The title is from a Hitchcock movie. It looks like the consensus is that the song is based on Strangers On A Train (1951)–more Hitchcock. I haven’t watched either film recently.
While the music video is gorgeous, I can’t find anything on it other than a quote from Kevin Kerslake in the book, I Want My MTV:
It was a point of honor among bands on 120 Minutes to not show up in regular rotation on MTV. They wanted to be the bad kids on the block, who showed up for those two hours on Sunday night and ran riot. At that point, indie rock was thriving. You had great underground labels like SST and Rough Trade, and they’d give you complete freedom. I wanted to do something totally new. I’d shoot Super 8, and play with the color palette to make it more psychedelic. The punk rock ethos really drove the visual content, even if you weren’t working with punk bands. My first music video–“Shadow Of A Doubt,” for Sonic Youth–used horrible quality, super-grainy performance footage. It was fantastic.
The part with the performance footage doesn’t do a whole lot for me–except to provide a strong tie between song and video by putting the harder part of the song in there. I like what Kerslake did before and after that the most. It makes me think of a very colorful, indie, and simplified version of one of those collage-style videos that Jim Blashfield made for And She Was by Talking Heads or Don’t Give Up by Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush. It gives the video an ethereal quality that I love.
It’s very appropriate that this was on 120 Minutes back in the 1980s. This is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected to see on late night cable back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Enjoy!
Dar (Adrian Pasdar) and Tuck (Chris Penn) are two losers. Dar is angry. Tuck is a moron. They live in a dying Pennsylvania industrial town, where they have no future. Dar is worried that the air has been poisoned by the nearby coal mine. He and Tuck decide to go to California so that they can look for a woman whose picture they’ve seen in a magazine. Since Dar and Tucker have no money and no one is willing to pick up two hitchhikers who look like they are on sabbatical from the Manson Family, they end up having to steal cars and hold up convenience stores. They also pick up a mentally unstable woman named Annie (Lori Singer). Annie may be dying because of all the pollution in the world. Dar and Tuck take the time to transport a Native American runaway back to her reservation, where they both get scalped. Mostly, Dar and Tuck just drive through some of the ugliest parts of America and talk about how, because of pollution, everything is all messed up.
Through the Shattered Lens 