In this analysis I will be discussing the famous music video created by ‘The Verve’ with their track ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, and how a famous football song happened to create a Horizontal Intertextuality of it and become a parody and pastiche of the video. 'Vindaloo' was released a year after it, made by ‘Fat Les’, and successfully managed to create an imitation of the song that was both incredibly similar yet totally different to the original music video.
Firstly, the music video for ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and ‘Vindaloo’ are both concept based and start off in almost exactly the same way as there is a slight fade in, into both main characters as they happen to be making a long walk up towards the main scene and the ‘Vindaloo’ video is an almost uncanny replica for the original video as they both centre the main character around the middle of the screen, both appearing very depressed. However, for examples of how the ‘Vindaloo’ video creates a humorous parody of the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ one, the ‘Vindaloo’ video at this particular part of it shows a difference in the background as the pedestrian sign is pointing in an opposite way (indicating the direct change and contradiction this video has over the original) and instead of the cones and road-works items, there happens to be a rather overweight man in a towel to forebode the subtle hilarity that will be present within the video that could only be fully appreciated and understood if one had seen the original to the music video, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’.
The ‘Vindaloo’ video imitates the original video in many ways, some perhaps more subtle and faint and others much more blatant and ‘in your face’. The mise-en-scene is almost exactly the same, which is key to the success of the ‘Vindaloo’ video being a parody. The lighting of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ has a strong theme and tone of blue to it, to connote a dark, gloomy and depressing sentiment to the video and the song. However in the ‘Vindaloo’ video they are aware of this fact and therefore create a very intense and powerful tone of blue to exaggerate on the style, providing a somewhat dark humour to it. The events of the video all happen to poke fun at the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ one as well, as in that video the main character pretty much happened to get his own way and move through obstacles regardless of what/who they were and how they felt about it. Although this is not apparent in ‘Vindaloo’ as the main character happens to experience the exact opposite kind of consequence and unfortunate reward for his own actions, and gets treated horribly and dreadfully regardless of the actions he takes. An example of the opposite result occurring for the main character would be where in ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ the main character happens to jump on a car in order to get past it, and the driver gets out stern and upset and follows the main character, whereas with ‘Vindaloo’ the main character here attempts to jump on the car to get by however the driver quickly reverses, therefore we see the main character embarrassingly take a tumble off and everyone around laughs at him.
A factor that made the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ video so significant is that all the shots taken are continuous and therefore there feels as if there is a natural flow to the video create a strong sense of realism and generating a realistic journey of the main character through the video. Another factor is that the main character is rather unique because he isn’t a typical likeable person or a particularly pretty character that an audience can all feel comfortable liking, instead he seems to have a more pessimistic style and his behaviour resembles that of a bully, however it is still possible that we as an audience do not loath or feel strong distaste for him. Instead we may feel confusion and sorrow for him as we don’t know anything about him or why he is behaving in such a way, but can only either assume that he just generally has anti-social behavioural issues or that maybe he has liven an unfortunately sad lifestyle which has endorsed upon him such a negative attitude. The area he goes by is also rather dull and illustrates his character, along with the weather creating pathetic fallacy and exemplifying to us his personality, and this only subliminally makes us the audience feel more depressed for him as well. The sense of loneliness and isolation may only increase our sadness for this character too but by the end of the video the audience may feel a bit better for him because he has re-united with his companions. We may feel sorrow for the character within ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ although this all changes with ‘Vindaloo’ as the mood is altered greatly that we actually would feel no sorrow or sadness for the main character here and even though we actually literally see him suffer, the comedic effects of the video allow us to divert any feelings of sympathy or mercy we could’ve felt for him into hilarity and amusement.
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