Bonnie Tyler | Through the Shattered Lens

I wanted to hold off on this video till later, but the sun and the moon made other plans. So, let’s go through it.

Why is Bonnie here in the first place?

Is the bird practicing to be thrown later?

Swinging lamps…

on loan from Harden My Heart by Quarterflash.

Harden My Heart (1981)

It’s safe to look at Total Eclipse Of The Heart…

but don’t look at the total eclipse of the sun today with the naked eye, or you could end up like this guy.

Doors also on loan from Harden My Heart.

Harden My Heart (1981)

It’s a Russell Mulcahy video. You can usually be assured that his videos will contain metaphoric liquids and/or homoerotic imagery.

Is this the same bird from earlier?

The Reflex!

The Reflex by Duran Duran (1984)

It was nice of Godfrey Ho to let Mulcahy borrow some ninjas.

Gentlemen, welcome to The Skulls.

Another thing from Harden My Heart.

Harden My Heart (1981)

Since both videos were filmed in Holloway Sanitarium, I like to think that while Bonnie was upstairs, Ozzy Osbourne was being chased around the basement by a werewolf for Bark At The Moon.

The Judas Priest dancers reaching for Bonnie.

And Bonnie’s reaction…to the entire video.

There’s more Harden My Heart in here, but I choose to show this person upside-down instead.

Definitely Mulcahy.

Pressure.

The Thin Wall by Ultravox (1981)

I love that they almost missed Bonnie with the altar boy.

Exactly how many birds is he supposed to have? We could see some others earlier, and there are a few behind him. Does he just wait around to throw them at people who pass by?

Wild Boys cameo

The Wild Boys by Duran Duran (1984)

Then Bonnie is rescued by an angel from the clutches of Mulcahy.

Or is she?

In reality, it was a bit of both.

Here’s what Mulcahy had to say about this video in the book, I Want My MTV:

I collaborated on the storyboard for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with Jim Steinman, who wrote and produced the song. Jim is fabulously, fabulously crazy. We would banter ideas over a bottle of red wine. I’d say, “Let’s set it in a school and have ninjas in one scene,” and he’d say “Let’s have a choirboy with glowing eyeballs.” We shot it in an old abandoned insane asylum in London. We had one sequence, which was Steinman’s idea, where a shirtless young boy is holding a dove and he throws it at the camera in slow motion. Bonnie came around the corner and screamed, in her Welsh accent, “You’re nothing but a fucking pre-vert!” And she stormed off.

There was nothing perverse intended. The imagery was meant to be sort of pure. Maybe slightly erotic and gothic and creepy, but pure. Anyway, the video went to number one, and a year later Bonnie’s people rang up and asked if I would direct her new video. And I told them to fuck off, because I was insulted about being called a fucking pervert. And I was a little mad because pervert wasn’t pronounced correctly.

So the bird throwing kid was Steinman’s idea. Interesting. Perhaps her comment is why he isn’t shirtless in the video.

I wonder what video Bonnie’s people wanted him to come back to direct a year later. I ask because the video for Faster Than The Speed Of Night, which came out the same year, puts a kid throwing a dove to shame.

Faster Than The Speed Of Night (1983)

Needless to say, regardless of their falling out, this kind of video became Bonnie Tyler’s thing for awhile.

Holding Out For A Hero (1984)

If mvdbase is to believed, she even got Jim Steinman back to co-direct If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man). It’s something you’d hardly notice if you watch the video.

If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man) (1986)

I’m glad she followed up Total Eclipse Of The Heart with similar videos. The songs are great, and the videos make them unforgettable.

Enjoy the eclipse!

30 Days Of Surrealism:

Sure, there’s a better known video by Bonnie Tyler where Rambo’s head explodes, but I’ll get to that at some point. This Bonnie Tyler video has both zombie soldiers & a white Bonnie chasing after a black Bonnie while a UFO floats overhead.

Let’s look at the summary on Wikipedia:

The video is set in London. Tyler, dressed in a black leather dress, walks down a cobbled road lined with statues of soldiers. She occasionally looks up to see a duplicate of herself, dressed in a white dress, standing at the top of a fire escape, shrouded in shadow. The statues come to life and follow Tyler down the road. Behind them follows a black car, driven by the duplicate of Tyler. She runs away from them as she notices the statues following her, and locks herself inside a garage. The car then breaks through the doors of the garage and attempts to run Tyler over. She escapes through another door and finds herself on a street, looking up to see a spaceship in the sky. The spaceship descends, and a car appears, which Tyler enters and drives away. The duplicate chases after Tyler in her own car. Tyler drives into another building, and as the spaceship flies above the building, the duplicate drives inside as the entrance explodes. The spaceship then flies away as the animated statues look on.

When you describe it like that, it just sounds stupid. Plus, where is the mention of the UFO exploding at the end?

The only piece of information I could find isn’t about the video. It’s that the song was used in the 1984 release of Metropolis. That would explain the white and black Bonnies. One is meant to be Maria, and the other is meant to be the robot version of Maria. Where the zombies, or “animated statues”, come in to play, I don’t know. I also don’t get the inclusion of a UFO.

I wish I had more. The only other thing I have is something that really belongs with Total Eclipse Of The Heart, so I’ll save it till then. If you go to her section on mvdbase, you’ll find that the majority of her videos have no director listed. Coincidentally, Meat Loaf is the only other very well-known artist that I’ve come across whose music videos are as undocumented as Bonnie Tyler’s. The difference is that they seem to at least have her videos in there.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism: