QueerVeluv

Link to MV

Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds. Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that. So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess. - Excerpt from “The Princess and The Pea”

To manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. - Definition of Gaslighting

You know it so well and control me… We're in a very weird and strange relationship… You got me feeling like a psycho, psycho - Excerpted lyrics from “Psycho”

In The Princess and The Pea, a prince wants to marry a “real” princess but can’t find a way for his bride-to-be to prove it. So when a woman shows up one rainy right claiming she’s a real princess, his mother devises a test to verify this. By forcing her to sleep in a ridiculous contraption and making her feel discomfort she doesn’t understand, she proves that she has the mystical delicateness of a real princess. In doing so, the princess is gaslighted. She thinks she’s “psychotic” for feeling distress over nothing. Once her psychosis has been explained away, however—it’s because princesses are so sensitive that they border on being “psycho”—that somehow automatically reduces her to a marriageable object for the prince, because only a prince could handle a “crazy” woman like that.

Red Velvet’s new “Psycho” MV is an incredible song with a hauntingly beautiful music video. The MV is laden with symbolic imagery, and in my opinion, it’s the best MV that RV has produced since “Cookie Jar.” I’m pretty sure that many of these references are to fairy tales. Yeri jumping on the bed seems to be a reference to The Princess and the Pea. Irene seemingly pricking her finger on the spinning wheel is a reference to Sleeping Beauty. The scene of Seulgi sitting alone in a room that has a loom with the golden hue and gold decorations reminds me of Rumpelstiltskin. The wedding dresses may be a reference to the frequent theme of marriage in fairy tales like the ones above. Most fairy tales involve women experiencing some bizarre, tragic situation that makes them (or others) think they are “crazy,” and it takes a prince charming who can live with their “craziness” to save them. Once the bizarre situation is solved and their psychosis is rationalized, they are automatically reduced to brides because there is no other capacity in which they can live with their experiences. However, like the dangling wedding dresses at the end of the MV, these princesses are empty shells of femininity, they aren’t people.

I think this is the “moral of the story” the MV is painting between its references to fairy tales, wedding dresses, and the lyrics of the song, where a woman seemingly talks about how she loves a man who manipulates and controls her by making her feel like a “psycho.” There are many scenes where the RV members seem to go “crazy”: Seulgi’s mirror image starts moving on her own, Irene is surrounded by butterflies. It’s about how women are made to feel helpless and isolated through gaslighting, convinced that they are bizarre and loveless, except by the one person who professes to be able to rationalize and love them through their psychosis (but who is causing them to feel this way in the first place).

The Princess thinks being wed to the Prince is her destiny and “happy ever after” because her self-confidence has been shattered to the point that she’s convinced she can’t be happy in any other situation, certainly not by herself.

Of course, there’s always the option of fully embracing one’s monstrosity and irrationality as a source of empowerment. “Peekaboo” demonstrates this, where the RV members embrace their identities as “psychotic” and dangerous women. In “Psycho,” however, they seem to be more hesitant. Here, they seem to be struggling to assert agency against the way the trope of psychosis also constrains them. It can feel liberating to not be understood, but it’s also very isolating. I'm thinking of the scene where Wendy stands there listlessly like a ghost, and Joy passes her by at first because Wendy doesn’t want to be understood, she wants to be left alone, but then turns around and grabs Wendy’s hand, and life comes back to Wendy. It’s as if Joy is telling Wendy that this is not empowerment. And then there's the dressing room scene where the RV members break character, demonstrating that these are just costumes/ roles/performances that RV puts on. They may feel liberating, but they are not the entirety of who the RV members are. Monstrous femininity can be empowering but also limiting, and RV is trying to navigate that.

Link to official MV

Link to MV with English subs

Link to director’s cut of the MV without the song

(Warning: Spoilers! Watch the MV first if you don’t want to be spoilt!)

