Eminem - Stan (Short Version) ft. Dido

This is the music video that I am going to be analysing, it is a collaboration between Eminem and Dido. In which an obsessive fan called Stan is letting his fantasy relationship with Eminem take over his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, who is played by Dido.

The genre of the video is hip hop, some of the general characteristics of this are seen in this music video. Mainly it is the element of rap that puts it into this category with Eminem rapping the whole song, with Dido coming in for the chorus.

The weather is representative of the mood, this is known as a pathetic fallacy, also the establishing shot through the window creates a sense of looking for the audience

The opening line of the song from Dido is 'my tea has gone cold', this is reflective of the mise en scene which is very dark and cold, mirroring the tension between Stan and his girlfriend. But before we hear this lyric we see Stans frustration at his girlfriend calling him 'Stanley' and his physicality towards her. He man handles her, also pointing at her telling her were to stand, this suggests that he is in control of her. His facial expression is one of anger and he leaves her on her own in the toilet and storms out. She then goes onto say and 'if I could it would all be grey', the mention of the colour grey is defiantly reflected in the colour scheme of the set. Grey can be described as the stage her and stan are in their relationship. On the shot that I have highlighted is an aerial shot, which gives this a notion of looking, we as an audience are looking down on their relationship.

We see the obsessive nature of Stan, with the posters all around his wall, he then sings, 'I'm your biggest fan' and 'I got a room full of your pictures man'. This is achieved by a pan across the room which highlights the amount of posters that Stan has. This highlights his freakish love for Eminem and how he is letting it take over his own life to the point, he puts his feelings for Eminem before his girlfriends'. It should be noted that the posters are all in black and white, in this screen shot Eminem is also looking which contributes to the notion of looking.

He even blames the post office for him not receiving his letters, even this shows how delusive he is, he cannot imagine his idol not returning his mail.

This image represents how he has mentally replaced his girlfriend with Eminem, if the audience were unclear of how obsessed he was with Eminem this picture highlights it.

But we then see that his mail is lost by the post office, we believe that Stan is making excuses for Eminem, but in reality we see that his mail is actually lost. This puts us as an audience on edge, because we know that Stan is frustrated and violent towards his girlfriend because Eminem is not mailing him back. So when we see this we are aware of how stan will react when he gets another rejection, but this time its no Eminems fault. 'I think its f*cked up how you don't answer fans'.

The music is very repetitive and dull, which concurs with the general mise en scene of the video. The pace of the music does not alter at all, it remains the same even when stan is driving at 90 mph you would expect the music to speed up, almost a climax but it stays at a consistent pace. Even when stans mood changes, for example, when he is at the concert and is watching his hero Eminem perform the music is steady paced as it is when he is about to drive of the bridge.