Even the simplest situation can be made awfully complicated. Director Saman Kesh enlists narrator Bret Easton Ellis to solve yet another mystery for Placebo. This time we have projectile vomit, a slaphappy creep, a rash and a possibly spiked blue drink.
And, we also have some NSFW elements, so you might want to study this like a Zapruder Film in the comfort of your own home.
Placebo "Too Many Friends" is one of those great videos that can be easily summed-up in a couple bullet-points to a newbie — it's narrated by author Bret Easton Ellis and ends with a quiz — but also stands up to repeated viewings and close studies. The video is a mystery, but also a critique about how we've been lulled into submission by our digital devices and the well-chose pharmaceutical.
We recently chatted with director Saman Kesh via email about how the video came together, the irony of it all, and what it means — including how the video is slyly, if a bit coincidentally connected to The Dark Knight Rises.
Narrator Bret Easton Ellis — yes, the dude who wrote Less Than Zero — and director Saman Kesh (aka Saman Keshavarz) explore the anatomy of a seemingly simple scene that reveals itself to be far more complex upon closer inspection. But the moral here isn't the unreliability of perception; it's the danger of relying on technology and drugs that actually amplify, instead of serving our desires and fears.
