"Giallobrutalism," or why everything looks like that
Defining the period pop style of the mid-2020s
Benvenuti. There are quite possibly more photos here than in any blog post ever written in the history of the world - I’d recommend opening in app or browser, and preferably on desktop so you can see them at full size. It is going to be a dissertation-level piece of writing so I’ve put an index in:
Arguing for a mid-20s “period style”
The 1930s-1970s foundations
Paranoia
The millionth coming of the “It-Girl”
1930s ingenue aesthetics
Attempting to define “giallobrutalism”
A provisional giallobrutalist canon, loosely annotated
Centripetal girls in a centrifugal world: giallobrutalism and place
Addendum: the Mario Bava - Laura Mars - David LaChapelle - 360 connection
I’m using this post to argue (through a canon of recent music videos) that the mid-2020s has developed a definite aesthetic sensibility. There are several elements that force it into 2020s specificity, and several tangential influences - Y2K-era J-horror, Norbert Schoerner, David LaChapelle. But everything in it is underpinned by an existing visual schema, the same one that dominated the Italian film industry from the late 1960s to late 1970s. The results of that sensibility are most readable in Italian gialli - a subgenre of surreal, stylish and bloody crime films. We might be able to interrogate our own cultural anxieties by studying the cultural anxieties that caused the original explosion of giallo style. My current thesis is that the new sensibility (I will call it “giallobrutalism”) exists to express common anxieties around surveillance, stardom, and urbanism.
Arguing for a mid-20s “period style”
Any discussion of period style will inevitably result in someone saying “the 2020s don’t have an aesthetic!” I think this is a fairly fashionable claim, usually delivered through the logic of “remake fatigue”:
None of these arguments are really unique to the 2020s. Mark Fisher thought British music culture fell into stasis around the turn of the millennium. For him, the 1960s and 1970s featured well-defined visual and sonic shifts, while the 2000s and 2010s were a referential doom loop:
While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century…1
Fisher pinned this stagnancy on a historically-specific combination of new media and neoliberalism. He was almost certainly right about a “nostalgia mode” in contemporary pop music, but he was almost certainly wrong about the stagnancy, circularity and twentieth-century boundaries of that nostalgia. As I argued in the New Statesman, PinkPantheress counterintuitively disproved Mark Fisher by drawing on the aesthetic specificity of the mid-to-late 2000s. Her Fancy That visuals proved that the Blair-to-Brown-to-coalition period was a distinct cultural entity, totally recognisable as one element of a nostalgic product.
PinkPantheress’s protegee Cece Natalie bases her music and visuals on the revival of what Fisher called “club hauntology” and the rest of us call “recession pop.” Canelle is a new pop star in the mid-2010s “pastel goth” mode. A spate of dance acts like Snow Strippers, Bassvictim and Frost Children base their visual identity in the fifteen-year-old “indie sleaze” era. Rather than remaining stagnant in the twentieth century, it is far more likely that we are moving through unique stages of revivalism, each one mediated by a combination of personal nostalgia and zeitgeisty “vibes.”
There’s a simpler argument for a unified sensibility: if we had no collective shifts in aesthetic sense, nothing would go in or out of style. You can tell what the decade’s shaping up to be by assessing what now looks and sounds almost universally outmoded: Kanken-toting “art hoes,” cursive singing, e-girl makeup, Selkie tutu dresses, “Danish pastel” interiors, cybersigilism.
The 1930s-1970s foundations
By the end of the 1970s, there was no visual domain that hadn’t been touched by the interwar age. There were 1920s and 1930s period dramas on both sides of the Atlantic. Womenswear designers adopted the flowing cuts and menswear influence originally seen in the post-flapper period. The two eras now exist as a single cultural entity. “Seventies-does-Thirties” is a recognisable “thing,” with its own unique balance of disco-flapper intrigue, Euro sophistication, and urban grime. When modern fashion designers talk about the Seventies, they generally mean Seventies-does-Thirties. The extreme majority of interwar films were in black-and-white, but the Seventies-does-Thirties aesthetic has its own colour palette (muted pastels, gold lamé).
