The Rhizomatic, Hypermodern Cinematic Universe of Blackpink’s “Kill This Love” Video
Welcome to the Rhizome
I, as a visual sociologist, first started this article a long time ago by talking about the fantasy worlds of BTS. But in the time that has passed since this video was released, BTS has gotten upstaged in my mind by BLACKPINK. Whose amazing, interstellar video brimming over with cosmic bling must now come first. The space in which Blackpink or BTS moves, from stage to stage, scene to scene — is a rhizomatic hyperspace — a hypertext version of the normal spaces music videos often place themselves in. Basically, a rhizome is a complex system of nodes in plant root network, in which one can plot a path non-linearly, punctuated by nodes from which you can go in any direction. Rhizospace uses the spatial logic of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure™ books of my youth, the links of the World Wide Web, Facebook, and all social media. It’s also the digital-era, culturally hybridic, hypermodern style of the best K-POP music videos. It defines their style; it is the definitive marker of Korean style.
Put quite simply, this video is out of this world. I mean this not just figuratively but also literally. They’re on other planets, in other worlds. They’re in their own cinematic universe. The video defines a timely departure from the dreary and depressing world of K-POP as lit by the immorality of the Burning Sun, in whose eerie light K-POP must be seriously reexamined because of the recent revelations of pornographic practices, prostitution, and other forms of insidious, moral perniciousness.
In what just might be the first K-POP video of the post-#metoo/Burning Sun Age of Revelations, the video is noticeably devoid of the standard oversexualizing genre conventions of K-POP music videos involving writhing, lithe young women. Devoid of distracting butt, breast, or lascivious lip licking shots, the video is a tour de force of fantasy depictions of super female Übermenschen. But girls this time. Holy. Godlike. The video begins with silver brass actually heralding their imminent arrival in a Cathedral of Holy Bling. Then they appear as Ameterasu-like sun goddesses who figuratively hold human hearts in their hands as clutch purse accessories. And then, they literally kick in the door in a visual assault of colorful kitsch as powered by the same kind of studios now popular with Korean Instagram influencer-models that serve up American-style cereal boxes and shopping carts-as Pop Art that would make Andy Warhol or Ray Liechtenstein squee in delight. After the head nod to Korean Instagram and another appearance of the sun goddess, we are presented with a remix of the cinematic cliché of the girl revving her American power car and running down her weaker self in a Tarantino-in-Deathproof effort to kill the kind of clichéd love that is the topic of the song. And that’s before even getting to the standard K-POP-perfected display of kinaesthetic hypnosis that comes with the synchronized dance in the trendy techwear that the cool kids at Seoul Fashion Week are wearing right now.
And by the end of the video, we have Blackpink members shooting arrows at themselves, and dancing within the giant, metal maw of a fantastically gargantuan beartrap. Wow.
And now, we can talk about BTS, since they exist in rhizospace, too.
A rhizomatic visual logic here jumps around from one logical point to another, like hyperlinks on the web, to which we have become quite accustomed. The better K-POP music videos, like the K-Fashion that parallels (and helps define) its style, move rhizomatically. This is one of K-POP videos’ trademark moves, besides the extreme precision of the choreography, which the “Kill This Love” video only got to as a perfunctory afterthought to remind people that this is, after all, a K-POP video.
But to truly get what’s going on in K-POP videos, take a standard, semiotically conservative, American music video that functions in the realm of the fantastic, as in say Nikki Minaj’s (sexual) fantasy of “Anaconda.”
Normal, Basic Space
By comparison, Anaconda is a fairly conservative text, actually. It is a Newtonian understanding of space and employs an antiquated semiotic/symbolic logic. It is quite linear and thematically narrow — sex, sex, sex. Beginning with the establishing metaphor of the “anaconda” (long, thick penis) that is introduced with the Sir-Mix-a-Lot sample from “Baby Got Back”, from which Minaj’s video directly riffs, the logical mise en scéne is that of the jungle, where the anaconda lives. And from there, the extension of that placement in video space moves on to include pineapples, coconuts, and, of course, bananas. Of course, there are jumps into fantastically empty, symbolic spaces such as a lap dance chair or a completely empty, white fantasy space in which to highlight lascivious dance moves, but the majority of the video’s spatial imagining is squarely in the realm of the narrowly interpreted, organizing metaphor of the jungle, with expected references to wildness, sexuality, sweating, and brazen sexuality. While the hypersexual representations on screen are indeed socially provocative, the video itself is quite semiotically conservative, nearly staid and artistically safe in its basicness.
By contrast, V-POP, which is the Vietnamese re-channeling/re-interpretation of the unmistakable K-POP aesthetic of rhizospace, which also has planted its flag in this fantastic, random-access, visual world, demonstrates the Koreanness of the virtual space it creates. it utilizes a Korean style. It’s what makes K-POP semiotically enticing and powerful, since it raises itself to the level of digital-era, hypermodern art that people around the world visually just grok, quite apart from any culturally specific content itself.
This is why Blackpink and their production team is breaking YouTube, kicking down doors, and why all the bases are in danger of belonging to K-POP. Say what you want about K-POP’s lack of virtuosity, its overproducedness, or its saccharine sensibilities. But that’s the point. K-POP has mastered the art of artifice. And its innovative use of spatiality is just one of its stylistic markers.
For the record, I am not really a K-POP fan. I’m too old, American, and curmudgeonly to be. In 2013, I defiantly declared that “There Is No Korean Wave” in this very newspaper. I was wrong. It was my clickbaity way of saying that Korean popular culture products had matured and would be a permanent fixture of global media culture so there’s no need to call it a temporary “wave”, but my opinion was nevertheless still too full of the dismissiveness that was easy to have in a time when Korean domestic media was exaggerating K-POP’s influence, Korean promoters were inflating ticket sales, and PSY was the only thing to point at. But now, the global attention is there, the numbers are there, and it doesn’t matter what I think. In the hypermodern media world of presidential Twitter feuds, the copy of the copy is the original, your avatar is actually you, and the hype is real. And no matter what old-fashioned ideas you have about viruosity, originality, and the location of “talent” in an unapologetically mechanized, “soulless” mode of artistic production, BLACKPINK is the harbinger of the hypermodern future of musical and visual art.
