The Killers – When You Were Young

This video is a mixture of performance and narrative. It follows and tell the story of a woman around the age of 20. It also shows the band performing in a bar, this bar is also part of the woman’s story.

The video starts without the actual song playing and cuts between shots of the woman on a rocky hill, where there is a white cross, it cuts between this and a man in a car.

This instantly makes us think that the male and female at the start of the video will be connected in some way and later in the video it is explained to the audience.At this part of the video the song has not actually started and all you can hear is background noises.

The song then comes in 46 seconds into the video while the woman is leaning on the cross. When the song come in it sounds like it is in the distance which gives the beginning of the video and almost eerie feel.

Then as the woman is leaning against the cross there are a number of quick flash backs:

At 55 seconds the song then stops again and shows the man running up the rocky mountain, with a slightly blur effect on the camera. We then see the woman laying on the hill top mourning, the man then joins here and this is the first time we properly see them together.

At 1 minute 29 seconds the song properly starts. There is a quick flash of the band performing which shows the audience it is going to be a performance/narrative video. It then cuts to show the woman praying the the church.

She then leaves the church and is shown with the man from the beginning of the video kissing so we assume this is her husband. While this is all going on the video cuts between the woman and the band performing.

The woman then arrives home but find her husband sleeping with another woman. She leaves the house and starts walking down the road, as she does this there are flashbacks of her wedding. This shows the audience how happy they used to be and makes us feel sorry for her as the camera follows her down the street crying. As before in the video flashbacks are commonly used, this helps the audience to get a clearer picture of what’s going on and the relationships between people in the video.

When we see clips of the band performing in the video they are wearing Indie style clothing but a little more dated as the video is set in Mexico and not very modern. In all the of The Killers videos that include performance the singer doesn’t hold a microphone when miming. This gives him more freedom to interact with the audience and put more emotion into the song.

The interesting thing about performance in this video is that the band actually perform in the location of the video and become part of the story. As the woman walks into the bar to work she the band are playing and she watches them as they perform the last bit of the song and then she turn around to carry on as the song ends.