, drink too much, then are filmed or photographed in sexual acts, and
have to carry the “guilt” while the authors of the images are left scot-free.
As the song
approaches its end, a different musical motive
can be heard: an oriental-sounding passage, brief, repeated twice. For this
moment, Romanek creates a unique image: a bottle of detergent, pressed by
Fiona, with the liquid floating in the air. The bottle and the way the liquid
spreads in the air can be seen as a reference to a genie coming out of a lamp –
a nod to the oriental sound of the passage.
It can also be
seen through a less candid light: given the fact that the entire video deals
with sexuality, the liquid would represent the orgasm. Romanek himself talks
about it on his DVD commentary; the association is almost obvious. It would
also explain the very last image of the video, a strange one: oranges floating
in a bathtub. In French, the orgasm is also called “le petit mort”, or “the
small death”. One of the most known appropriations of oranges as symbols occurs
in the Godfather films: whenever the
fruit appears, it means that a character will get killed (or an attempt to
murder someone will occur). The oranges in the bathtub can represent this
“death” caused by the orgasm – and, fittingly, they also signal the end of the
song and the video.
Bibliography
Ciapponi, Giana. “Why Does Fiona Apple’s
‘Criminal’ Video Still Feels Shocking After All These Years?” Ravishly.com. Ravishly.com, 25 April
2014. Web. 06 August 2014.
Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Extraordinary Measures.” NewYorker.com. Condé Nast, 10 October
2005. Web. 06 August 2014.
“Mark Romanek.” The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com, Inc., 2014. Web. 05 August
2014.
Murphy, Tim. “Strange Fruit: Fiona Apple.” WMagazine.com. Condé Nast, June 2012.
Web. 06 August 2014.
Steinmetz, Katy. “Top 10 Controversial Music
Videos.” Time.com. Time Inc., 06 June
2011. Web. 06 August 2014.
Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.
Weir, John. “Girl
Trouble.” Spin. 13.8 (1997): 84-91. Web.
07 August 2014.
The Work of Director
Mark Romanek. Dir.
Mark Romanek. Perf. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Fiona Apple, Nine Inch Nails.
Palm Pictures, 2005. DVD.