Wake me up
Two realizations hit me when I first saw the music video for Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”
1) The song isn’t about school. Ten-year-old me had unquestionably thought Green Day hated the first month of school just as much as I did. Being 10 years old, I didn’t completely listen to the lyrics, but I heard words like “pain” and phrases like “ring out the bells” and figured it all added up.
I wasn’t completely wrong in my thinking. The song was written about lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s father, who passed away in September 1982 when Billie Joe was 10, but also has come to represent the pain produced by 9/11, as evinced by the video, and even Hurricane Katrina victims, to whom the song was later dedicated. So the song is really about any hardship that haunts someone during the month of September, but syllabus week (did they have that in fifth grade?) and the like isn’t what most people had in mind.
2) Upon first viewing the video, it hit me that a music video can be more than girls, cars and colors. For the first time, I enjoyed the music video as much as the song itself. The two elements combined to tell a painfully beautiful story in just more than seven minutes.
If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you have, here’s a refresher: The video focuses on a couple, played by Jamie Bell (Nymphomaniac: Vol. II) and Evan Rachel Wood (Barefoot). They are young and caught up in each other. Standing in a field before the song begins, he says “I just want this to last forever.”
“And it will,” she says. But it doesn’t. He joins the military and finds himself in Iraq, fighting to protect that girl in the field. She waits for him, their previous conversations ringing in her head.
“Don’t ever leave me.”
Wake me up
Both Bell and Wood manage to give deep performances in a limited time frame. There’s an interlude between the music at about 3:00, in which Wood confronts Bell about his decision to enlist, which provides some of the best acting I have seen from either of them. Both prove genius selections for the roles as their avergage looks blend in well to the video’s rustic, low-income American scenery. The whole thing feels real; it feels like a story that could come from any corner of the country. They’re just a couple of kids.
Directed by music video guru Samuel Bayer, the video is also visually stunning. Slick camera work and a savvy use of focus, in addition to some beige-based cinematography, really give the video an authentic feel all its own. I can’t think of another music video quite like it — an enormous accomplishment in an industry that loves to recycle.
Shots of the band playing are dispersed throughout the storyline, giving the effect that Green Day members are not just musicians; they are storytellers. The group is no stranger to long videos (the one for “Jesus of Suburbia” clocks in at about 12 minutes) but “Wake Me Up When September Ends” stands alone for the emotional punch it packs.
Of all the books written, movies made and pieces of art produced that touch on how war can tear lives apart, to even consider a music video in the conversation says something in itself. When combined with the video, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” might just be the best thing Green Day has ever produced in its long and storied history.
