Decemberists - Calamity Song
The Decemberist’s “Calamity Song” video is a surprisingly literal presentation of the YDAU Interdependence Day Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest. I was impressed by the attention to detail — Otis’ computer is even running Pink2 — and Colin Meloy is an entertaining, if quite not a convincing, Michael Pemulis. But it wasn’t as gripping as I wanted it to be — I couldn’t make myself feel the tension on the court. Is a four-and-a-half-minute music video too short? It took DFW several hundred pages to get to that point. (And if you haven’t read the book, do, but probably don’t bother with the music video until you have.)
(And I really wanted to see Otis’ head get stuck in the monitor…)
Update: Lol, the director actually mourns that he couldn’t end the video that way.
Seeing even a portion of the beloved novel brought to life was “like a weird dream fugue,” he said, though he reluctantly accepted that his video could not end as the passage from “Infinite Jest” does, with a child’s having his head crashed into a computer monitor.
“They’re all flat screens now, and you can’t put your head through a flat screen,” he said.