To generalise: while the Sixties-Twenties synergy was bright and campy, the Seventies-Thirties synergy was grimy and cynical (and still campy, but in a darker way). After a dominant decade of Meghan Trainor, “Danish pastels” and Selkie dresses, I think we’re deep into a revival of the latter aesthetic sensibility. This is why:
Paranoia
Earlier this year, the Economist ran an article claiming Britain was in its “second golden age of paranoia.” The cited figures are compelling: polling agency More in Common found that nearly half of us thought “a secret group of people is [definitely or probably] responsible for making all major world decisions, such as going to war.” “Corruption talk has become so common,” read the article, “it is akin to the weather, an uncontroversial ice-breaker.”
The first “golden age of paranoia” spread simultaneously across post-McCarthy America and Harold Wilson’s Britain. It had several causes: a generalised panic about Communist influence and Soviet intelligence, a particularised panic about misconduct in the US government and intelligence services (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers), a personally-paranoid American president (Richard Nixon). 2
This paranoia arguably peaked in the 1970s, by which point it had infiltrated almost every form of popular culture. It lurked in the emergent postmodern novel (see Gravity’s Rainbow).3 The emergent auteurs of “New Hollywood” (early 60s-early 80s) gave us plenty of overlapping visual representations of this political mood. Alan J. Pakula4 had the “Paranoia Trilogy.” All the President’s Men (1976) deals with the journalists who uncovered Watergate;5 Klute (1971) follows a call girl who sets a private investigator on her stalker, and The Parallax View (1974) tracks another journalist who must work out what happened in a senator’s assassination.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), a surveillance specialist grows increasingly paranoid as he uncovers evidence of a murder plot. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) features a detective slowly losing his mind while unearthing a historical scheme to divert water into Los Angeles. (This one’s particularly relevant because it deals with mismanagement of a public resource).
The “paranoid style” most likely came back into fringe discourse during the run-up to the 2016 election. While Democrats were convinced of a Russian disinformation operation, Trump actually conducted himself like the politicians in Hofstadter (see this BBC article from his election year). The COVID era had the Q-Anon-ers, who were convinced Trump had sent them on a mission to uncover a secret group of celebrity pedophiles. Liz Truss is still of the opinion that the the “deep state” prevented her from fulfilling her mandate as Prime Minister.
I think there’s been a general post-2020 switch from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism, and that this has caused a new, widespread wave of media-sanctioned paranoia. This shift probably began during COVID-era isolation and intensified in response to the corporate push for consumer AI. Tech messiah Elon Musk is now a pariah; “doomscrolling” is a stand-in for “scrolling”; “brainrot” and “enshittification” have entered the lexicon, and there are new, huge audiences for books like Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. We’re not necessarily any less entwined with technology, but this pessimistic information environment has made us aware that our data is always at risk.
There is, tangentially, a fair amount of paranoia about AI-enabled surveillance. Some of this has come in response to consumer pushes, like the short-lived AI wearable Friend, and the lavish Kardashian-backed campaign for Meta AI glasses.
Another portion of this anxiety is interlinked with our anxieties and moral stances on war. There’s a longstanding and overwhelming global paranoia about the funds normal people might inadvertently send to Israel - either through taxes, or through our consumer behaviour - and Palantir probably wouldn’t have gripped the public imagination if it hadn’t readily provided services to the IDF. In America, roving ICE agents use Palantir’s AI analytics service to track down illegal immigrants. There is also increasing public scrutiny around a contract between the analytics firm and the NHS.
Some of the paranoia is more directly Pynchonesque. Earlier this year, when the White House dropped an enormous amount of Epstein-related data, the whole “media class” became paranoid, New Hollywood-esque detectives, compiling digital-only “evidence boards” and going down adjunct rabbit holes.6
The millionth coming of the “It Girl”
The (liberated) flapper emerged as a side-effect of 1920s consumer culture, and Clara Bow starred in It in 1927 (thus birthing the term “It Girl”). I’d argue Hollywood’s next decade was characterised by an obsession with stardom itself. The female-focused star system arguably reached its height in the 1930s: this was a prosperous decade for the American film industry, and it spawned and/or cemented some of the most recognisable celebrity personae of all time. (An antitrust lawsuit would ruin it at the end of the next decade).
