Lost All Care: Despair and Stagnancy of Mental Illness in Emde Music Video

Chris Wu, the director and cinematographer behind Emde’s Lost All Care music video, adds the right kind of stylisation to the lyrics’ despair with slick, glossy visuals featuring Emde as a young woman in the middle of a crisis. 

A blend of hip hop and soul, the song articulates a cry for help. The shots, which are largely set at night or at least give the impression of night, centre Emde as an introspecting, warring figure. Dance sequences are brief and sprinkled through, giving shape to an entirely internal process via conflict with another young woman—but as the lyrics state, “When I say you, I mean me.”

If you don’t pay attention to the lyrics, the images can be taken to mean a woman’s struggle with an abusive relationship. This is a deliberate choice, cleverly complementing the idea of imprisonment within a self moulded by mental illness and of course, its friend, apathy. It enriches the use of night and darkness—a time and state that offers privacy of thought as much as it impairs clarity, or as it obliges every misstep with increasingly deepening fall. 

Each of the shots add to this sense of crisis and frantic pursuit of clarity—harsh shadows at a party lend it a nauseating feeling of vertigo, as if she is out of her depth; high angle view of the woman on a cluttered bed combines with the green-yellow lighting to produce a bleak feeling of predation and staleness; with repeated motifs of phone calls and mirrors, the video lays down evidence of the years she has lost fighting the same battle. The brightest shots include the shell and dictating force she is trying to cast off, finally made visible in the form of another woman. 

Coming out of the foggy woods takes her forever, and when she does, she finds a long road beckoning her—hopeful and forlorn. But feeling something is often better than the exhausting stagnancy of nothing. 

Watch Lost All Care Short Film Trailer