Review of avril lavigne's latest two videos, which are essentially
identical. Written for a class and I need to get some feedback.

Please see gazettalux.com for more information, as well as my film and
photo portfolio.

She's 20 years old, an overnight multi-millionaire and a huge star
shining on pop charts worldwide – and unfortunately, I can't help but
feel anything but sympathy for the poor girl.

Under My Skin is the latest contribution by teen-sensation Avril
Lavigne to the masturbatorial fantasies of self-styled "dangerous"
high-school boys. It currently resides at number six after eight weeks
on the Billboard top 100; despite this evident success it appears that
it may indeed be her music videos that bring this very expensive image
campaign to a premature and rather gruesome demise.

Let me explain.

Two months, two videos. They both go like this:
        A girl is alone in the city of New York. Her boyfriend is bigger,
older, moustached and erect. He asks politely, she refuses him. Shit
gets weird, they break up. She's sad, damn sad – WAIT – oh, not
anymore! She's strong and tells him NO! We can tell already that the
man reeks of cigarette smoke so she's better off without him anyway.

Both videos follow that line exactly and this cannot be disputed. At
this point though, they break away from each other – in Don't Tell Me,
she's changed outfits into something very dark, a zombie girlfriend or
something out of a Misfits video, and she very sexually claws her way
along the wall stalking the boy down a hallway, forcing the guy to
question his sanity. She becomes his conscience, casting the vengeance
of Christ upon the fornicator, and in the very end is carried up into
the sky like an angel on a hidden forklift. A little silly.

My Happy Ending concludes in a similar way, with Avril putting
Moustachio, age 35, in his place at what must be a vegan café based on
the looks of the girls that stand up and walk out with her, probably
leaving behind doe-eyed Emo boys to cry into black handkerchiefs and
poke at grilled soy-walnut faux-Ahi. She dashes to the local 24-hour
guitar shoppe, run by a very oily man that stands in his doorway like
a pimp spider catching lost flies like Ms. Lavigne. It's morning now
and she's trouncing the pavement with her boots as she tracks that
filthy man down – she's been up all night writing a song to beat silly
his guilty sinner's soul.

She finds him on a roof in a wifebeater, playing cards with what
appears to be Eminem + posse. She plugs her guitar into a massive
amount of amplification equipment that someone's kindly set up for her
in advance and gives said soul said beating. Fade to black.

In these videos, so much attention is being paid to portraying this
girl as a woman – the seven gratuitous shots of her breasts bounding
back and forth in My Happy Ending, for example – that it's unfortunate
her juvenile lyrics and Disney-channel after-school specials have to
work so hard against that. Her obnoxiously ubiquitous tutu, which
they're trying to use to show some sort of "punk-ified" femininity,
has supplanted that formerly omnipresent tie that she's since sworn
off forever.

These two contradicting images emanating out Arista headquarters do a
tremendous amount of damage to their campaign. It's probably
frustrating for her male fans that Ms. Lavigne has to be singing about
not having sex with them at the same time that they pine away for her
body, ignited by those seven shots.

Hell, maybe it's a brilliant move – tease these boys with images of
sex juxtaposed with scenes of chastity, and tie it all together with
very abstract and general lyrics about relationships, but twice in a
row? Come on kiddo – I expect better from you next time.