Welcome to the Black Parade

Reading the Carol Vernallis article “Telling and Not Telling” and then watching C4 with the various contemporary pop music videos on Select with Joel; the concept of narrative and nonnarrative music videos got me thinking on what was narrative and nonnarrative. I realize the certain techniques within specific contexts and the use of aesthetics and technical features. Watching the music video of “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance, I would assume this to be a narrative, as it creates the appearance of having a narrative, as I think it has a beginning, a middle and an end (Vernallis, 2004). It has characters- ‘The Patient’ dressed in a hospital gown, the two women, embodying Fear and Regret and Mother War who wears a gas mask and is dressed in a Victorian gown. The song is about dying and being taken by death in the form of the Black Parade. The video begins within a hospital and then moves to a surreal cityscape, surrounded by ruins and the remains of destroyed buildings blanketed in ash (Wikipedia, 2007). The music video follows the Patient, as he wonders through the parade looking at everyone, as the float passes through and then in the middle he is presented with a medal, which seems obvious but still ambiguous, whether the medal is symbolic of a life completed, acceptance of death or death itself. The end comes when the parade then leaves and the Patient is left alone. The characters of the music video lack dialogue, a technique of narrative. The Director Samuel Bayer is able to incorporate the band in the narrative. The bands gestures correspond with the music and the narrative. The images of MCR, works within the narrative, as being on the float they do not blunt the narrative drive, but are part of the parade and the narrative. This music video draws from other techniques- silent film, dialogue, (mise-en-scene), the costumes worn are meant to be the opposite of the costumes worn by the Beatles on the cover of their album ‘Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’, television commercials (temporal compression choreographed movements of figures, photography (buildings from San Francisco Earthquake, San Francisco Hall and a painting (inspiration from ‘Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889’, by James Ensor.
(Copyright right laws, unable to post the photos, but go to Wikipedia types in 'Welcome to the Black Parade' and 'Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band' to check out the resemblance.)