Sam Tudor: Joseph in the Bathroom (2019)

The video for Sam Tudor's track "Joseph in the Bathroom" is an extremely personal, moral homecoming for the singer-songwriter. In the song, he recalls the dark social realities of his small-town highschool with newfound clarity. To confront the past head-on, I travelled with Sam to his old school in Northern BC, casting real students from the school and creating a dream-like production process which put us inside the song. Listening to his words, I began to envision the school as a physical embodiment of Sam's mind and the way we move through it as his stream of conscious thought. As we drift through the building, the vacant bodies of both teenagers slither lifelessly along the ground, pulled from room to room by an invisible force. They have no agency within the context of Sam's headspace. They exist in his mind as faceless objects, seemingly part of the school itself. When his fractured memories of these characters coalesce in the high school gym and Joseph and Autumn's faces are suddenly revealed, Sam is unable to confront their subjectivity and makes a fruitless attempt to escape it. As he runs, the haunting chorus of "no reflections, no reflections" rings out, reminding us that their presence will loom over Sam until he does in fact, reflect.