the 1975’s “The Birthday Party”: Matty’s drug use and the digitalization of the modern era

Video:

Notes:

0:40  Our buddy Matty strolls in from a dreary and rainy world into “Mindshower” for a digital detox and steps into a bright and shiny (simulated) reality after lobbing his phone into a box

1:28   Pretty soon we meet the people Matty shares his time with: Avatars whose faces are common internet memes, but the environment is all nature. Matty’s now wearing a comfortable tunic thingy now

2:36  Matty frolics and dances in this digital paradise. He now approaches a small secluded pond, but right when he looks to see his reflection, the pond turns into the familiar blue error screen that is displayed on Windows computers following a fatal system error or crash. But once he puts both hands on it, the blue screen flickers and glitches until he’s sucked into it.

3:15 Matty’s now back in the nature, but his digital skin begins to decay and de-materialize, one of many translucent effects that has happened to his skin so far in the video. All the while he keeps dancing foolishly without paying any notice to it.

3:55  As Matty takes a moment to reflect on his thoughts, for a few seconds we see a dark, contorted version of his avatar flailing in front of some code, possibly a quick look behind the code that is the foundation of this simulation, where Matty’s body is being manipulated and bent in anatomically impossible forms to make him dance. This visual is not unlike the bare-bones of animation software where a controller moves joints and limbs to construct movement. It then just as quickly cuts back to Matty floaitng in a sunset sky dancing in a complex yet lazy way.

4:40  Now we see Matty again in the dark back room of the simulation, as he cautiously and slowly approaches another person… himself. Once he is close, both Mattyies reluctantly embrace one another and kiss, then walk away.

5:32  At the very end of the video, as Matty dances away into the infinite digital plane, it pans over to find “The Virgin” and… who I think is the girl from Danny Phantom? sitting beside each other on a log. The screen fades to black.

Analysis:

The genre of “The Birthday Party” is Alternative/Indie. Much of the 1975’s music is either this genre or is rock or pop. The band’s audience has for the most part always been Gen Z and some younger millennials. This video came out in February of this year, 2020. It serves as an artistic description of the lead singer and main character in the video, Matty Healy, and his current life off of drugs. He has to find new ways of dealing with how boring and awkward life is now, so he turns to the Internet to supply any leads on fulfillment.

However, a greater theme emerges from the context of the video. The “digital detox” is still a virtual simulation. Matty’s avatar is a facsimile of himself– in the same way, the other avatars in the simulation are societal archetypes created from the ground up on the internet, each symbolizing characters in society that people play. The message is truly nihilistic and difficult, but ends with the possibility of escape.

Identity, Connection, and Hopelessness

Like all humans since the dawn of self-awareness, the next generation longs for the discovery of identity and genuine connection to others.

Matty turns to the simulation, a system designed to make you feel wholesome about something that isn’t real. As a new generation raised online, it’s hardwired into us to subconsciously take into account the preferences of others to achieve wholeness, rather than the preferences of oneself. This subversive hijacking of identity leads to manipulation; we allow society to tell us who we are, and it all starts with an inherent need to connect to the world at large. The memes don’t only signify a fleeting distraction disguised as happiness, but the trap into loneliness and ego death that is losing your sense of identity, and losing the opportunity to discover it for yourself.

Another byproduct of living in a sea of connectivity never before attained in human history is the lack of it. TV shows, Twitter, our parents, Snapchat, and society have lowered Generation Z’s expectations of what genuine connection with other humans and with the world looks like, and has bamboozled all of us into nabbing the first imitation of connection we can get our hands on immediately. The only reason they’re getting away with it is because we let them, by playing by the rules of the social media game and emulating what we see online.

What the video ultimately conveys is that as a result society is a ton of living memes hopping around now unable and unwilling to fashion a unique identity, regulating surface level relationships that don’t amount to much more than the social equivalent of emojis and Instagram stories.

We’re nothing more than unrecognizable, digitized facsimiles of our true selves. The brief glimpse into the contorted “Matty” being made to dance among the bare bones of the computer code embody that through the dimness of our lives we are manipulated constantly.

And yet

there’s hope.

Matty walks up to the small pool, but when he attempts to see himself, the error flashes in the way. This is an effect to convey the unnaturalness of the simulation, but also proves that the system does not encourage self reflection. But in the end, there’s an attempt made to reach out to the only thing he knows is real, himself (Cogito, ergo sum). Through self-love, Matty kisses himself and achieves an identity beyond the perceptions of others and beyond the bounds of the simulation.

The 1975 has often times confronted the problems of our age, such as in their provocative “Love it if We Made It” and “I like America and America Likes Me”, as well as speaking about the newest generation’s challenges in rectifying their goals and desires to meet these challenges. Therefore it isn’t out of bounds to assume that the message at the end is that there is hope in preserving a unique identity while living in this hyper-reality, and that we can use the web as a tool for self-discovery and connection, as well as to conquer the obstacles facing us in the future. It all just starts with facing it and facing yourself.

+++sorry that this was so long, or if it doesn’t make sense, but I had to+++