Modest Mouse's Little Motel

If you haven't watched the video, I definitely recommend it before you start reading. "Little Motel" is one of my favorite music videos. Modest Mouse usually has some really interesting ones, such as "Dashboard." However, I chose this one to write about in particular because when I first saw the video, I ended up crying.

The music throughout the song is rather hushed, enhanced by the scene set up of being late at night where the mother evidently checks herself and her son into a motel. My favorite aspect of this video is that everything is in reverse, but it's not something you notice until the mother carries her son out of the hotel room.

In essence, this story carries out from the ending without understanding the significance of why the mother and son ended up in such a place to begin with. While the mother is seen checking her son into the hotel, while she's buckling him up into the car, and when she's simply on the road, we don't really understand the significance of her actions.

The chorus repeats, "that's what I'm waiting for, aren't I?" which seems to reflect not only the audience's waiting to understand the situation, but the mother herself at the beginning and end. In both instances, she sits by her son's bedside waiting for him to wake up.

Her expression gives nothing away all throughout the video, as though nothing were amiss. Similarly, the boy seems to simply be sleeping. Interspersed between some of the scenes is the blinking lights of a sign, giving a sort of whimsical feel, adding to the idea that everything is all right.

There are little cracks beneath the surface, however. Before the mother puts her son in the car, she looks around with a hand on the nape of her neck in a sign of nervousness. While gassing up her car, she smokes a cigarette to relieve stress. She takes her unconscious son to a diner for pancakes shaped like a monkey.

Right before the climax of the song and video, she has one flashback in sepia tone about she and her son at a playground together, running across the space. The transition shifts to her running out of the hospital cradling her sleeping child.

All in all, though this media is in video form, I hope to generate the same sort of emotions from reveals such as this one had. The use of flashbacks, setting, and beginning a story through the ending are all tools I hope to use effectively at some point. I don't believe I could ever master telling a story in reverse through prose, but that is a feat to go on the bucket list.