“I studied creative writing in college and really fell in love with the dirty realists/Kmart realism,” musician Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast told Cinema Spartan. “Writers like Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Breece D’J Pancake. I think I enjoy creating short story like scenes with my lyrics and focusing on micro-moments that maybe reveal some kind of greater meaning.” Here, in Zauner’s graffiti-dotted music video for “Everybody Wants to Love You”, the artist bounds from pool table to bar stool. She plunks down shots of whiskey and plows through bottles of beer with a coolly dedicated approach. Zauner is reenacting, nay, participating in the barley-soaked, grease-specked kaleidoscope of nighttime revelry.
Directed by both Adam Kolodny and Michelle Zauner, self-medication and jovial excess clasp hands with cavalier shrugs and dogged existentialism – this is tongue-in-cheek surrealism. And, hey, it’s pretty fucking cool. An aloof Zauner being circled by an expressionless bicyclist may be the best image of a hyper-strange 2016.
