David Lynch is asking you to think of a music video. The pulsing lights, the quick cuts. The surreal set pieces, the singer’s eyes staring into yours. No, all wrong. Too slow. Make it faster. The lights must be brighter, the imagery starker. Multiply the singer’s face a hundred-fold. Let’s say it’s Trent Reznor, for argument’s sake, but it’s not really Trent Reznor — it’s the idea of Trent Reznor, the idea of Nine Inch Nails’ new single, the idea of a music video. The cuts are faster, but they’re not enough: let’s add some flashing dots on top until the whole thing pulses. Has it stopped pulsing? No. Don’t let it stop. We are distilling the essence of flashed-forward entertainment to its core, even if (we worry sometimes) the final product is hard to distinguish from simply a bland music video, a failed one.
David Lynch directs Nine Inch Nails’ latest music video, working in the medium of seizures
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Sometimes inducing epileptic seizures is the price of art.
We are emphatically not joking about that. Heed the seizure warning.
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