My gold standard for music videos comes from what is, in my opinion, one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music ever written: Nightwish's "The Islander." Released in 2008, a little less than a year after the album on which the song was featured, it was directed by Stobe Harju and filmed in a large Finland city called Rovaniemi. At times both surrealistic and whimsical, it is an example of what all music videos should be.
The accompanying video makes full use of its ability to show rather than tell to enhance the story. That is to say, the lyrics tell you the story, and the video shows you. Each can stand without the other (i.e. if you watched the video without sound, you could still easily tell what's happening), but when put together, they become considerably more powerful. The video adds an extra level of depth, which is something that the vast majority of music videos simply fail to accomplish.
Take, for example, the titular character of the Islander. The video allows us to put a face to the character. We can see his struggles, see how lonesome he is. His march to the cliff where he will end his life is uneven and difficult, but he walks it with determination and dignity. He is so accustomed to the presence of the island's ghosts that he doesn't even acknowledge them. Then, we get to watch his last smile as he takes a final deep breath of the sea air that he probably found comforting in times long past. You pity him in that moment, but also feel something akin to relief that his troubles are at an end.
The video is also heavy with symbolism. The most noticeable symbols are the cherry blossom trees at the cliff, literally the only other living things on the island besides the old man. In this way, they do symbolize life, but at the same time, they also symbolize death. When the islander drops the anchor, a new tree grows on the cliff out of nowhere. It seems likely to me that the five other trees grew from the deaths of his family. This would fit, because the young man playing the bagpipes on the cliff towards the end of the video, presumably the ghost of the islander himself, is approached by five others: one tall figure in the middle and two smaller ones on either side of it. These are his wife and four children.
The other important symbols are the ship and the anchor, and the video plays with the general conceptions of those symbols by basically reversing them. In many, many stories, ships are used as symbols of freedom, vessels that allow tortured souls to escape lives they hate to seek better ones. However, in this story, it is the ship that is keeping him chained to the island (literally, since he is forced to drag it behind him), and it is the anchor, which normally secures things in one place, that finally releases him from his pain.
The mark of a great music video is that it makes you appreciate a song more than you did before watching it. Most fall short of that. The Islander definitely does not. The first time I saw the video, I walked away feeling as though I had just seen the story in an entirely different way. It turns out the most effective videos are the ones who just want to tell their story.
