"30 Seconds To Mars - Hurricane" Deconstruction

Artist: 30 Seconds To Mars
Song Title: Hurricane
Genre: Rock
Director: Bartholomew Cubbins
Year: 2010
Audience: 15-24

This is a video based on the concept of dreams and the darkness of people's minds. Outside of the opening text, “This is not reality. This is a dream,” there are many instances of dream-like imagery. Jared Leto (vocalist) experiences multiple instances of falling in ways that defy reason. First is when he leaps from his apartment window and falls many stories to the ground only to absorb the shock and stand up right when in reality his body would’ve been crushed by its own momentum. The second fall occurs when Leto unlocks himself from a coffin, and is suddenly thrust forward and falls to the ground again, mirroring the suddenness as well as the same fear felt in the common “falling dream.” Reality and physics are also skewed in the fighting that takes place in the video. When Tomo Milicevic (guitarist) punches an assailant in the stomach, the attacker is knocked farther backward than he could physically go, and when Jared Leto later knees his own inner demon in the chest, the same defiance of physics occurs. The video itself closes with the line, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and much like a dream, the video ends on an ambiguous note with a lack of any real resolution. This lack of  closure follows not only the structure of a dream, but also common ideas about the afterlife because, as the chapters presented in the video are called Birth, Life, and Death, it is unclear about what happens after the video ends, just as there is much confusion as to what lies after death.


Throughout the video there is cross cutting to scenes of explicit sexual acts, which relates to the dark imagery of the video. Often when there are mature themes contained in a video the artist releases an uncensored and censored version, so that it can still be played on TV, but people can also choose to view the video the way the artist and director intended it, and this is not exception. Intertextuality to other work by the band is present in this video, as from 0:05 to 3:00 the opening song of their album, Escape, is heard, and during the fight at 8:12 to 8:45 the song Night Of The Hunter is used. Throughout the video there is a strong aspect of not only male gaze, but also female gaze, because although there are many shots of women in revealing clothing, the male singer has his top off for the whole video. There is also a religious aspect to the video, as at 5:50, People of different religions are seen throwing books into a fire. Here is a quote from the vocalist Jared Leto about the video: "I really was just following my creative muse and this is where it led me, to make a film that explores some of the things that usually live in the darker corners of our universe and our psyche"

Making of video: