The Big Picture

  • Director Jonathan Glazer's films share a mood of spooky alienation but don't have a clear throughline connecting them, which may be why his music videos offer a different way to connect with his work.
  • Glazer's early music videos pay homage to Stanley Kubrick, but he also has his own distinct style. While Kubrick's ghosts are consumed by the spaces they haunt, Glazer's ghosts are trapped in those spaces but maintain their own selves.
  • Glazer's collaborations with Thom Yorke, particularly in Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" and "Karma Police" music videos, highlight Glazer's tendency to present the human body as conquering space and his unique approach to portraying complexity through impassive faces.

Director Jonathan Glazer is best known for his feature films. However, The Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and comes out this December, will only be his fourth film, and his first in 10 years. His movies have been in wildly different genres. Sexy Beast was a gangster movie, Birth was a family drama with a supernatural twist, and Under the Skin was science fiction mixed with body horror. His films definitely share a mood of spooky alienation, but beyond that, it isn't that easy to find a throughline connecting them. Fortunately, Glazer has an entire other body of work to look at for inspiration. Glazer rose to prominence as a director of music videos. He uses many of the same expressive techniques in his music videos and his films, but they're different mediums, with different audience expectations. The same focus on mood over plot that can seem deliberately withholding in a film is a traditional element in a music video. And so, it might be a little easier to connect with Glazer through his work in this other medium.

Jonathan Glazer's Earliest Videos Pay Homage to Stanley Kubrick

Jonathan Glazer transitioned from directing commercials to music videos in 1995, the year he was hired to direct the videos for MassiveAttack's "Karmacoma" and Blur's "The Universal." Both of the videos he came up with borrow heavily from individual films by the legendary director Stanley Kubrick — The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, respectively. When giving an interview about Under the Skin in 2013, Glazer was frank about how much he felt himself to be a product of Kubrick's influence. “I’ve picked his pockets, really," he joked, self-deprecating, "People politely say ‘homage,’ but I probably stole his wallet.”

There's certainly a spiritual connection between the two confrontational directors, and of course, Kubrick was a trailblazer who made a lot of room for subsequent directors to experiment, even in commercial spaces. But, Jonathan Glazer is a different person, so he's inevitably going to have his own distinct style. Here, because he sets himself in direct comparison with Kubrick, those distinctions are apparent. The video for "Karmacoma" is set in a hotel with haunted vibes. Sound familiar? The references to The Shining are unmistakable; there's a set of ghostly twins, and a typewriter repeatedly punching out the same phrase. Broadly, the concept of the video is that there's a tormented soul in every room, each with a story to tell. That seems very similar to Kubrick's presentation of The Overlook Hotel, which, beyond the famous room 237, memorably included a glimpse of another room where a couple of genteel ghosts are apparently engaging in some fursona play.

But Glazer and Kubrick have different takes on the relationship between these spirits and the space they haunt. While Glazer's ghosts are trapped in a hotel, Kubrick's have been consumed by it. All the ghosts in The Shining, despite maintaining some of the trappings of their human lives, seem to have "become" the hotel and lost their old selves. You don't get that feeling from the "Karmacoma" video. This might seem like a pretty silly point to make, but it defines something consistent about the two directors' approaches. Kubrick presents humans who have been taken over by the space, or the system, enveloping them. In Glazer's work, the self is transcendent and defines the space it occupies.

Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" Music Video Shares Similarities With '2001: A Space Odyssey'

In 1996, Glazer directed the iconic video for Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity." The instantly recognizable video was a huge breakthrough both for the band and for its director. The video combines lead singer Jay Kay's dance moves with an ingeniously designed set that has moves of its own. The video is viscerally present in the cultural memory — you can call it to mind with just a few choice words: it's the video with the "moving floor" and the "big hat." So it's tempting to think of it as the work in which Glazer finally left Kubrick behind. And yet there are hints that it is as indebted to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as "Karmacoma" was to The Shining. Most obviously, the song is anxious about the future and "new technology," while the video takes place in a jarringly furnished white room.

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But in particular, the set that Glazer had built for "Virtual Insanity" just seems like an idea you'd come up with if you were trying to answer the magnificent rotating set that Kubrick constructed to represent the Discover One, the ship which HAL 9000 and friends take into space. And, on a much smaller budget, Glazer did manage to equal Kubrick in engineering prowess, as both sets create the illusion of what seems like impossible movement. This may be the picked pocket that Glazer got away with.

Jonathan Glazer's Best Collaborations Were With Thom Yorke

Also in 1996, Glazer directed the video for Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)." It was the first of two videos he'd direct for Radiohead, before collaborating with UNKLE, a band which, like Radiohead, features Thom Yorke vocals. The "Street Spirit" video makes a much better case than the one that fully departs from Kubrick. In it, the members of Radiohead play the residents of a trailer park, sharing a somber, self-reflective night under the stars. Shot in striking high-contrast black and white, the video features Yorke singing while he and his bandmates interact with their environment in a way that combines dance with the self-destructive stunts of a proto-Jackass crew. It highlights the way Glazer tends to present the human body as conquering space, and builds to a signature Glazer moment of full transcendence over the earthly realm.

For "Karma Police," Glazer places Yorke slouched in the backseat of a '70s Chrysler. The car appears to have no driver — or is it powered by Yorke's pulsating sense of ennui? It drives itself down a lonely road on a dark night, pursuing a terrified man, trapped in its headlights. The lyrics of the song, in which a mystical police force deals out justice for boorish behavior, seem to imply that this man is finally getting what's coming to him. The camera pans back and forth from the man to Yorke, supremely bored by the entire affair. And yet, as a face of pure manic rage often signifies pure emptiness to Kubrick, a character entirely possessed by an external force, to Glazer, an impassive face often conceals complexity. The video ends with a twist, with the murder-car sparing the man's life, while offering up its own.

"Rabbit in Your Headlights," Is Most Similar to Jonathan Glazer's Feature Films

The video for "Rabbit in Your Headlights," by UNKLE is frequently chosen as Glazer's best. Starring Denis Lavant as a mysterious figure who appears at first to be an unhoused person experiencing a mental health crisis, the film is set entirely inside an auto tunnel. Lavant, wearing a hooded parka, stalks purposely down the street, angrily spitting out words that don't make sense (when we can hear them). The ballad is sung softly in the background, frequently dropping in volume below the angry honking of cars that are forced to steer around Lavant. Finally, Lavant is knocked over by a car, which keeps driving. But, he gets up and keeps walking. He's struck again, more forcefully. But he gets up again and continues. Again and again, the repetition unmistakably evokes the casual violence that society is structured to dispassionately inflict upon the unhoused. Until, in the final moment, the man triumphs over his environment. It's the video that feels most like one of Glazer's films.

Glazer prefers to express himself with a certain level of abstraction. Though his films are highly regarded, they can also seem unapproachable, because none of them can be fully understood as a conventional story. And yet, simply looking at his work in the context of a different medium, where communication through visual poetry is expected, reveals an artist eager to connect with an audience. It's more apparent in that work what he wants to give us: the thrill of despair blossoming into spiritual transcendence. And this idea also plays, subtly but significantly, in all of his movies.