Happiness Directed by Steve Cutts Review

Hello guys, today we review about Happiness by Steve Cutts, Let's start

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the videoclip Happiness by Steve Cutts, which can be found on YouTube. The four-minute and sixteen-second video is a strong critique of the modern world, with Cutts choosing rats to represent humans.

The animation begins with a swarm of rats running across a white background, while the song L'amour est un oiseau rebelle (Love is a rebellious bird) plays in the background and runs throughout the video. The French song talks about how difficult it is to tame love, drawing an analogy between the freedom of the bird and the difficulty of controlling love. The big irony of this song and video can be interpreted as the difficulty of human beings to find love, they are always in a race to find love and pleasure, but this is not that easy as I show in sequence.

Reading films in context entails observing "[...] how genres transcode ideological positions" (KELLNER, 2003, p. 103) and the animation is rich in details, making it nearly impossible to follow everything that has drowned, but some things are repeated, such as medicine pills, cameras all over the place tracking the rats' movements, and people drowned in their cellphones. Consumption, alcohol, medicines, and money are among the advertisements that Cutts mocks; all of these issues are approached as a way to find happiness in a modern world. I employ the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method because, as Débora de Carvalho Figueiredo states:

The CDA's current focus is on the dialectic relations between semiosis (including language) and other elements of social practices. More specifically, the projects within this approach are centred on the radical changes that have occurred in social contemporary life, the role of semiosis in changing processes, and changes in the existing relationship between semiosis and other non-semiotic elements from the social practises network. (FIGUEIREDO, 2009, p. 740, translation by me)

Cutts' video emphasizes the effects of mass culture on social practises and the consequences for daily life.

The first scene is set in a crowded tube station where signs show the way to 'nowhere', but the rats keep coming and going, which can be interpreted as no proposal in life, and their expressions show anger, confusion, and sadness, while in the background there are famous advertisements apologising for happiness. He changed the names of well-known brands like Starbucks, Visa, McDonalds, Pepsi, Adidas, Coco Chanel, and iPhone to Happiness while keeping the design.

At 1:25', a rat is happy because he bought a lot of things; at 1:33', Black Friday occurs, and he simply forgets everything he had bought and fights for his life to buy more things that he probably didn't need. At 2:28', the video gets to alcohol, and once again, famous alcohol brands' names are replaced by Happiness.

We can find a beer labelled drink, forget, smile; a whisky (Jack Daniels) labelled drink the blues away; and a vodka (Absolut) labelled absolute happiness, the purest happiness there is; all of which imply that alcohol consumption is a way of finding happiness in a sad world.

The rat begins to drink in order to find the promised happiness, but it does not materialize, and he falls into disgrace while no one notices. He eventually wakes up and decides to heal himself, and another advertisement leads him to the cure. At 2:52', there is a large bottle of medicine labelled happiness, but upon closer inspection, there is the name fluoxetine, an anti-depressant with a maximum recommended dosage of 60mg per day, but in the video, the dosage is 200mg per pill. The rat feels happy after taking the pill and sees the world around him as magical, beautiful, and perfect.

The medicine keeps him going for a while, but happiness cannot be bought or changed, and even fluoxetine overdoses could not give him what he desired.

Cutts brings the money problem into the scene at the end of the animation. According to Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control:

Marketing has evolved into the company's "heart" or "soul." Corporations are taught to have souls, which is the most terrifying news in the world. Market operation is now a tool of social control, forming an impudent breed of our masters. DELEUZE (DELEUZE, 1992, p. 6)

The sold idea that "if you have money, you have everything" is relevant because in today's world. It is impossible to be isolated from environments such as big cities, but the big insight is how to live without getting caught in a trap, as the rat did. The majority of people live to work, and Cutts depicts this at the end with hundreds of rats trapped in a rattrap looking for happiness in a place that is sickling their lives.

Even in the final few minutes of the animation, Cutts shows the word Happiness again, and a rat begins to eat the wire of the name that is shown with lights, causing a minor electrocution and turning the name off. As seen throughout the video, it can be read as a thin line subject to modern happiness.

That's all, if want to see the video, go to youtube and search Happiness by Steve Cutts.

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