The first Duran Duran hit video, “Planet Earth”, was produced in 1980. It was the only video actually shot with video equipment on a standard television soundstage, and it features an example of Duran Duran’s short-lived flirtation with the New Romantic trend. As it stands, “Planet Earth” is an exquisite example of the cultural/historical schizophrenia exhibited throughout the videos of The World Tour and later, but considered with its follow-up, “Girls on Film”, it dictates a possible manifesto for the road ahead, the globe trotting antics of “Hungry Like the Wolf”, “Save a Prayer”, and “Rio”.

The chorus of the song sets up the core of the “Planet Earth” video:

Look now, look all around - There’s no signs of life! No voices, no other sounds - Can you hear me now?!? This is Planet Earth - You’re looking at Planet Earth...

Dressed in their 18th century-reminiscent “Romo” outfits (Simon even wears cartoonish pirate pantaloons), Duran Duran are seen performing in some sort of ice cave, perched atop a glacier with no safe exit in sight (fig. 1).

Simon is seen alternately lying naked on a slab where he must dodge Constructivist graphic intrusions (fig. 2), engulfed in flames, or manically dancing at the edge of the glacier in front of the band. With their ruffled shirts and plaintive screams (Can you hear me now? sung into the void of ice), Duran Duran are positioned as 18th century men frozen in time, burdened by Modernist graphics, haircuts and musical instruments. They are Romantics in the Modern era, longing for lush gluttony in stoic Britain. There is a dual reference, both to Romanticism, which was a European experience afforded by the luxurious height of colonialism, and to the new 1980’s Capitalism, through which young British men like Duran Duran can colonize far reaches of the globe via rock music and cable television.

“Planet Earth” suggests not the youthful exuberance for creating a New Romantic era that surrounded the RoMo scene, but a longing for the original Romantic era and the socio economic global conditions that matched it, as if the second-rate redux isn’t enough. As pop stars they are part of larger socio-economic sphere in which their cultural products will be able to transcend actual spatial and temporal borders in a kind of constant motion outwards through geographical space and generational time; as signs within these videos, they can invent their own fictive world that allows them to retreat, to regress, to move inwards and backwards through history and mnemonic landscape.

Along with this sort of temporal displacement, “Planet Earth” also struggles with a displacement of erotic identity. In some of their videos to come, as is typical of the time period, the members of Duran Duran take on roles modeled after Hollywood-style leading men - Indiana Jones here, James Bond there - within Hollywood-style heterosexual romantic situations. E. Ann Kaplan, in Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture, defines this type of video as “classical”, based on the deployment of a “voyeuristic male gaze”, as outlined by Laura Mulvey in her seminal take on the dilemma of feminine spectatorship, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can have said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness...the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like...A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of a more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. [1]

Mulvey’s theory, a marriage of and reaction to Freud and Lacan, has most commonly been used by feminist scholars as a critique of such “old master” filmmakers as Hitchcock (filmmaker as sexual predator) and the aggressive eroticization of actresses such as Kim Novak (ingenue as unwilling victim of the scopophiliac rape). But Kaplan argues that the music video always functions in a space somewhere between “dominant commercial cinema” and a “studied, self-conscious” critique, leaving it up to the viewer to determine whether or not the video is “virulently sexist or merely pastiching an earlier Hollywood sexism”. So whilst a music video may play with certain “classical” cinematic modes, Kaplan concludes that on the whole, the MTV apparatus “seems not to be gender specific in its very mode of functioning in the manner of the Hollywood film. Across its various segments MTV constructs a variety of gazes that indicate address to a certain kind of male or female imaginary.” [2]

In Duran Duran’s videos, even despite the apparent emulation of or reference to masculine pop cultural icons, it is often not clear who the intended spectator is. Many of their videos including “Planet Earth”, make use of a narrative in which there is no call for a female role. Without a biological female to fetishize, Simon himself is clearly “styled accordingly...to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”. With his bare, hairless chest and vacant, dreamy stare of resignment, pinned to the slab by so many phallic graphic gestures (fig.2), it could hardly be said that in Simon the average heterosexual male viewer would find a “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror”. There are two things going on here: Simon’s lack of masculinity - whilst not quite androgynous, still an adoption of a passive, female pose - puts him in league with Kaplan’s critique of “hair bands” such as Motley Crue, who “have incorporated the feminine, as it were, making its actual presence superfluous...[their] feminized appearance seems rather to mark the absence of women as something desirable” [3] With Simon standing in for the ingenue and assuming the female role, the idea of an active/male gaze and passive/female object gets mixed up. Mulvey suggests that the standard problematic of Hollywood cinema is that the female spectator must force her self to “look” like a man. If “ultimately, Mulvey calls upon us (intellectuals, filmmakers) to convert passive pleasure into both critical acumen and a counter-cinema”[4], whilst we could say that MTV qualifies as at least one type of counter-cinema, serving as an arena for more liberal spectatorship, for it to function as the 24-hour commercial reel that it basically intends to, the viewer must necessarily resist the urge to convert that passive pleasure into critique.

Kaplan, who Robert Miklitsch rather cattily notes is mired in “a certain classical Marxism, a position that fundamentally differentiates Kaplan from a younger generation of American feminists who have stopped worrying about popular culture and learned to love it”[5], crystallizes the problem of talking about moving advertising images in binary terms of passive/aggressive: “MTV, more than any other television, may be said to be about consumption. It evokes a kind of hypnotic trance in which the spectator is suspended in a state of unsatisfied desire but forever under the illusion of imminent satisfaction through some kind of purchase.” [6] Miklitsch, after Kaplan, calls this kind of spectatorship “post-Oedipal: splintered, shattered subjects, we consume ad-segment after ad-segment in order to satisfy our finally insatiable desire for the phallus”.[7] With Miklitsch, the music video gaze becomes decidedly homosexual: “We” are not women cowering away from the male predator that is MTV, “we” are Oedipus finally admitting that we wanted Daddy to do it to us all along. The music video thus allows for the kinds of open-ended reads that 100 years of cinema still refuses.

Notes:

1. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol.16, no 3 (Autumn 1975) pp. 6-18.

2. Kaplan, E. Ann. "Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture". Routledge, New York 1987. Page 90.

3. Kaplan, 72.

4. Tinkom, Matthew, and Villarejo, Amy. “Keyframes: popular Cinema and Cultural Studies”. Pg. 9

5. Miklitsch, Robert. "From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism”. SUNY Press, 1998. Page 106.

6. Kaplan, 12

7. Miklitsch, 106.