Their sexuality seems to exist somehow outside the range of the camera’s gaze, outside the atmosphere of mortal men. They’re so casual in their nudity, so composed, so unperturbed by the antics of the men objectifying them. “They were the talent we were more like props,” Ratajkowski writes of the men in her new book, My Body, and yet the women are the ones viewers can’t look away from. She commands the video in both the PG-13 and unrated versions like a supernova, a vortex of pulchritude and screen presence and sticky red lip gloss.
“Blurred Lines” instantly made Ratajkowski a star. This is the raw power of the female body, and yet what kind of power is it, really? At one point, Thicke seems to push the model Emily Ratajkowski against a wall, hollering into her ear while she gazes away from him, a picture of barely suppressed disdain. But what most surprises me now is how pitiable the men seem, pulling at the models’ hair and playing air guitar for attention, less musical superstars than jejune dads who don’t exactly know what to do with the women they’ve paid to be naked. dance, goofy and fully clothed, around them.Īs an artifact of its time, it’s a remarkably deadened and nonsensical thing. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.) In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props (a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe) while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.I. In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project.
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