gotye's seven hours with a backseat driver

it's adhd hour, so i'm going to talk about one of my favorite music videos!

mild warning for some sexual themes in the video; it's all very cartoony (monkey with a banana)

i think i just resonate with this because i had overprotective parents.

the narrative of this video (as my own interpretation) is that the elephant is somewhat of an innocent child at the beginning, guided by their guardian with a very limited and "perfect" view of the world. but when the guardian disappears to take care of their own stuff, the elephant learns about much more mature things, like crime and sex, which both disturbs and intrigues them. they want to know more, but their guardian returns and harshly prevents them from going back.

the bird also sees other birds flying overhead and there's a "huff" noise, which i think was the bird's own frustration at not being able to fly freely up there, which gave way to the bird's harshness to the elephant. the bird definitely has good intentions and wants what's best for its charge, but takes it too far due to its own internal frustrations.

then the elephant, having their innocence sort of taken away by having looked into those dark areas, sees society around them unraveling, and is aware of much more mature things like violence, drugs, and promiscuity. but they, too, end up finding something within all of this that they're interested in - exploring their own sexuality. their guardian is helpless to stop them, and they end up tripping and falling and making huge mistakes, but the ones in the end who provide care to the elephant among all of this were the ones that the bird tried to keep them away from. and in the end, even though the elephant's world is destroyed (there's no returning to that childhood innocence), they find comfort in exploring their sexuality and find others who truly support them.

the message, especially considering the title of the song, is a jab at these sort of "backseat drivers:" those who control too much of others' lives. i think a lot of people tend to miss that the bird wasn't really in the right in this video; the bird definitely had good intentions and wanted to guide the elephant on the right path, but this "right path" was only what the bird wanted and not what the elephant wanted. it disregarded their autonomy as another person, which left the elephant struggling between being the person who the bird wanted them to be and the person that they wanted to be, which is how we got to the elephant tripping and crashing horribly. 

you can't make someone do something that they don't want to do, and that's important, including for children.