One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Published on 4/29/2025
A few days ago, the song "Breezeblocks" by alt-J popped out of nowhere in my Spotify, reminding me of its glorious Tumblr days in early 2013. Giving it a listen anew, and after a few replays, something started to forcefully announce its presence in the lyrics: namely, the seemingly contradictory "Please break my heart" line. At the same time, I also rewatched the video, about which the vocalist of alt-J, Joe Newman, has stated:
"Our video for this track has a really different message, and yet it worked really well with the song. It’s quite a weird one; people aren’t sure what’s going on. We liked that you might have to go back and watch it a second time to figure out what is happening."
Well, how come the message is "really different" but it still worked pretty well? What is missing here, or what is the link? Also... what's the point of the rewind, the most notable feature of the video? The video starts, as it ends, with a man curled on a bathroom floor, wreckage behind him. Each reversed action—the breezeblock rising from the water, the struggle unwinding, the mouth tape reapplied—becomes a signifier desperately attempting to chain itself to that primal image of devastation. The viewer is forced to read cause from effect, exactly how trauma installs meaning after the fact, but is there anything more to this afterwardness?
Starting with the lyrics, there seems to be the lingering theme of a paradoxical command dictating the whole song. I will now attempt to formulate the basis of that command: on the one hand (and the most obvious interpretation of the lyrics) is the painful longing of a partner desperately trying to salvage a relationship, while the beloved one has become disillusioned and emotionally withdrawn. On the other hand, this exact "longing" is suddenly interrupted by the request for its opposite: a plea to leave, to "shatter me," to open a morbid wound that guarantees the continuation of intensity—the raw cry of "Please break my heart." Appearing only twice, isolated amid the dominant pleas of "please don't go," this line marks an irruption of the Real—a sudden crack revealing a raw, almost unbearable demand.
Yet, far from being a true contradiction that disrupts the song's core logic, these two sides of the command work beautifully together, revealing the hidden agenda beneath: Do not, under any circumstances, deprive me of the intensity that makes my heart pound. This isn't merely about seeking intense feelings over numbness; it's a fundamental demand to keep the circuit of the desire operational. Both pleas—whether demanding fusion ("I'll eat you whole") or split ("break my heart")—function as strategies to keep the Other installed as the objet petit a, the vital lack around which the subject's desire must circulate. To rewind a bit: the slippage from "I love you so" to "I'll eat you whole" exposes love's all-encompassing logic. Love as incorporation, as the desperate attempt to swallow the Other, to annihilate the gap that makes them Other. And if consumption fails, if I cannot possess your jouissance, then inflict pain upon me, let me derive jouissance from my own shattering. Anything beyond these two options and you would have a real tragedy to deal with.
Now, forward onto the video. The above economy of intensity finds a perfect metaphor in the image of the breezeblock. Crucially, like the paradoxical command in the lyrics, the breezeblock is never allowed neutrality. It must be charged, forced into one of two active roles servicing the demand to keep the circuit live: either as a décor, propping up an improvised table and supporting the fragile fiction of a stable, loving home; or as a weapon lifted in rage, transformed into a pure, lethal force, reminding us of the "break my heart", or in this case, head... In both charged states the breezeblock serves the fundamental demand: Keep the intensity, keep the Other engaged, keep the drive circulating. Render it neutral, imagine it simply returned to the background wall, indistinguishable from any other brick - and there is no more a breezeblock, the song dissolves. The metaphor of the breezeblock itself, ironically, is the link connecting the video to the song, the thing that has "worked really well" according to Joe Newman.
Let's now take a closer look at the video's famous reversal. Why rewind? We have three figures: the husband, the (bound) wife, and the intruder. The intruder isn't just a rival; she is embodied surplus jouissance that the fantasy of the stable marital life tries, and inevitably fails, to expel. She is the living proof that the Symbolic fiction of romantic closure is always-already cracked, haunted by an excess it cannot contain. So, what happens when the husband succeeds in eliminating this disruptive element? He strikes the fatal blow and the intruder falls into the water. At this precise moment of "victory," the underlying horror is exposed. By annihilating the figure who carried the excess—the very excess that arguably fuelled the libidinal tension—the husband confronts not triumph, but unbearable emptiness. The objet is gone, the conflict is seemingly resolved, and he is left face-to-face with the raw impossibility, the void at the core of his desire. His collapse onto the bathroom floor isn't just shock from the act of murder; it's the psychic implosion that occurs when the fantasy structure sustaining him is violently ripped away.
This is where the rewind becomes more than just afterwardness; it becomes a necessary self-defense maneuver, a desperate flight from the deadlock. The reversal functions as a frantic "undoing." By playing the video backwards, the fatal act is retracted, the stray jouissance contained, the conflict reinstated. The husband doesn't just watch the events unhappen; he orchestrates this regression. Re-taping the wife's mouth isn't just a reversed action; it's the unconscious restoration of the wife to her immobilized position. His "exit" from the house at the video's end isn't a true departure, but a retreat to the point where the unbearable choice (and its unbearable consequence) has not yet been made. The rewind allows him to escape the void by perpetually deferring the final act, forever rewinding to the moment before the intensity collapses into nothingness. He leaves the scene, yes, but only by resetting it, ready for the cycle of desire to begin again, forever avoiding the terrifying lack that comes by removing the excess.
Yet, this avoidance might sustain a deeper compulsion. Following Žižek's reading of the death drive as that which "insists on endlessly repeating the state of tension," the rewind serves not just as an escape from the void, but as the very mechanism of the drive itself. Perhaps there is a source of a perverse jouissance located precisely in this rewind-repetition, this constant re-staging of the traumatic encounter?