Intertextuality in Music Videos: Break Free

Intertextuality seems to find its way into many music videos. It's fun and easy to incorporate classic moments from other media texts into a music video. It plays an important role in music videos as it gives a sense of an inside joke or reference that the audience can discover. If a fan gets the artists reference it gives them a sense of intimacy and pleasure as they feel they are part of the 'joke'.

In Ariana Grande's music video for 'Break Free', she creates a Sci-Fi, adventure piece which includes references to popular space movies such as Star Wars and Barbarella. These two films are classics that many fans can relate to as the two films span over around 50 years. Here, Ariana Grande has chosen to use the same font that scrolls from the bottom of the screen to the top, to give an exposition on the narrative of the music video. This is a direct reference to Star Wars as each film had the same animated exposition at the beginning to give some insight into the story. 

Here is the original from Star wars. You can clearly see that the same animation style has been used. This reference to Star Wars in her music video could suggest that she is trying to attract the geeky/nerdy audience by showing she has an interest in the space and Sci-Fi. This then adds to her star image as now different audiences can relate to her and what she is doing. This is also done cleverly as the rest of the video is very similar to the 1960's space classic Barbarella. Her costume, the male voice over, and the dangerous femme fatal attitude all closely resemble that of the character Barbarella.

The short white outfit Ariana has on slightly resembles the classic white Barbarella outfit that she wore when defeating aliens in space. She also has long hair but the colour is brunette instead of blonde. The plot of the music video is parallel to Barbarella as we have a strong female protagonist who fights against aliens in intergalactic space. Referencing to this classic film allows an older generation to recognise a film that they may have seen when they were younger, giving them a sense of knowledge over a younger audience who may not know what the reference to Barbarella is. This is also creates Ariana's star image to an older generation, showing that she is interested in classic films and old Hollywood.