Does the MV for “Wish Tree” make for good queer representation? Or is it queerbaiting? (Hint: I am completely biased as an RV stan.) On one hand, it takes queer love very seriously, elucidating the heartbreak when one’s feelings are unreciprocated. On the other hand, it reinforces the trope that queerness is a tragedy, that queer people don’t deserve happiness, that queer stories only exist to be edgy, especially through a shock ending. And the sappy lyrics only add salt to the wound. But I loved the MV and found it was a deeply meaningful representation of the adolescent queer experience. Here’s why.

The MV initially presents a platonic (if not ambiguous) homosocial friendship between two women, until it becomes increasingly clear that character that actress Lee Joo-young plays (henceforth “JY”) has more-than-platonic feelings for the character that actress Baek Soo Hee plays (henceforth “SH”) but struggles to articulate them. All this occurs to the accompaniment of the lyrics, which express the addresser’s Christmas wish to always be with the addressee no matter how many winters have passed, with clearly romantic connotations. In the penultimate scene, they watch the Japanese film Love Letter (1995) together and JY looks at SH desperately, unable to say anything. Afterward, JY and SH are making Christmas wishes and JY looks troubled again. Suddenly, the song pauses and SH asks JY what she wished for, stating she wishes to spend next Christmas with a boyfriend. Stunned, JY replies that she wishes not to spend next Christmas with SH. At this point, the song finishes its last line reiterating the addressee’s wish to always be together and the MV ends.

At first, I was like, “wow typical sad ending for queer people but yay superficial representation but also it’s a Red Velvet MV so you can’t criticize it.” And then I read the lyrics of the song and watched the MV again. And to my surprise, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by sadness, knowing the twist ending that was coming. By the end of the MV I was a disheveled mess with a pile of soggy tissues in front of me. And I’ve never even cried at any romantic tragedy before! (I’m far more likely to be rolling my eyes.) What happened?

The “Wish Tree” MV is not melodramatic in the least. There was nothing to suggest JY’s more-than-platonic feelings were the reciprocated, unlike the many hetero-romances out there about a match made in heaven that, alas, was simply not meant to be in this world. Instead, it was the sheer mundanity of the narrative that resonated deeply with me as a queer person.  It likely never even occurred to SH that JY might be queer—that her statement might constitute a painful rejection to JY. I imagined JY as a queer adolescent woman without access to any queer communities or resources (this is not uncommon in Korea and a fair assumption within the context of the MV), struggling to make sense of her intense feelings for her best friend. SH might well be the only person she has been this close to, felt this way for. And yet her feelings were shut down in the most oblivious, nondescript way possible. After all, don’t (straight) girls tell their bffs about their wish for a boyfriend all the time? What could be more mundane than that?

And yet, to JY, the message is clear: not only does SH not consider JY a romantic possibility in a way she does for men, she sees no issue openly expressing her dissatisfaction that she is spending her Christmas with JY and not her hypothetical boyfriend through her wish not to repeat this next year. She implies that JY is sorely inadequate for her as a same-gender, markedly non-romantic partner, and yet in the most innocuous way that does not require her to register that intention, given how socially normalized it is. “Wish Tree” is meaningful to me because it captures the mundanity of queer erasure. This is the point that JY is confirmed to be queer for the viewer beyond doubt--that the video offers queer representation--and it occurs through JY’s experience of hurt and erasure.

And due to the pervasiveness and mundanity of queer erasure, JY would not even be able to fully understand what happened. She would not have the words for it. She would be left heartbroken without really knowing why, let alone what to do. And when you can’t express your hurt, then you can’t get closure. You can’t heal from it. It remains unresolved and buried, affecting you deeply for years to come. Heteronormative society won’t recognize your pain, because within the logic of compulsory heterosexuality, nothing melodramatic, nothing eventful, nothing warranting sadness, has happened at all. SH was just expressing a mundane sentiment every “normal” girl does.

