Popscreen - The Editors

The Editors
“Munich”
Dir. Soup Collective



The Editors are masters of the non-sequitur. While it’s no surprise that their video for “Munich” is unrelated to the song—they do, after all, try painfully hard to be arty—nothing seems to be related to anything else at all here. The title and the visuals seem to be totally unrelated to the lyrics, which are a fairly standard sub-Interpol: elliptical and dark.

The video cuts black-and-white footage of the band, playing in some vague dark space, with images of athletes in motion, also in stark black-and-white. The athletes are shown in rapid-motion superimposed freeze-frames, making a tennis serve into a fan of limbs. Who plays tennis with no net in the dark? It looks pretty neat regardless.

It’s best to just look at the video as spectacle and not statement. While it’s possible that there is some sort of connection between its elements (perhaps it’s about the Munich Olympics?), odds are that the band just wanted a video that would make people go, “Ooh, cool,” happened to see some freeze-frame photos of athletes, and thought it would distract their fans from the fact that they sound exactly like The Bravery.

There are worse goals. The video is original without being particularly innovative, playing like an unusually well-done and non-bombastic Gatorade commercial. The band footage is unmemorable, and the athlete sections, while fun to look at, aren’t exactly groundbreaking. It’s a bit dreamlike, but it doesn’t have that ecstatic, unhinged feeling that pervades the best strange videos. It might grab your attention for a moment, and it might even make you thirsty for a sports drink, but the video certainly won’t stick with you.



—Elisabeth J. Bloomberg