An Analysis Of Tame Dali's Let It Happen

“Coming up with the best visual representation of what it is like to be dreaming was one of the main goals of the Surrealists. In the beginning, Surrealism might seem a little crazy, but we've all had dreams where unrelated people, places, or objects come together in completely inexplicable ways.”

The artefact that I have chosen to discuss in this thesis is a Tame Impala music video for their single “Let It Happen” which was released in August 2015. Music videos are also one of the most common modern day music advertisements and are also an expression of kinship between modern day technology and design. Music videos have become so popular in our modern culture so when they subsequently involve an enormous amount of surrealism references,

When talking about surrealism and time running low, it is inevitable not to be reminded of Salvadore Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931). Dali’s painting of melting clocks also dips into the idea of how little time we really have. Weather it being insufficient time to catch a plane or the ever-lasting struggle of having insufficient time on this earth.

In the infamous Dali painting, the scene in set with four clocks propped up against various objects in what seems to be a dessert back drop. While this might seem uncanny enough, the clocks are not flat as you might expect them to be, but are bent out of shape, appearing to be in the act of melting away – perhaps symbolising time slipping away from either the painter or the viewer or both.

Shabi understand the painting in an interesting matter: “If Persistence of Memory depicts a dream state, the melting and distorted clocks symbolize the erratic passage of time that we experience while dreaming. Have you ever woken up and expected it to be still the middle of the night and are surprised to find that it is already morning? While we often are pretty good and keeping track of what time it is while we go about our days, keeping time while we are asleep is another story.” (Shabi, 2013