Bringing new meaning to Andy Warhol’s famous line that “art is what you can get away with,” paintings and portraits come to life in the new Win Butler-directed video for Arcade Fire’s “You Already Know.”
As Butler pans his camera across the room, it lands on his bandmates performing the song, but when the lead vocals kick in, the shot focuses instead on paintings that come to “life,” lip syncing the singer’s words as his reflection (“Just a reflektor!”) occasionally shows up in their frames. Things get creepy when the portraits’ eyes get vacous and fluorescent pink, but Butler swoops in to save the day with a mirrored selfie at the video’s conclusion.
“You Already Know” is the latest in a series of Reflektor-era oddities that have included the Canadian band covering the theme songs from Back to the Future and Beverly Hills Cop and the release of a music video with Spider-man star Andrew Garfield last spring.