This is what makes the MV such an ingenious juxtaposition against the lyrics of the song. It sets up our expectation that the MV will be yet another sappy Christmasy love story like every other heteroromantic Christmas song out there, just gay. That’s nice and all, but it’s not very meaningful. And then, just when we anticipate the characters will finally confess their love for each other, the twist ending comes out of nowhere and hurts like a fucking BITCH. We are stunned, lost of words, in the same way JY is. The final bit of the song hits especially hard because it now conveys a double meaning: both the intensity of JY’s unreciprocated what-the-hell-do-I-do-now feelings and the nonchalance of the hetero-romantic lyrical narrative towards the fact that JY cannot attain the love it celebrates as a queer woman. Through this, the MV tells us that JY’s pain is real and deserves a voice, deserves not to be erased, even if it seems mundane, even if she doesn’t have the words to explain it.

I don’t need queer representation to be happy to be meaningful--although queer people do deserve happy representation. More than that, I want queer representation to reflect on the queer experience, including its negotiation of societal queerphobia and queer erasure, in a poignant, realistic, and relatable manner. One of the qualities many great lesbian coming-of-age novels share is the depiction of ambiguous homosocial-homoerotic friendships between young girls who don’t know how to describe what they’re feeling, and as a result, don’t know how to process the pain when these friendships eventually crumble under compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia. The “Wish Tree” MV powerfully captures this experience through its ingenious use of a shock ending, which in most cases of queer representation would leave a bitter aftertaste, juxtaposed against the unassuming lyrics of the song.

“Sirens are used for warnings, and I was also inspired by sirens in mythology. They are known as beautiful but frightening presences that lure sailors in with their beautiful voices and drag them down to the bottom of the ocean. The mermaids that appeared in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ were also sirens. I think I’ll be able to take that unique concept and express it well.” She went on to add, “The reason sirens stuck out to me is that they’re what are used in the most dangerous of situations. And the origin of the word ‘Siren’ is that mermaid figure. The song itself has an ambiguous meaning, so I wanted to use that word.”

- Sunmi

Link to Video

So this is a blog dedicated to Red Velvet, but after Secret Unnie I now consider Sunmi as extended family since she’s eventually going to marry Seulgi anyway and I will now extend my analyses to her oeuvre.

We know, both from Sunmi’s quote above and the imagery in the music video, that “siren” references both meanings of the word: as a dire warning that something is not right, and a mythological female creature who seduces men to kill them. There is an immediate contradiction in how both meanings of the word relate to danger: the former alerts one to danger, to tell them to back off, while the latter deceives one in the face of danger, lulls them into complacency until it is too late.

The song lyrics revolve around a woman telling a man to stay away from her because she is dangerous. At first she sounds cautionary (“I told you not to be fooled”) but becomes increasingly aggressive (“get away out of my face”). Near the end of the song, she says “I ain’t cry no more”—which suggests she once cried, but no longer does.

It’s clear that the song lyrics satisfy the first meaning of “siren” as alarm. Sunmi is warning men to stay away from her, for their own good. But how does the second meaning of siren as seductress come into play? Sirens neither warn men to stay away from them nor cry for men.

With all this in mind, let us turn to the music video.

I suggest the house represents Sunmi’s inner psyche, and the various Sunmis represent different facets of herself. We open with the protagonist Sunmi, who has just taken a shower and applied makeup. She seems to have made herself pretty for what we can assume is a date with a man. Protagonmi sneezes, revealing her body is flawed despite its doll-like image, but she quickly suppresses it and readjusts her eyelashes to look pretty once more. Protagonmi represents Sunmi’s default state of consciousness: she feels compelled to make herself doll-like and pretty for men, and even feels pleasure doing so.

As Protagonmi looks outside the window, prepared to leave the house of her inner psyche to present her made-up self to the external world, a siren suddenly fires off and the room turns red. Another Sunmi arises from the bathroom in a manner suggestive of horror movies—now THIS is the siren I was looking for. Sirenmi is wearing a purple costume that looks like a blend between the blue sweater Protagonmi has now put on and the redness of the blaring siren. Sirenmi starts dancing in front of Protagonmi aggressively, as if trying to warn her of something, and at one point she directs Protagonmi’s gaze towards the camera, making her aware that she is being watched by us, by a masculine voyeuristic gaze.

