2. Background
Sweating bullets is a song by Thrash metal band
Megadeth. The single is from their fifth album ‘Countdown
To Extinction’. The music video was directed by Wayne
Isham and features all the members of the band but it
focuses on the front man of the band Dave Mustaine.
3. Narrative
The video shows Dave Mustaine as a dissociative identity
disorder patient in an asylum where different versions of him talk to
him in a patronizing way as well as they seem to try to take the
control and influencing the ''real one''. He wonders what is real and
what not. On the guitar solo we can see how the other members of
the band suffer from the same condition and are also pattiens in the
same asylum. At the end of the video, the multiple versions of
him are all over the room walking and singing, this represents that
his thoughts are uncontrolable and the last shot were he is looking
at the mirror and someone pulls him back we can see his expresion
of fear and surprise that makes the audience wonder what
happened.
4. Locations
The video, as I said before, takes place inside the rooms
of an asylum. The room is dark, dirty, old and broken. You
can say that the room represents the mind of the singer,
all broken and full of people. This is probably the best
choice as the lyrics are about a guy who has a serious
mental desease such as dissociative identity disorder that
needs to be institutionalised. The dark
and creepy location give a great atmosfere that favor the
music.
5. Representation of the
characters
Characters are portrayed as perturbated,
tough, dangerous and insane.This
representation is something atractive to their metalhead
audience. Megadeth was a band known for their speed,
their madness and their agresivity, this is seen on their
performances and now, in their own videos, that say
something like ''Don't mess with us''. This badass actitude
is the one that makes a band more appealing for a more
mainstream culture.
6. Costumes and Iconography
There are not actual costumes on this video, characters
wear normal clothes. In my opinion, the use of normal
clothes, the clothes that a teenager would wear, makes
the artists more relatable and also connotates that anyone
can suffer from this mental illness. Also the dark colors
that they wear, represent their dark personality, however,
Nick Menza's red t-shirt makes a good contrast from his
band mates, it doesn't break the armony, it makes it more
pronunciated.
7. Lyrics mach the visuals
The video is mostly a conversation. This means that all the
lyrics are at least dialoges between Dave and his other
personalities. However, in cuotes such as ''Man kind has got
to know his limitations'' we can see denotations such as him
holding a brain, which denotates that all human limitations
are inside the brain. Other good example of lyrics matching
the visuals is when one personality says to the main
one ''you can subdue but never tame me'' and then another
one joins the conversation and starts to patronize the main
one.
