Reading response 2

The video I selected incorporates many visual symbols such as the ones our class examined during the Eminem video. I chose to analyze Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done”. This music video strings together many different video clips taken during historic events from all over the world. The video offers the message that we can change by “forgiving what I’ve done”. So the video takes the viewer through several history’s darker moments including World War Two, the September eleventh attacks, nuclear bomb tests, the Vietnam war, and so on. These images represented the horrors that have happened in the past due to misguided or evil leaders or some other flaw of humanity such as our need insatiable need for violence. Then at varying intervals during the film, the video introduces today’s problems: oil, global warming, water pollution, obesity, African poverty, and others. Modern problems that, for the most part, exist solely due to humanity’s other flaw, the revolutionary inertia that causes the human race to suffer until enough support can be gathered for change. These two themes together help sell the idea that there have always been big problems in the world, and there are now. It implies that we as a nation and as a species have overcome many challenges because the need was dire enough, and that the need is indeed dire now. This is followed by various images of hope: new scientific discoveries (several regarding new live such as medicines and what I think is artificial insemination), images of babies and young children, a rose blooming, and other such symbols of new life. However, as a painful reminder, the video turns back to today’s issues, for example, a penguin swimming through clean water, then a shot of an oil tanker shipwrecked as well as an oil refinery, followed by an image of the penguin covered in oil. More images follow of recent destruction, but the video finishes with a simple image: an image of new grass growing out of barren soil. This serves as a symbolic reminder that even in, and maybe especially in, the darkest of times, we have the ability to change and benefit our world. We have the power to give life, just as we have the power to take it away and that, despite all the horrible things that have happened, are happening, or are about to happen; we can find a way to come through.