Sound And Vision: James Foley
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos directed by James Foley.
James Foley passed away a few weeks ago, which made me revisit some of his feature work and music video work. And it made me realize that his work is about divisions and schisms. On the one hand he has one foot in the past, and on the other hand one in the future. One of his early movies was the Madonna-starring Who's That Girl, for which he also did the music video for The Look of Love, using just clips from the film. The music video for Who's That Girl, the title track, on the other hand was directed by Peter Rosenthal, except for the few clips from the film in there. But I digress, as Who's That Girl is emblematic of the divide between past and future, being a screwball comedy that heavily references On The Waterfront, Bringing Up Baby Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, and Marilyn Monroe in general, but updates all of these for the MTV-generation.
You also have his erotic thrillers, Perfect Stranger and Fifty Shades Freed and Fifty Shades Darker, that all feel like they were made a decade or two too late. And his many neo-noirs, where the rub lies in the name of the genre, as seen in films like At Close Range (for which he directed the Madonna-music video for Live To Tell) and After Dark My Sweet.
The music video for True Blue (below) embodies this (post-)modernist approach to the past, being all in the style of doo-wop and fifties culture, full of pastel vintage cars, Madonna in stylish rock 'n' roll get-ups, and a general rockabilly approach to setting and look. The music video for Deep Purple's King Of Dreams (also below) feels similarly like a throwback to the fifties, where two teenagers fall in lust at a carnival ride. The edge here makes it more modern, where the carnival has some dark and noirish qualities that make it feel like a more nowadays approach to a fifties fling, the eroticism being more overt and the danger more clear.
Another divide is between his feature work and music videos. Films like Glengarry Glen Ross, At Close Range, Fear and The Corruptor all show Foley as a man's man, who is interested in machismo and masculinity. Whereas his music videos, like True Blue and his general approach to Madonna-music videos share a more frivolous or sensitive side. His music video for Papa Don't Preach (also below) is quite the sensitive approach to teen pregnancy as a topic. It ruffled feathers, mostly because it doesn't judge, which in the eighties was a novel approach to teen pregnancy. Madonna and Foley's music video for Papa Don't Preach is touching, and centers the point of view of the young woman going through her emotions after she gets pregnant, and when her father rejects her. It is feminine and feminist, showing a side to Foley he could rarely explore in his feature films.
Is this why he chose to direct his Madonna music video's under the pseudonym Peter Percher? It shows another true divide in his work, where on the one hand his music videos are made to be a wholly separate entity from his feature work, nom de plume and all. But there is also something inherently cinematic about King of Dreams and Papa Don't Preach. The weirdest thing about Foley distancing himself somewhat from his music videos is that they often align with the films he made, like Live to Tell for At Close Range and The Look of Love for Who's That Girl. He even was best man at Madonna and Sean Penn's wedding, which makes the use of a pseudonym all the more interesting.
Which brings us to Marky Mark's Hey DJ, (finally below, sadly in piss poor quality) which shows the two sides and world of Foley colliding in a car crash of a music video. Just like Foley believed in Madonna as A Serious Actor, which at the time was met with ridicule, he believed the same about Mark Wahlberg, then still known as a popstar. So his turn in Foley's Fear, as a serious, brooding villain was also met with some ridicule. How could we believe that guy from the Funky Bunch to be a serious actor, let alone a villainous one? Which is why it is even more baffling that Mark Wahlberg decided to release a tie-in track to Fear, which again, is a serious thriller about an evil stalker, with the fun and summery Hey DJ.
The careers of Mark Wahlberg and Marky Mark couldn't be more dissimilar, and the tones between Hey DJ and Fear clash violently. Which is why it is batshit insane to have a music video set in a nightclub, with Marky Mark as the emcee giving us all a good time in a colorful, gold-like setting, and then intersperse the footage with darkly blue hued clips from Fear. It is not working. This was the one time where a pseudonym might have helped Foley. The one time where having his foot in two different types of visual media, with two different tones, truly didn't work out in his favor.