Sirenmi’s warning makes Protagonmi uncomfortable, and she runs out of the room so that she can bury the thought, leave the house, and go for her date in peace. However, Sirenmi has instilled a seed of doubt in Protagonmi’s mind, and she pauses in the corridor and goes to check on her other personas. In the first room, she sees herself sitting on a chair wearing a tiara looking like a queen, with roses in a jar and scattered across the floor. In the second room, she sees herself sitting invitingly on a bed. These are two personas Protagonmi has treasured because they make her attractive to men—as a figure of beauty and sexual companionship—but she now realizes how powerless and passive they look and is disgusted by them.

In the third room, Protagonmi sees Sunmi dressed as a mermaid. Sunmermaid, unlike Sirenmi looks rather less like the vicious sirens of Greek mythology and more like the infantilized little mermaid variant. Sunmermaid still sings the song, suggesting she has more agency than Protagonmi does (only Sirenmi has sung the song up until now), even if she has been compromised as a symbol of empowerment; she sits on a washing machine, suggesting even the aquatic freedom she supposedly represents has been assimilated into domesticity. Nonetheless, Protagonmi recognizes that Sunmermi minimally has more agency than Queenmi and Bedmi, and she looks on in contemplative silence.

Protagonmi goes down to the living room, finally prepared to present herself to the external world. She sees a rose in a birdcage. The rose symbolizes the flattery men give her for her beauty, the boost of self-esteem she gets from knowing she is desirable, which entrances but simultaneously imprisons her. Protagonmi momentarily forgets about Sirenmi and wishes to become the rose in the cage. As she reaches out to touch it, however, the siren blares and turns the room red again, and Sirenmi appears in the living room trying to warn her. Sirenmi briefly gets Protagonmi to sit down and try to see things from her perspective; when this happens, Queemi and Bedmi shake off their lifelessness and begin to move.

Eventually, Protagonmi does not want to make her date wait any longer, and with a somewhat apologetic gesture, turns away from Sirenmi and tries to leave the house. This is when she realizes the entire house has been covered in warning tape. The warning tape is not meant to warn her about the outside world; it is meant to warn the outside world about her. Because the feminist siren has been blaring in her house for some time now, men have decided that she is too dangerous and must be contained, until she has successfully exterminated Sirenmi within her and can be easily assimilated back into society as a passive doll, a rose in a birdcage. (One is reminded of triggered Korean men when they realize a female idol might “secretly” be feminist).

Protagonmi finally realizes that Sirenmi is not a danger to her—a siren in the second sense of the word—but a warning to her of her internalized misogyny—a siren in the first sense of the word. Women often feel compelled to pacify themselves, to tone down their harshness against men and appease their feelings, lest they become branded as monstrous sirens and lose their desirability. Sirenmi is trying to warn her not to forsake the part of herself that perceives this injustice in her effort to navigate the external world.

Protagonmi experiences a newfound determination to break out of the cage and starts to merge with Sirenmi, finally accepting the siren within her as an integral part of herself. Protagonmi finally begins to sing the song, suggesting a newfound consciousness. Queenmi begins to dance (unfortunately, it looks like Bedmi is beyond reclamation). Finally, Protagonmi manually switches on the siren herself, suggesting she wants to leave it on within her conscious mind and how she interacts with the external world, both as a warning to herself about men and a warning to men about herself.

Let us turn back to the song lyrics. An line that caught my eye was in the pre-chorus: “You know that in your fantasy I’m not beautiful.” Normally, it is precisely in the fantasies of men that sirens are beautiful, and in reality that they are monstrous. However, Sunmi rejects this artificial beauty men project onto sirens from a distance that objectifies them. Rather, she sees beauty IN their monstrosity. Sunmi tells men the beauty they project onto her in their fantasies is not true beauty, and they ought to know it is not really who she is.

