In this post I am going to analyse One Republic's Music Video for one of the best known songs of 2008: Apologize. The are two Official music videos for this song, but I have chosen something that differs from the other analysis that I have done. This video purely represents symbolism of things related to the lyrics and it links well to the Godwin's theory of representation. Whatever the singer sings in the background we can it happening or there is a symbol appearing that makes us think and link everything into one piece.
We are being introduced to the music video by seeing a pen writing "
Apologize" on the letter. This might be for the audience, to make them aware that the music is about to start or just simply to a person writing a letter to the one he/she loves. When the music comes in we see a variety of shots focusing on the woman reading the letter and crying. The tears are the black ink which drops onto the letter. This means that the person writing the letter at the beginning was a guy.
In the next shot we can see males hands hitting the piano to the beat of the music. Because the music video is so full of symbolism, I think that the hitting and the beat that we can hear in the background might represent the heart beat of the person to another person in the music video.
After for about a minute we are being introduced to all the symbols that surround the lyrics. On the screen we can see a pen, ink dropping, feather which represents the old style pen, old style phone which also represents talking to another person, light which might represent change and evolution in something. The symbols are presented in the montage so the audience can take every one of them into account and come up with the idea and message the music video is trying to pass.
In the video we don't really see the main artist. The only that we can see him in is the one when he is singing to the hanging telephone. This was shot to represent him looking like his singing all the lyrics to the person on the other sing. And in the other bit, where we can see the same shot the song goes: "I'm holding on a rope" which may represent the link between him and the telephone handset. In the next shots we can see a variety of flowers that are all in different colour. They are all well grown and looking really nice and fresh which might represent the relationship between the two of the people before everything went wrong. There is also a shot of plastic hand which has a wedding ring on a finger (woman's hand).
When the lyrics of: "It's too late to apologize" are heard, we can see a shots of flowers opening and growing and juxtaposition of the woman crying and letting her tear drop on the letter that she got which is the letter from the right beginning of the music video. Her tears are from ink.
The ink tears might represent that the words that have been written by the ink on the paper hurt her so much that her own ones turn into the same material.
As we watch the music video further we can see that all the symbols that were before represented as rich/precious/fresh/gold are not starting to burn and are getting destroyed. So in my opinion the symbols that were represented in the video are making up their love together and we can see the letter and her crying that straight away put a message in our head that the love has disappeared. The same happens with the photo frame where we could see their own photo. It breaks and drops on the floor. The feather pen is burning as well which may imply that he will not be writing any more letter to her.
At the right end, we can see a shot on the letter burning with the only two words left on it which are:
"...love you." This creates a confusion for the audience because we don't really know now who is the letter from. If the letter was sent to her from him, maybe she did not read the last few words and this creates an unanswered question. Overall, the music video is very original and contains a lot of symbolism and meanings. It is very open to interpretations.
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