Music Video Analysis - Kings Of Leon - Pyro

In this music video, there is a message that is trying to be shown across to the audience through the events and happenings that are going on.

The song and the video together are trying to tell the story about a man who thought that the world he was living in wasn’t the perfect world to him, and how he was fed up with it all. Its starts off with someone thinking they know how its supposed to be, but at the end the thought is ‘I cant even be that way. The other message that it shows is mostly directed at the audience and it shown during the fighting scene and the first scene as well that there's always that one person who needs help, and you see it, but you don't know how to react. You don't know what to do. But the main fact is "I may be the only person who can help."

It is set in a bar; more of an American bar, judging by the clothes the people wear, and how they act with each other. They look more like the classic ‘rednecks’ from the south of America, which is where this story is taken place and where the bands origin is. The most important thing that video is trying to get across to the audience is the subliminal message of how the band perceives this image of the world, and judging by the mood in this piece, its more of a negative view, and the places and actions that happen here do not appeal to the audience whatsoever. I think the video strongly shows this message through its various scenarios and its answers to these, and also shows through a metaphorical vibe then just showing to the audience plain on.

In the first few scenes (and the most important) we are introduced to the outside of bar down a hallway, and an old man struggling to walk. A young man comes into the shot from the right hand side through an over the shoulder shot beginning to help the old man up as he falls There is a specific red glow that surrounds them. Red usually signals danger, which is ironic, as he gets badly hurt in the fights in the bar, that happen later on. The camera follows him as he walks through to the bar, leaving the low ambient lighting behind him, and introduces the bar to him and the audience. As the string plucking at the beginning of the song ends, we hit the high tempo part of the song as he enters the bar. The camera pans around slowly at all the people that are in the bar and the protagonist walking and looking at all the different occurrences between them. The messages behind all these specific people, are that they have some sort of issue and are all pieces to the ‘world messed up’ problem. We see a woman helping a very hold man who cant walk or do anything for himself, some of the people we can analysis in this piece are, a depressed woman who could be having some sort of life problem, a pole dancer who appears to be on drugs, and an older man coming onto slightly younger woman. The camera does a pan of the room focusing on these people and we can see that it is a slow movement to go with the track and to highlight the gloom and misery that surrounds the bar and keep with that mood. The camera goes back to the main character relieving a sceptical look for the bar man to suggest that the bar man things that this young guy is different from him and to show the small tension between the two. There is a lot of pan shots in this piece and is the transition from going to all the other characters back to the main character and to the band who are playing in the corner and singing the song. The band are represented in a big way, as they are spectators watching the goings on in the bar and there reactions to it, even though they are just singing the backing track to it mostly they also take on the ‘guru’ role, of knowing what’s going to happen and how it will all turn out. This is to show that the band are not only still playing the track, but that you feel that they are still apart of the story that is going on in this video. As it pans round again we can see another man shouting at another woman and our young main character comes over to confront him but the shouting man turns around and quickly swings a punch at the young man. They emphasis this confrontation here that the pace of the video then quickly slows down and goes into slow motion. With this being at this slow pace we can see all of the small details of everyone’s movement, even when the young man is pushed, we can see a little of saliva jump out of his mouth just as he is punched in the face. When this happens it grabs everyone’s attention in the bar, and we see the quick, choppy transitions of all there reactions. It quickly changes back to the young man once again being punched in the face by a friend of the shouting man. We can see that both the man are enjoying punishing our main character here, and again putting the emphasis on the punch by changing the pace slower as is thrown into the air by the punch. Now a lot of his friends get in on the action by coming and kicking and punching this young man, just for fun. There is a low angle shot from the young mans point of view, making all the “rednecked’ drunks, enjoying beating down this young man. A good shot here is when one of the rowdy rednecks throw the young man into the glass mirror behind where the other woman is dancing, but she has not care in the world because she is on drugs so doesn’t notice. It emphasis its point more, here, because in the slow pace movement of the man falling onto this glass not only shows the glass coming down on him, but his world falling down on him as well.
As the man continues to be beaten up we see a shot of the woman he was trying to save fall to here knees in a low angle shot showing her pleading for the man to stop, and to see her emotion – this makes her look smaller then the rest of them. The camera does go back and forth to the other characters with there story’s and seeing it develop more and there reactions to this beat up and as if they are trying to avoid it in some way. Still in slow motion, we see the barman throw a baseball bat to one of the rednecks from under the bar, and the redneck runs over from another low angle shot from the beaten down young man, running over to hit him with it With all his friends cheering him on, and in particular one, who we can see emphasised through a close up. They all abruptly stop as the beaten down man rises in the air and continues to go up in some ‘godly act’ with the rest of the rednecks in shock as to what is happening. We see a close up of the beaten down man as his scars heal and the blood slowly disappears from his face and the cuts disappear also. We then see shots of the other characters who has a story behind them or an issue with themselves also rise up into the air such has the poll dancer, the old man, and the vulnerable woman. We see close up shots of their feet rising up and the song gets a higher tempo and more instruments are introduced to the ending of the song. There is low angle, long and medium shots of the band playing and looking up at the people rising. This rising represents hope for these characters and this ‘godly act’ sees them being saved from there given situation and escaping from it. Then the rest of the people in the bar get raised as well to show the split between them and the rest of the characters. We see a close up of the drummer looking up at the young man and a response shot of the healed young man coming into shot with his arm raised and moving and rising towards the bright light. This light being an escape route for him as this scene fades out.