“I don't wanna make it, I just wanna… ”: Cinematic Intertextuality in 2000s Emo Music Videos

One of the most proximate forms of intertextuality in music video is with cinema, whether through references to specific films or entire genres. The highly contentious musical genre of emo has been especially prone to these references and as a musical genre is especially subject to several overlapping thematic tropes around alienation, self-harm, dark comedy, suicide and death that have also given rise to cinematic narratives from teen movies to crime, horror and art-house cinema. This chapter will look at this inter-textuality between emo videos and cinema, focusing especially on those videos where there is some form of relatively autonomous visual narrative that either makes references to a specific film or to an identifiable cinematic genre. This chapter will analyse some selected case studies of this intertextuality between emo music and cinematic aesthetics and genres, arguing that music videos played a key role in mediating youth popular culture between film and music industries and especially in presenting an outsider perspective that was nevertheless situated at the very centre of popular culture at the time.