Audioslave’s Doesn't Remind Me music video is a story of toxic masculinity.
The video: https://youtu.be/lBFdX37Qpnk
I don’t know what Audioslave and the video's director intended. They may have meant for the boxing match to be liberating, or may have meant to make it disturbing. But ignoring the artists' intentions it's a disturbing story of a cycle of toxic masculinity. The family has lost their husband and father to war, and the very-young son finds solace in… playing with toys that look like weapons of war, running away and breaking things, and getting involved in a violent competition*. The son is too young to know any better but it seems society (including his mother, but also everyone training him and cheering him on) is more than happy to repeat the toxic cycle of violence that got his father killed. The son seems to feel better after winning the fight, his mother feels proud, and his trainers are glad he's learning and enjoying the sport, but it's a great microcosm of "everyone in this situation is just doing the best they can but this is how we end up unintentionally normalizing violence."
I think it works well with the lyrics too. One possible reading of the song’s lyrics is the singer is trying very hard to remain in denial about something that is troubling him. Similarly, instead of dealing with the trauma of losing his father, the son in the video is seeking out distractions - and this case those distractions are mostly violent.
*I’ve boxed and enjoyed it, but have concerns about it as a sport.
Posted Jul 20, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC
Definitely seems intentional to me, especially during the fight scene where they intercut military bombing footage with the fight between the two kids and the celebration of that violence.
Also, I think the lyrics themselves are meant to be kind of ironic in the way the video’s narrative is. The narrator of the song keeps repeating that he likes doing things to distract himself, but the things he’s referencing become increasingly personal until he’s eventually addressing an individual person in the bridge. The irony being that eventually, even the distractions start to remind you of what they’re supposed to be distracting you from, as in the video the “distraction” is really just a microcosm of the trauma to be distracted from. The distraction informs the trauma, and in a way, the impulse that invites the distraction and the impulse that creates the trauma are one in the same.
Good point about the irony in the song. I discovered it well after it was famous and the first couple of times I listened to it I thought it was totally straightforward, but eventually I caught on to the narrator demonstrating his obsession with his past by trying really really hard not to talk about it.