Major studios expressed their own might through their cultivation of star power, casting figures like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn as historic queens. Films like What Price Hollywood? (1932), Going Hollywood (1933), and the first Star is Born (1937) chronicled the experience of ordinary women who went through the industry’s “starmaking” process. The massive “backstage musical” genre focused on ingenues who had to prove themselves at dance revues. (Sidenote, see the oddly postmodern expressions of camp personality in films like Dames (1934)):
The Hollywood star obsession resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought us a wave of campy “hagsploitation” films - mostly directed by Robert Aldrich - and a few later, darker explorations of stardom, including major adaptations of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. Andy Warhol meditated on fame by casting an assortment of random people as instant “Superstars.” Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon came back into print after a decade-plus of obscurity.
The camp “persona” is back in a big way in pop music. Read Notes on Camp if you haven’t (it’s still the best explainer).7 In short: camp personae are consistent characters. If you want to escape the “Khia Asylum” as a pop star in 2026, you’ve got to pick a consistent “look,” aesthetic, and musical style, and preserve it for the rest of your career. (Gradual variations are allowed). It is no longer uncool to yearn for fame. Fans plot and scheme on Twitter, pretending to be managers, stylists and record executives. Instead of marketing to club DJs, successful artists use their remix albums to showcase contemporaries higher and lower on the popularity scale.
There is also a growing body of work about the Khia Asylum. See Adela singing about infiltrating the pop industry in KGB. Or FLO literally escaping the asylum in their video for Leak It. Or Zara Larsson hopping onto a PinkPantheress single to narrate her breakout:
The past year has also seen a semi-mainstreaming of the K-pop idol system via. Katseye, who are part-managed by South Korean conglomerate HYBE. K-pop fans are already used to the machinations of the star machine - it’s always been normal to be aware of your favourite idol’s label situation, and to point out instances of mismanagement. Katseye have taken this level of transparency to heights unseen in Western pop music. The group were formed on a competitive webseries called Dream Academy, and that webseries was then turned into a relatively unflattering documentary, featuring footage of internal meetings and interviews with label execs. The documentary still invites masses of faux-managerial speculation on Reddit and Twitter, where fans draw up alternate lineups and pontificate about the competitors who will eventually “make it.”
Another pivotal figure is Addison Rae, who might be the last ever Warholian Superstar. She was an ultra-lowbrow TikTok dancer before the Interview Magazine team helped to “make her,” aligning her with fixtures of the highbrow underground (Arca, Bruce Conner) and dressing her like a zany ingenue. As with the original Superstars, Addison’s current star persona revolves around stardom itself. See the breathlessness of this on-stage performance, or the Nathanael West-ness of this Rolling Stone profile, where she talks about her framed photo of Judy Garland, or the Lynchian Oz references in the High Fashion video.
Addison is a great example of Y2K-ness as Trojan Horse: she makes a lot of surface-level Britney references, but her mannerisms, aesthetic, and overarching sensibility have undoubtedly come out of the 1960s and 1970s. Her movement style (coordinated by creative director Lexee Smith) is very Ann-Margret. Also very Faster, Pussycat. See the ingenue-ness of her performance in the video for Diet Pepsi:
Tangentially, I think it’s significant we’re seeing an Ozempic-fuelled rise in “heroin chic,” in alignment with the beauty standards of the 1930s, 1970s and 2000s. Historical figures of note here include Edie Sedgwick, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton; also Kate Moss, whose whole thing was ingenue-ness. It’s notable that the look tends to float back into the common vernacular during periods of It Girl Obsession. Your eyes look bigger when you are very thin, which means you can be amazed all the time at the marvellous predicament you are in (ie. being a STAR).
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the “cool girls” dress like off-duty chorus-line hopefuls in a gritty early-1970s remake of a mid-1930s MGM backstage musical:
I’ve heard “microtrends” as an argument against a unified “2020s aesthetic,” but actually when you put the current ones together you get a distinctly 1930s design language, with pastel colours and exaggerated feminine details:
These styles are very “online,” but they’re filtering into mainstream pop culture:
There’s also a 1930s makeup analogue. The thin eyebrows, sunken cheeks and lined lips of the 2020s all hark back to Marlene Dietrich. (Women these days are getting their buccal fat removed, which we’ll look back on as a particularly “2020s” phenomenon; Dietrich was one of several 1930s actresses to have their molars taken out for added cheekbone emphasis).
