Rosie Van Vliet

“Pretty Hurts” Music Video Critique

            “Pretty Hurts” is the first track on Beyonce Knowles’s fifth studio album. Directed by Melina Matsoukas, the “Pretty Hurts” music video uses a storyline that works alongside the song’s lyrics to play up a very clear message about societal beauty standards.

            The song itself doesn’t start until two minutes into the video. In these first two minutes, contestants are backstage at a beauty pageant. A sequence of clips of the women grimly getting ready to go onstage soundlessly rotate through the screen. The women’s preparations get more and more gruesome as they build up to Beyonce throwing up in the bathroom, alluding to bulimia. This series of images could be fairly upsetting for some, but I’m quite sure that they are necessary. Without this level of disturbing material, the viewer would not be nearly as haunted by the video. Matsoukas does a very good job depicting the atrocities that women go through every day to be beautiful by society’s standards. By showing the very worst that women go through in this opening sequence, Matsoukas elicits a feeling of sympathy in the viewer that they carry on throughout the rest of the video, and perhaps that they carry on to real life. My one complaint about this opening sequence is that it seems too long. Two minutes is a long time to show the same images over and over again and, although these images are very powerful and necessary to the video’s storyline, I can’t help but think that the editor could have run through them faster.

            This opening sequence lends itself to the story later on when Beyonce’s character is actually on the stage in the middle of the pageant. The song cuts out abruptly, as the pageant emcee asks her what her aspiration in life is. As Beyonce pauses to think on stage, a clip depicting her drowning plays over her voice. Beyonce’s final answer is “to be happy.” By saying this, she is implying that she isn’t happy in her current situation, and the viewer is forced to think back about the depressing images of women in the beginning of the video. The addition of Beyonce drowning while trying to answer the question comes rather abruptly, and while I appreciate the meaning behind this, these images of her writhing around under water could be interspersed throughout the rest of the video to make it seem less out of place in that moment.

            The final issue I take is in this part also. The non-music video version of this song begins with the emcee asking Beyonce this same question, and I can’t help but think that this should be how they start the music video also. The video shoves this question awkwardly in the middle of the song, disrupting the rhythm and flow of it. The video would do better if, after the sound-less sequence of women getting ready, it jumped right into the emcee’s question, and, after Beyonce said “to be happy”, the song started.

            I think this music video was incredibly successful. The cinematography is beautiful, eerie and powerful. The message is clear: something needs to be done about this unhealthy, unreachable beauty standard that we’ve created as a society. Overall, I applaud the producers and Matsoukas for successfully creating an incredibly influential music video.