However, due to her internalized misogyny, Sunmi feels compelled to shoulder all the blame at the start. She blames herself for “fooling” her male suitors by pretending to be a doll she increasingly realizes she cannot be. As the song progresses, Sunmi gradually accepts her inner Sirenmi. She stops blaming herself, and starts telling her male suitors to fuck off. She will no longer cry for them; she will no longer feel sorry for their feelings of betrayal that she is not who they expect her to be. In order to heed her inner siren, Sunmi must become the siren, even if it means wearing bright yellow warning tape across her body. She may be witch-hunted for it, but it is still better than being a rose in a birdcage.

After Red Velvet’s liberal interpretation of the Korean lyrics of Bad Boy in their English version, I decided to write one for Russian Roulette as well :D

After Red Velvet’s liberal interpretation of the Korean lyrics of Bad Boy in their English version, I decided to write one for Ice Cream Cake as well :D

Link to MV

After Red Velvet played iconic man-hating lesbians in “Peek-A-Boo” and “Bad Boy,” the girls are back to finish the trilogy with “#Cookie Jar,” cementing their place as the feminist queens of K-pop.

This MV is, in my opinion, the most complex and difficult to unpack of the three, but it’s very subtle and clever, and I’m SO impressed that they managed to put this much depth into it, given the constraints of what makes an appropriate MV for a Red concept song.

I see “#Cookie Jar” as a critique of the male conquest narrative, where women are represented as inert “prizes” to be won by men. We open to Red Velvet role-playing as treasure hunters searching for the elusive Cookie Jar—a pink jar with red cookies inside that gives the book in “Bad Boy” a run for its money—as if it is something to be “discovered” (incidentally, “finding the C” also corresponds to a popular strategy men think is key to winning a woman’s heart lmao). This is overlaid with images of Red Velvet playing chess and cards, once again reinforcing the idea that female “conquest” is a “game” to be “won.”

Once Red Velvet find the elusive Cookie Jar and bite into the cookies, they are transported into the world of the jar, and now adopt the perspective of the “female prize.” We see them posing on a bed, and they walk out to a spread of desserts.

In advertising, images of women eating desserts are often used to titillate men, as a stand-in for female sexual appetite. Women are portrayed eating desserts in measured, restrained bites with ecstatic facial expressions (which Red Velvet replicate), connoting the man’s ability to please the woman with ease and the extent to which female desire is rendered safe for control and consumption by men. By the end of the first chorus, it seems like this vision of female intimacy is the “prize” contained within the Cookie Jar after all.

Here is where things get interesting. In verse 2, Red Velvet members have fully assumed the perspective of the “Cookie Jar,” and we see them holding up objects that could be read as typical gifts by men. These gifts represent the conquest tactics men have tried to gain access to the Cookie Jar. Crucially, these gifts are transactional: they come with expectations of some sort of reciprocation, culminating in the sexual obligation that the act of “conquering” the Cookie Jar represents. However, that’s not the only transaction that occurs:  being the recipient of these gifts also imposes societal expectations on Wendy, Joy, and Seulgi on what is an “appropriate” and “grateful” way to receive them.

Wendy receives shoes, or the gift of “effort.” The male suitors want her to put herself in their shoes, to recognize how much effort they put into chasing her (cue Bruno Mars’ Grenade) and dress up nicely for them in turn (hence the clothes in the background). The fact that she receives 5000 pairs of the same shoes shows that her male suitors are all the same and just want the same thing from her: to force her into a single cardboard persona that matches their expectations of what a “prize” should be, under the guise of being considerate to their efforts.

Joy receives a telephone, or the gift of “attention.” Her male suitors want to spend time talking to her, in fact they want to talk to her all the time, and they think they are making her day by showering her with so much attention, but she evidently looks unimpressed, even as she feels obligated to continue listening to their drivel. Eventually, she loses her patience and dunks the telephone into a tank; their conversation is so boring that they might as well be talking to fish.