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Attempting to define giallobrutalism
A three-point definition:
Giallobrutalism occurs in a version of the present coloured heavily by a version of the 1970s that was, in turn, coloured by the 1930s. No individual will wear anything she could have worn in the 1970s, but no setting will look out-of-place in that decade.
Giallobrutalist action usually occurs in public spaces. Those public spaces are usually financed by private capital, and exist at the margins of an urban/suburban or urban/rural divide.
As with the giallo camera under Mario Bava or Lucio Fulci, the giallobrutalist camera is a voyeur. It zooms in and out quickly (the “crash zoom”), shoots at very high or low angles, and “eavesdrops” on background action.
A provisional giallobrutalist canon, loosely annotated
Here is a basic canon of “giallobrutalist” music videos. In each case I’ll point out how I think the aesthetic scheme works in context. I’ll also draw a line to any potential reference points of note, and will go into theoretical detail lower on.
Olivia Rodrigo - good 4 u (May 2021, dir. Petra Collins)
The Italian influence isn’t there yet, but I’d pick this out as an important early text. Interestingly, Olivia Rodrigo’s brand is 2020s-does-2010s-does-1990s. Her team very often draws on the cloud of sonic and visual influences behind now-extinct online teen magazine Rookie (2011-2018; see here for a good representation). Sofia Coppola’s 1999 adaptation of the Virgin Suicides was a prime influence on the magazine. The film’s voyeuristic, stagnant view of 1970s Middle American “girlhood” took off with Rookie and its readership, and bled into the work of Petra Collins, whose photography was a regular feature (see here and here). We see its later evolution in this video:
Charli xcx - Good Ones (Sept 2021, dir. Hannah Lux Davis, D.P. Gaul Porat)
This is where the Italian influence kicks in. Seriously: this music video is so Italian. I’m pretty sure this was an early kick-off for the giallobrutalist style, and I’ve tried to probe into it to work out whether its visual scheme is characteristic of any creative in particular. Hannah Lux Davis is one of the most prolific music video directors in the world, but at this point she hadn’t made anything else that looked like Good Ones. It’s a mystery…
And I’d also like to point out some visual similarities to this dream sequence around an hour into Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965):
And I am almost certain there’s some visual influence from Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971):
Doja Cat - Agora Hills (Sept 2023, dir. Hannah Lux Davis, DP Kate Arizmendi)
I wouldn’t place this all the way into the canon, but I think it was probably important in calcifying the current style. There are a few motifs here that now turn up very regularly. Doja Cat sleeps in a 90s-does-70s-does-Victorian Laura Ashley bedroom, which is illuminated by a weird green light. She’s captured (on and off) in a found-footage-esque VHS format. She floats through a grey street featuring various signs of decline (we must assume she caused some of them, Carrie-style), and dances in what appears to be an abandoned office building. She’s slightly early to the current ingenue phase of fashion (it’s a stripped-down take on what was then called “coquette”).
I’m pretty sure there are visual cues here from teen-wasteland-drama Euphoria, which took many visual cues from Petra Collins.
Now we move onto the mid-2020s, and the beginning of the giallobrutalist canon proper:
Ariana Grande - yes, and? (Jan 2024, dir. Christian Breslauer, DP Gaul Porat)
Some personnel overlap here: the cinematography is by Gaul Porat, who was also Director of Photography on Good Ones. This is a high-profile video, and one that seems to have set quite a few trends. The colour scheme is consistently bluish-grey, with deep blacks. We’re in a placeless, timeless industrial-ish space that could reasonably also have appeared in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979):
There is an underwhelming audience of art-world miscreants:
There’s an important tendency here when it comes to blocking (the arrangement of figures onscreen), with individual groups placed at different distances into the background:
Charli xcx - 360 (May 2024, dir. Aidan Zamiri, DP Ben Carey)
This is where things get very serious. The first important point is that we don’t know when 360 is set. It features a cast of very “now” It Girls. They are the Edie Sedgwicks of today, ie. they are literally just there because they are famous. Julia Fox is there; so are Gabriette and Rachel Sennott. Chloe Sevigny makes a walk-on appearance, planting us back into the 1990s.
