Burn The Witch Essay

How are media language and intertextuality used in “Burn the Witch” to construct representations of groups, messages and values?

“Burn the Witch” is a song sung by an English rock band Radiohead that was released in 2016 and it is part of the Dawn Chorus album. This song uses stop-motion animation for their video and within it holds a huge amount of intertextuality and cultural references in the time of publishing the video.

At the start of the video, the audience is shown a bird chirping on a tree branch. This connotes to the audience that the song is going to be peaceful and harmless to them however, this idea digresses later as the song continues. After that scene, they are greeted to the inspector on his way to review a town then there was a match cut to the town where the mayor instructs his people to get ready for the inspector and for them to do their jobs. The style of the video is reflected from the Trumptonshire trilogy because of the fact that the video is stop motion and that the models of the characters are very similar. This trilogy was made in the 1960s so there was no such thing as computer-generated animations that are seen in the modern world. If the audience knew what this trilogy is, they will immediately suspect that the music video is going to be calming and peaceful with no conflict (as it is a children’s show) however, again, this idea changes in the next scene of the video. Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s frontman, was born in 1968, so he grew up in a world of Trumpton on children’s TV, therefore, it can be argued that he brought this aspect into the music video.

As the first bridge is being sung “This is a low flying panic attack”, the first strange thing is being shown to the audience, with a man marking a red cross on a wooden door. This lyric “Red crosses on wooden doors” is later sung in the video. This is a cultural reference to one of the many medieval practices that are shown in the song, as people during 1665 and 1666 were forced to mark red crosses on their house doors if they had the plague so that people around them to know to not walk near them as it is highly contagious. The next cultural reference is a girl being seesawed into a puddle. This relates to the witch dunking that happened during the 16^th and 17^th centuries as women are dunked into the river while being strapped onto a chair and if they floated, they were seen as witches. Then, in the next shot, there are people (supposed men) have surrounded a woman that has been tied onto a tree and they’re dancing around her performing a ritual. Furthermore, there is a shot where the mayor brings the inspector to a woman that shows him medieval cuisine which includes a cow that has been made into a pie and its blood dripping from it onto the ground causing a puddle of blood. Last medieval cultural reference is the inspector being shown to a hanging rope in which people are executed by it as a form of punishment. This is shown to the audience that society during the medieval times was very gruesome and horrible however, the fact that the town is showcasing this in a positive limelight, it really gets juxtaposed by the whole set which consists of a clean town with small houses, shops and trees with a clear blue sky and all of these aspects portray positivity.

Additionally, there is an intertextual reference to a movie named “The Wiker Man”. The audience is shown to this idea when the mayor brings the inspector to a garden where many people were picking tomatoes from the branches on the ground. In front of the garden, there are creates labelled “Jobe’s” and some of them were full of fruit whereas some of them were not. This is a reference to the film, where the crates were filled with tomatoes in crates called “Summerisle Fruit” in the Wicker Man. Furthermore, when the second chorus of the song is being sung, they vocalist repeats the title of the song “Burn the Witch” as the inspector crawls into the effigy and the residents of the town burn it by using wood from a “Jobe’s” crate. Permission was granted by the mayor to do so. This is also a reference to the film, in which a detective who went to an island to investigate a disappearance which was full of pagans and they used the detective as a sacrifice which is part of a ritual so that the “Summerisle Fruit” business can keep on succeeding. This idea was given by Lord Summerisle who indoctrinated the pagans into performing the rituals. The differences are that in the song, the inspector voluntarily went into the effigy and he manages to escape it while it was burning whereas the detective was forced to go into the effigy and he, unfortunately, dies in the film. When the effigy was burning, the residents and the mayor waves their hands to the audience, which is intertextual to the trumptonshire trilogy because of its innocence as it is a children’s programme however this shot gets juxtaposed to the fact that they allegedly murdered a man that’s doing his job in a burning statue.

The song was released a month before the EU referendum, in May 2016. It seems to be critiquing some of the propaganda put out by the “Leave” campaign and representing some of the moral panics generated by the media around immigration. For example, there is a poster that displays people from the middle east queuing to enter the UK and the coverline is “Breaking Point The EU has failed us all” insinuating that they will take all jobs, houses etc essentially their race will be overpopulated and will overrun societies. Europe was in the midst of a refugee crisis, Islamophobia continued, and the “Leave ”campaign captured this, therefore, residents in the UK were persuaded to vote for the leave campaign so that it can be prevented. The reason why the design of the characters of the song was identical to the trumptonshire trilogy because in the USA, at the same time as the “Leave” campaign, Trump was campaigning for the presidency. Much of the ideology around his campaign mirrored the messages in the UK as he also wants to keep society traditional therefore refusing immigrants to be allowed into the country.

To conclude, Burn the Witch holds a huge amount of both cultural and intertextual references from the world and other media programs. This song is a direct response to the refugee crisis that happening in the UK and it portrays how they can possibly get executed through the demonstrations that was illustrated in the music video for example getting burned in an effigy, getting witch dumped, possessing the plague or committing suicide by hanging themselves because of the discrimination that they have experienced and Radiohead has managed to do this by referring to different media programs such as Trumpton and The Wicker Man.