An Unreluctant (ish) Blog

It has come to my attention that some of you have never seen what I firmly believe to be the greatest music video of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It is the perfect marriage of a galactically bombastic power ballad and a writhing mass of 1980s video clichés, thrown into the path of a wind machine and blasted down a moodily lit corridor into the realm of legend.

In case you’re wondering what the heck they were thinking of when they made it, I remember Bonnie once explaining on TV that it’s about the dreams of a headmaster’s daughter, hence all the boys in (and out of) uniform. In retrospect, the whole shebang is quite fascinatingly female gaze-y, and I’m pretty sure it was a major formative influence on my pubescent imagination.

Steinman told Playbill in a 2002 interview that he wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as a vampire love story. He said its original title was “Vampires in Love.”

SCARLETT JOHANSSON as MARY BOLEYN

Dress

c. 1926

by A. & L. Tirocchi