I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a running joke in our family about how me liking a song means that I’ll listen to it (and only it) over and over and over again, for days and days, until someone else snaps and forces me to switch, at least to headphones. 

I’ve been thinking recently about how often when I have conversations with men about art, they tell me what something means, or how clever a piece of symbolism was. And I think, Is that really how art works? It’s not always a quiz, to answer; or a puzzle, to solve. (And of course, it really can be. It really can be something to be read, and interpreted, and parsed. And that can be fantastic - I’ve read hundreds of beautiful essays on great albums and films. I just don’t see the value or necessity of that for my own enjoyment of every single film, or book, or song.) I haven’t been able to verbalise what the alternative was, until I started watching this video earlier in the week. 

I can’t explain what Maddie Ziegler’s gentle punches to Shia LaBoeuf’s forehead does to me. I can’t explain why his funny faces make me want to cry more than my father’s funeral ever did, and his furious face through the bars, and his incredulous face at her physical contact. I can’t separate the love I feel for his strength, swinging from the roof of the cage, from the fire I feel with her wild rage, and I can’t tell you what the role of identity is in here, or youth, or fear, or conflict. I know that the video’s director could, and co-director Sia could, and tonnes of men who are passionate about art and music and culture could. 

But that deadens it for me, that leaden hand of Solving The Artwork. It’s not an exam I’m sitting. I’m flying on that gut feeling I still get when I watch it for the tenth, fiftieth, hundredth time, and it’s something to do with fatherhood, and it’s something to do with trust, and it’s something to do with almost finding out a little bit about myself from watching it again. And again. And again. 

And again.