The sets in the video are just as timeless and placeless. We start in an anonymous tunnel leading to a buzzy restaurant, hop from institution to institution (a hospital corridor, a therapist’s office, a sterile gym), break through a wall (Backrooms-style) into a suburban living-room, and wind up in a run-down street.
These sets often look uncanny, which might partially be a lens thing (some feature a weird tilting perspective, a bit like the Arnolfini Portrait). The cuts between them make visual sense, but little logical sense, with plenty of match cuts between disconnected scenes.
The uncanniness is also a function of composition. Different people are shot at different distances at the same time. Some areas of the frame are devoted to “mini-scenes” with no apparent relation to what Charli is doing. She pays no attention to a car crash behind her.
There is an overlay of grain, and almost constant low lighting; it’s generally cool-tinged, with strategic flashes of light on faces. The colour grade emphasises very deep blacks, browns and greens, with pale blue often used as an accent colour. Skin tones are dull and sallow (not very much red).
Lisa - New Woman (Aug 2024, dir. Dave Meyers, DP Scott Cunningham)
This is an earlyish example, using the style to bridge the gap between the 1970s, 2000s and 2020s (see, eg., the Nokia phones in the microwave, combined with colourful tights, combined with slingback heels). Hints here include a desaturated colour grade, quick and surreal cuts, and multilevel compositions:
Billie Eilish - Birds of a Feather (Sept 2024, dir. Adrian Zamiri, DP Stuart Winecoff)
An influential (and much-loathed) post-360 music video from Zamiri. This song was a hit, the video is closing in on a billion views, and it’s probably one of the most important uses of “giallobrutalism” to date. The postproduction grain is low-key here; the 1970s-ness comes from the sets:
Yves “Viola” (Nov 2024, dir. EEHOSOO, DP Han Sun-woo)
This appears to be the first use of desaturated, 1970s Euro visual schema on Korean soil (you’ll see K-pop properly running with it a few months later). At this point you could have interpreted the video as an homage to the then-ongoing Gen X “office siren” fashion trend (FKA twigs had just done this for the first half of her Eusexua video). But the Viola set design verged away from 1990s cubicle nostalgia and into Italian modernism:
Tate McRae - “Sports Car” (Jan 2025, dir. Bardia Zeinali, DP Marcell Rev)
Basically the peep-show sequences in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, but backdated to the 1970s in every possible way. Note, again, desaturation, surreal blocking, surprising cuts:
IVE, “Attitude” (dir. Yunah Sheep, Feb 2025)
At this point there was probably no going back; the 1970s schema slotted into the choreography-focused K-pop video standard. The 360 texture isn’t there, but the colour scheme and compositional sense are both present. The video also gives us our first very direct representation of surveillance (a CCTV camera tracks one of the girls, who falls flat on her face in a corridor).
Seulgi “Baby, Not Baby” (dir. Ha Jeonghun, Mar 2025)
Another semi-entry in the canon. I know 360 had some impact here because the trailer for this EP clearly draws from it:
Seulgi is at a shopping mall, in an abandoned room, and in an industrial refrigerator. Everything is timeless and placeless; everything is part of the corporate “commons,” with its weird overlaps between public and private space. We often switch into a “surveillance mode,” with switches in perspective or camera quality gesturing at private CCTV.
Adela - SexOnTheBeat (dir. 91 Rules, Aug 2025)
Adela forged a pop star “brand” at light speed after getting cut from the hypersexualised Katseye lineup. This is her breakout song. The video leans heavily into 1970s aesthetics to provide a commentary on sex in modern music:
Demi Lovato - Kiss (dir. 91 Rules, Oct 2025)
This one’s a companion piece to SexOnTheBeat. We follow Demi around a film studio, tracking her with horror-esque shaky camerawork and distinctly Italian crash zooms:
Harry Styles - Aperture (dir. Aube Perrie, Jan 2026)
Another very high-profile greenish-greyish video set in an anonymously modernist-looking 1970s-ish building. At least two locations here are also used for Birds of a Feather. Harry is pursued by an anonymous man; the video eventually devolves into a pastiche of Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. We find an early precedent for Aperture in the giallo Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), which opens on a murder in a lift shaft. In both cases, we’re clued into what’s going on with a shot of the opposition’s shoes.
