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"The World Tonight" - "Mary's Yella Brella Video"
In response to a diminishing
number of requests, here is my intuitive attempt to review Mary McCartney's
video of
Paul McCartney's song: The World Tonight.
OK, so there they
were all on holiday--Paul and Linda had gone to a lovely place, and they wanted
Mary and Alistair to visit them, for whatever reasons. Mary and Alistair did.
So Mary was fooling around with her(video)
camera, taking some shots, and maybe a beach umbrella got twirled. They were
sitting around looking at the shots, and somebody said, "Hey, we could make
a video here." (Paul reported that that was the genesis of the video to John
Fugelsang on the VH-1 "Town Hall Meeting" special) So, Mary, challenged, said:
"I want lots of color." So Paul went and looked at what he had brought with
him to wear on vacation, and the blue shirt looked good, and then! he found
the yellow and black pants (or possibly they were pyjama bottoms), and he
realized he had a chance to look thoroughly disreputable, so of course he
pounced on it. Linda had her yellow and orange outfit, and a black one, to
mimic Paul's black outfit, or vice versa, who knows? As luck would have it,
the shirt was not unlike the brilliant Mediterranean sky over them, and the
yellow picked up the yellow umbrella,and all of this has no symbolic significance
whatsoever. The colors just went nice together. And so, over the course of
a few days, one or another of them realized that the twirling umbrella was
like the earth turning, which was vaguely what the song was about. Thereafter,
in various outfits, Paul mugged happily for the camera, primarily to entertain
his family, and to express the musical mood of the song. This is a complex
song: the tune is bouncy, upbeat, with a jaunty strut to it. But the lyrics
are a different story: there is a lot of past pain being remembered in those
lyrics, a number of moments in which the poet wishes he could have sunk through
the floor in chagrin, or the agony of complete frustration. What he remembers
are not toes being stubbed, but falling headlong. The music expresses the
joy of discovering that those moments were not so bad after all, that they
have, surprisingly, fallen into perspective, that they can never hurt him
again. It's an unstructured video, a pure, probably communal work, in which
people said things like--"oh, the blue shirt looks nice walking in front of
the yellow umbrella--do some more of that". The "Beautiful Night" video, by
contrast, is highly structured - everything happens according to a very good
plot, and its quickening pace follows the dynamic arc of the song. But Mary's
TWT is purest home movie, made by a bunch of ambidexterous artists--not a
one of the assembled family was without a good sense of color, shape, movement.
The one who got to call the shots was Mary, the photographer, and in the few
photos I have seen from her, she loves intense color. And, as always, Paul
is "looking for ways to love" Linda. In the final shot, Linda looks as though
she's protesting gently to someone off camera, so Paul grabs her for a smooch.
A fine finale to a sun-filled,sky-aerated dance of an expression of a song.
When there is so much fun to be had with umbrellas, old clothes, and videocams,
who has time to contemplate mortality? The pain that must always have been
in a corner of their minds as they made this video might one day, like the
remembered defeats in the song, "only be a souvenir".
Carol Cleveland
