How Paul Thomas Anderson Directed Radiohead
Written By Ryandira Bagus Rahardjo
Let’s talk about Radiohead, where should we start? Perhaps let’s start with their most of ‘disturbing’ but yet magnificent song.
“DAYDREAMING” also alludes to some of Anderson’s core artistic conceits, namely the iconography of California and the compositional values of portraiture. While the various spaces that Yorke stumbles through are meant to be taken as generic, geographically-speaking, they nevertheless remain characteristic of the Californian landscape: sunny beaches, crowded laundromats, grungy industrial spaces, and sleepy bungalows. Anderson also finds a few opportunities to dwell on Yorke’s face as he stands still, framing his weathered visage inside of a tight portrait.
The video sees frontman Thom Yorke walking through various doors that open to new and unexpected places, and it’s a positively hypnotic piece of work that is equal parts gorgeous and terrifying. It’s great to be getting a new Radiohead album, but it’s also fantastic to have a new piece of work from Anderson as another surprise. His hazy 2014 comedy Inherent Vice was sorely underrated, and the filmmaker seems to be getting more ambitious with each new feature, so I’m eager to see what feature film project he settles on next.
When Yorke’s character finally finds solace beside a fire in a cave, he speaks a backwards phrase to the camera which, reversed, sounds like, “Half of my life, half of my love.” 23 years, of course, constitutes just about half of the 47-year-old Yorke’s life — and, Kaneria notes, the number of years since the band began recording. The video also performs other exegeses numerical, lyrical, and visual, and zodiacal, everywhere finding references to Rachel as well as to Radiohead — song titles, album art, even the settings of past music videos — to the point that we see “how Thom’s personal life with Rachel is inescapably saturated and surrounded by all things Radiohead.”
Probably important to know that in 2015 he and his partner of 23 years split. She passed of cancer in 2016. The year this album was released. He was going through the deepest grief. She was gone. He and his children were left to mourn. It puts this album into focus.Watch the video again. He is searching everywhere, through every door, in a hospital, ends back up in a home and there is a woman there reading a newspaper …notice all the times he goes back into this house…looking for that which is lost. When he opens the last door he is in the snow, into a cave. And he has no discernible language to describe it. That’s grief.
To me this video is about how many doors we open throughout our lives without ever questioning where they actually take us. There are doors of regret, doors of mundane insignificance , doors of sweet moments, doors of anger. We think we’ve gone to a place further than where we started. But we are just back at zero, like it shows at the end of the video.
Nobody ever called balancing the demands of domestic life and those of perhaps the biggest rock band in the world easy. Still, few recent works of art have illustrated this kind of struggle as vividly as the “Daydreaming” video, and Anderson, not just one of the most famous and respected filmmakers alive but a husband and a father to four children, surely knows something about it as well. So often compared to his cinema-redefining predecessors from Robert Altman to Stanley Kubrick, he must also know as well as Yorke does what it means to have your work subjected to such close scrutiny — and to want to create work that will repay that scrutiny.