Seulgi receives flowers, or the gift of “feelings.” Although men once again think they are making her day by confessing their feelings and bombarding her with all these flowers, it is Seulgi who has to put in all the physical and emotional labor to take care of the flowers (aka their delicate feelings), otherwise they’re gonna start calling her an “ungrateful b*tch.”

Frustrated by the societal expectations of how they should receive these gifts, Wendy, Joy, and Seulgi put them into the Irenomancer’s mahō cauldron, hoping she can help turn them into something remotely useful. Irenomancer works her sorcery to turn it into a cream-based filling and, together with Yeri the master baker, successfully create the dessert spread we see in chorus 1. The final ingredient needed for Irenomancer’s magic to work is for Red Velvet to repress all their anger and frustration at men, which we see at 1:50, where lightning flashes and they bottle their sense of selves into the tiny Cookie Jar, allowing themselves to be objectified and reduced to it.

Enter chorus 2, and the illusion of romantic conquest is sustained yet again. Yeri holds up a crystal ball for us to spy on the other members, and Seulgi is eating popcorn as if to congratulate us on our successful voyeurism. By the way, the notion of the gaze is a really important motif in this MV, as it was in “Bad Boy.” Red Velvet are aware that they are constantly being watched by the male gaze. Early in the video, Joy abruptly turns to look behind her, worried she is being followed. And who else is following her but the camera? Likewise, the crystal ball with the pink and yellow stars represents a romanticized and voyeuristic filter for looking at women, through which they are reduced to the fantasy of the Cookie Jar. It almost seems like Red Velvet have chosen to silence themselves because they are on camera, constantly under scrutiny by the male gaze.

During the bridge, the Red Velvet members increasingly tire of performing for the male gaze. They sit around a table of half-eaten desserts, bored and probably suffering from stomachaches. Joy brings out the final dessert item from Irenomancer’s concoction: a grotesque cake disfigured from all the candles of societal expectations stuck into it. Together, the Red Velvet members with newfound conviction decide to blow the candles out, and then—

In the final chorus, the magic wears off and the desserts slowly revert into the trash that men gifted Red Velvet. Disillusioned, they destroy the food in a brilliantly uncomfortable scene to watch, which ends with them smashing the Cookie Jar itself. We cut back to the forest. Now that Red Velvet have ruptured the illusion inside the Cookie Jar, ants begin to swarm its contents. Irene, representing the male conqueror once more, drops it in horror; the “prize” is not what she expected it to be.

The Cookie Jar swarming with ants alludes to the image of the vagina dentata (“toothed vagina”), which symbolizes male castration anxiety towards the monstrous feminine: the woman who appears restrained and seductive at first but harbors destructive intentions towards men (arguably epitomized by Red Velvet in “Peek-A-Boo”). Historically, men have glorified self-control—tightly-sealed and pretty and pink—as the source of female desirability, much like the Cookie Jar we first see as the object of male conquest in this MV. In contrast, men are terrified of women with unrestrained desires, women who are seen as “out of control,” associated with images of gaping abysses and creatures like Medusa, Sirens, and Succubi. The vagina dentata, in particular, connotes deception: an object that appears deceptively controlled and suitable for male consumption at first, only to reveal a set of razor sharp teeth behind the veil.

So that’s my analysis of Cookie Jar! I really like this MV a lot, and I think it has many innovative elements that we have not seen in previous Red Velvet MVs. I really like the scene of the dance choreography at 3:20. Red Velvet’s choreographies are usually innocuous compared to their MVs, but the way 3:20 is overlaid with the scenes of food being destroyed, coupled with Joy’s absolutely perfect facial expression, makes it SO sinister, like there’s a claw inside the Cookie Jar that’s going to grab at you the moment you open it.

(#Cookie Jar also lowkey seems to be throwing shade at Irene’s feminist book incident tbh, where men accused her of being “ungrateful” and not “reciprocating” all their effort, attention, and feelings lololol.)