Watch this Video: The Objectified Man in “From the Sun”

In Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s disturbing new music video, a man struggles with emasculation and escaping a victim’s mindset.

Before you even watch the accompanying music video, “From the Sun,” the bouncy, psychedelic track from lo-fi New Zealanders Unknown Mortal Orchestra makes no secret of its contradictions. Over a warm, plucky guitar riff, singer Ruben Nielson, sounding a lot like solo-era George Harrison, cheerily informs the listener that “isolation can put a gun in your hand.”

Oh, it can? That’s nice. These fuzzy beats are giving me a summery high though, so I’ll just tuck that little nugget away for later.

The video for “From the Sun,” however, puts that darkness center stage, to disorienting, disturbing effect. A young man sits impassively while a group of art students subject him to a series of increasingly grotesque acts; drawing on his body, binding his hands, spitting and urinating on him. They twist him like a mannequin, get up in his face, search his features for displeasure. He adopts an open-mouthed look of numb exasperation throughout most of the clip, faintly grimacing as one man wraps duck tape around his legs. The bizarre exercise is bookended by two scenes of the man standing alone in the university bathroom after its over, staring bleakly into the mirror with lipstick and spit smeared over his face. 

Directed by Rick Alverson, “From the Sun” takes hefty cues from performance artist Marina Abramovic’s groundbreaking “Rhythm 0,” a 1974 piece in which Abramovic placed herself in a similarly objectified position. After informing her audience that they could use 72 pre-chosen objects upon her in any way they chose, Abramovic stood impassively for six hours. The public quickly abandoned their propriety, and began to aggressively manipulate Abramovic’s body; cutting her neck, poking rose thorns into her stomach, removing her clothes, etc. When the allotted performance time concluded, and a bloodied Abramovic stood up to leave, the audience ran out of the museum, escaping any confrontation they might face now that the piece was over. “Rhythm 0” is one of the artist’s most famous works, for the questions it posed about the distinction between audience and performer, violence enacted on the female body and public culpability.

In “From the Sun,” there’s another major figure that shares the screen with the objectified young man. The video actually begins with a tracking shot on a woman walking through the halls of the university, ostensibly a student come to participate in the art piece—if that’s what it is. As the other spectators continue to rip and tug at the man on the chair, the camera flashes back to this young woman, watching inscrutably from the sidelines. Later, she massages the man’s hands and face, then curls up next to him on the floor where his chair has toppled over. His face changes. He looks relieved.

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This is not the first time Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s videos have presented men struggling with agency in a sinister world. Similarly sunny tunes accompany the video for “Swim and Sleep (Like A Shark),” another contradictory ditty which probably deserves its own post. That stop-motion clip stars an exasperated toy doll, a hapless little fellow who is struggling with what it means to be a man. He gets caught masturbating. He catches his therapist tuning him out during a session for his own “rub-and-tug.” He reads a magazine labeled “Man Book” and tries to interest himself in boxing, before trying his hand at painting a horse. The horse in question, plus some passing teenaged vandals, begin to laugh at him. He can’t figure out how he’s supposed to act.

Which leads us back to “From the Sun.” This video shows a man who has decided not to act at all—either for the purpose of an art piece, or as part of an extended metaphor about the “victim” mindset plagues many modern humans.

The video poses a number of interesting questions. Who is being critiqued? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the young man? The easy answer would be yes—his body, and his self-worth are demeaned at the hands of these largely faceless aggressors. But he’s chosen to put himself in this position—he could be the instructor who proposed the work, or the student who volunteered. And what about the girl? Is she the intended object of critique, for not intervening, for being unmoved? Or is she a stand-in for the rest of the world, waiting for the man to pick himself up?

“From the Sun” is a departure from Abramovic’s piece in many ways, largely because the focus is less on the audience’s action than the central figure’s reactions. And its also interesting that Alverson chose to make a man the objectified figure in the video.  Is this man just a stand-in for the lead singer, the one who sings “I’m so lonely” in a chipper clip while the audience stands back and observes its work?

What seems a more compelling option is less obvious (and perhaps, entirely invented, but hey, that’s what you risk when you write about music) There on the ground is yet another young male figure waiting for a “Man Book,” someone to tell him the right way to act to get the right responses, the right intimacy. He wants a closeness that doesn’t involve making himself the object of the violence, or the dreaded enemy of all “real men,” shame and emasculation. But without movement, without agency, he’s stuck on the floor, waiting for someone else to massage his hands, cradle his body like they would their own.

Photo: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “From the Sun,” directed by Rick Alverson