preview

Rihanna We Found Love Essay

Decent Essays

Rihanna’s composition of various scenes in her music video “We Found Love”, explores the destruction of her relationship overtime. She begins the video with scenes based in present-time that exhibit the aftermath of her drug-influenced relationship. Significantly, blemished makeup, distraught body language, artificial lighting, and disheartening non-diegetic sounds create an ominous impression of how the relationship malfunctioned over time. By transferring to flawless costumes, lighthearted body language, and cheerful non-diegetic pop music, Rihanna shifts to a flashback of the relationship’s carefree moments while simultaneously juxtaposing the couple’s current drug-induced devastation with the past memories of the blissful connection that …show more content…

In the beginning of the music video “We Found Love,” Rihanna creates a dejected feeling of agony while establishing the scene in present-time. For example, she composes a shot in which she and her lover lay together in a bathtub as florescent lights strike their faces. This artificial florescent light represents the falsity and hollowness of their affection, and simultaneously, it attributes to the destructive theme of the use of drugs throughout the relationship. In the same scene, their clothes are drenched and water trickles down the surface of their skin. Rihanna’s makeup appears tarnished by the mascara bleeding down her face. This scene shows the couple as very disjointed creatures by manipulating their appearance to seem haunting. Similarly, the non-diegetic sound in this particular scene plays a vital role in setting the mood; Rihanna speaks about a past lover, which furthermore, implies who the man in the bathtub, is. During this scene, Rihanna and the young man do not speak, but rather we hear Rihanna express her emotion through commentary. She places the soft piano strokes within her commentary in order to compel the viewer to sympathize with her anguish. As a whole, this scene in the video exemplifies the heart wrenching emotion that one undergoes during the loss of love due to

Get Access