Narrative Analysis of a Music Video

Sam Smith - I'm not the only one

This music video follows one of the eight narrative types stated by Kate Domaille (2001), the one it seems to follow is known as Tristan and Iseult. This narrative is when there is a love triangle, however this category tends to follow the journey of the person in love with another who is already spoken for, in this case it is the opposite as we follow the journey of the women who is the wife and already married to the man. The husband is being unfaithful and having an affair and although the wife knows she goes on as if she knows nothing as she still loves him and feels as if she needs him. 

The video includes two of the possible three forms of narrative, which are a story/plot which features people that have been cast to play roles instead of the artist himself acting it out, and also performance shots of the artist lip-syncing. The third possibility of narrative form is abstract, however this is not featured within this video in particular. 

Sven Carlson (1999) states that there are two types of clips which are performance clips where the song is being performed, and conceptual clips where the audience are seeing something artistic or ambitious so this would fall under the abstract form of narrative. The video features two different types of performance shots as we see the artist signing the lyrics as well as the cats acting them out as a story, so both are relevant to the lyrics themselves.

The narrative does not really follow the standard Hollywood narrative structure that Pam Cook (1985) identified. One of the areas stated is "Linearity of cause to effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution" however we do not actually see the cause of the situation but we do see the effect it is having of the marriage and especially the wife's emotional responses. We instead just assume that the husband is simply cheating and there has been no cause, as the women is presented as the victim and the perfect stereotypical housewife who is not in the wrong. It does also not offer "A high degree of narrative closure" as throughout the video we see the women burning some of her husbands clothes and we assuem she is going to confront or leave him, at the end though we see her greet him with a smile on her face as she embrases him which gives us the illusion that she will keep pretending. 

The audience will not feel a sense of narrative closure as we do not know for sure if the wife does anything about the situation, we are mainly lead to believe that she decides to stay with him because she is so deeply in love. These reasons indicate that the video does not fully follow the standard narrative structure of Hollywood, as we do not see the cause or the outcome of the situation and just the effect, leaving us as the audience with a lot of questions.