Elastic Heart Analysis

There’s an overwhelming amount of emotion in Sia’s music video for Elastic Heart. At first, watching it perturbed me, but in a good way. It stirred emotions and questions in my thoughts—Why are they in a cage? Who or what do they represent? And so on and so forth. Sia’s music video contains an abundant amount of artistic proofs and influences to her audience. To quote Texas A&M, “an artistic proof is created by the rhetorician and encompasses the appeals, canons, and most of the techniques given below.” (appeals such as pathetic, ethical, and logical) Elastic Heart intends to make the audience ponder the artist’s past or childhood, arguing that innocence is something easily lost but difficult to regain. BYU suggests that rhetorical analysis should hold values that can appeal towards audiences, whether or not there are principal lines of reasoning or kinds of arguments used. Elastic Heart appeals mostly to the pathos side, invoking to the audience’s emotion. In the beginning of the music video, a man and a girl are standing opposite sides in a cage, trapped inside the metal bars. Sia then poses her first appeal “Oh why can I not conquer love?”. This direction towards pathos tugs at the audience’s attention. At (0:08), the man appears frightened of the girl, similar to the emotions a child would go through when being confronted with a school bully. Sia’s lyrics, “I’ve got thick skin and an elastic heart, but your blade it might be too sharp/ I’m like a rubber band until you pull too hard, I may snap and I move fast” go on to further her argument. The man appears to want to trust the girl, though she continues to attack him. This especially breaks through in the music video at (2:06), where is almost showing signs of affection in reciprocation, but snaps to interpretably “bite the hands that feed” her. Even though she attacked him, he continually attempts to express affection for her. Though around (3:20), the man displays signs of aggression towards the girl, causing her to leave the cage. It’s in this moment where she realizes the cage he has trapped himself in. Their character development now shows that they begin to formulate a type of reluctant trust in their relationship. The girl ceases to harass the man, and, in turn, tries to free him from his prison. At (3:43), we see the stages of grief he goes through in sacrificing his distrust for the girl. Sia represents this in her lyrics as “You did not break me/ I’m still fighting for peace.” The mere fact that the man could easily escape the cage but cannot tear down the bars that hold himself inside appeals to the audience’s emotions. Compose, Advocate, Design proposes that the purpose of one’s composition should invoke a feel or sensation in which the reader would have in response. At the end of the music video, where the man slowly gives up, the two characters appeal to the audience’s sympathy and sadness, persuading the reader to concede and empathize in Sia’s argument for the song as it is an audio/ visual portrayal of her childhood.

            There is an internal struggle portrayed through Sia’s lyrics and music video, a struggle that doesn’t seem to be resolved by the audience’s interpretation. She further solves the question “Who cares?” as her audience can emphasize with her internal struggles and use them to empower their own lives. Her answer to the “So what?” question is to argue that her strength throughout her childhood, her interpretation revealed in a video documentation, though disturbed by an abusive relationship with her father, still is tenacious as elastic material—always bouncing back.

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Sept. 2015.