Elastic Heart

“Elastic Heart” is a music video directed by Sia Kate Isobelle Furler, most know as Sia and also the singer of this song, and Daniel Askill, who had directed most of the music videos of this singer. In my point of view this video tells the story of a girl (Maddie Ziegler) and a man (Shia LaBeouf) that are trap inside a gigantic cage while they explain there discord relationship.

When this music video starts we can see two people, whom I take as a girl and her father. I believe that both of them are dirty and almost naked to represent their natural behavior, plus they often act like animal, what’s more, they even howl from time to time. Once again, this could be to let the audience know how their relationship is.

As regards the characters, the man seems to be weak and kind of a coward to me as he always tries desperately to find the way out of the enormous jail. The moment where we can see this represented is where the man tries to escape by climbing the cage, perhaps at the middle of the night, if you get to hear the lyrics you can apprehend her telling us that she suffers the most when the night comes. In that point we can see that he can’t leave her since the got a strong bond. But differently, the little girl produce the image of a cheerful lady who always sees willing to make the fragile bond between the stronger. We gat to appreciate this stage in the multiple occasions when she leaves the cage and immediately returned to cheer him up and even free him. Unluckily this never seems to work out.

From my perspective, this could be like this since the cage symbolise their relationship. In other words, this would mean although she knew she couldn’t stay any longer beside him, she can’t get apart no matter how hard she tries, just as her father. Maybe she knows that this man will always be part of her childhood as he was supposed to be forever part of her early memories.

Additionally, this might be the origin of the song’s title. She demonstrate that, as her heart has been split into pieces by the one who has to protects her during her youth, from now on she has as a result an elastic heart, that is to say it can’t be broken again. Whereas, a Video clip that this one has reminds me of was “Carousel” by Melanie Martines. Both have a strong use of metaphors and talks about an split. Nevertheless, the contrast I found is that Melanie’s video was  metaphoric as a result of her over meaningful lyrics and “Elastic Heart” has it  in there video as an artistic representation of what the author felt while writing it.

Here I will leave both videos if you like to watch it.

Elastic Heart by Sia

Carousel by Melanie Martines