IVE - Bang Bang (dir. Bang Jae Yeob, Feb 2026)
This is one of the most important entries in the giallobrutalist canon. It makes a real effort to locate the Italian roots in K-pop’s encroaching house style, and then finds new, interesting things to do with those Italian roots. The video was filmed in an actual 1970s brutalist housing complex near Trieste, which means it looks like an authentic giallo film a lot of the time.
One common shot here picks up on an extremely “1970s Italian” tendency which I’ll go into in more detail lower down:
Another sequence (1:05 to 1:17) is of particular interest, because it picks up on a surreal editing logic that really was big in 1970s Italy:
Here’s a similar sequence from Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970):
ILLIT - Not Me (dir. Yunah Sheep, Feb 2026)
ILLIT are a K-pop group with a girly “cute concept,” and the video for It’s Me demonstrates the versatility of a 360-style muted colour scheme (you’ll notice some flashes of pale pink in the grey). The video takes place in an enormous, anonymous car park. It is empty apart from a single lorry. We see the singers from drone height and zoom in very quickly without their knowledge as they go about their usual business.
None of their “usual business” makes sense in this industrial-looking setting, with its wired fences and swathes of concrete. One girl carries dry cleaning; another holds blueprints, folders, and trays of coffee, as if she’s in The Devil Wears Prada. Another wears a pink party dress and wheels her Pomeranian in a baby’s pram. Sometimes we switch from the glossy default format to CCTV quality; sometimes we drag and drop photos around and resize them until we can see individual pixels.
It’s worth noting that longstanding K-pop group TWICE did a similar thing for an album trailer in June 2025:
Check out the similarities between the two videos and the famous title sequence of Coppola’s Conversation:
Katseye - Pinky Up (Apr 2026)
Pinky Up draws on the now-established style to create a sense of static placelessness which is totally odds with its hardstyle dance focus. To intensify the effect, we have film grain and flash:
I also think we have an actual reference to a giallo film here:
FLO - Leak It (Mar 2026, dir. Olivia de Camps)
An important canon entry, because it helps us connect the visual logic of giallobrutalism to the Twitter logic of the “Khia asylum.” Many 1970s Italian accoutrements in this deceptively-2000s video: a long, low, modernist building, wall-to-wall red carpeting, glass bricks, and a focus on surveillance, with paparazzi hiding out in the fields:
aespa - Lemonade (May 2026, dir. Bang Jae Yeob)
This is another explicit nod to Italian visual culture from Bang Jae Yeob, featuring nods to the fascist aesthetics of Mussolini’s Italy and a larger visual scheme seemingly inspired by 1990s Prada campaigns from Norbert Schoerner and Glen Luchford:
Le Sserafim, Illit & Katseye - Iconic By Mistake (dir. Cody Critcheloe, Jun 2026)
I find this video interesting because it is maybe the archetypal combination of everything else I’ve put in the post so far. It ticks almost every box; it’s the best possible argument for “giallobrutalism” as a formalised, exportable style. For example: wood panelling, 90s-does-70s office furniture, symmetricality, and multilevel compositions, with our focus drawn to a secondary action in the background of a scene? Check!
Cornfields, heavy emphasis on blacks in colour scheme, and David LaChapelle-esque melodramatic action? Check!!
Actual decentralised surveillance? Check!!!
Centripetal girls in a centrifugal world: giallobrutalism and place
Film scholars often identify links between physical space onscreen and offscreen. For example, the almost-square aspect ratios of early-to-mid-1940s films noir were claustrophobic, and filmmakers drew on this constrained two-dimensional space to relay the emotional claustrophobia of American wartime life. In a time of mass city living, they also used urban settings to reflect a widespread sense of physical claustrophobia. Things turned around after the war: broader aspect ratios and pioneer-era Westerns accompanied a real-life migration to sprawling suburban space.
In his book Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, academic Edward Dimendberg draws a contrast between “centripetal space” and “centrifugal space.” Centripetal means “seeking the centre,” and for Dimendberg, New York is the ultimate “centripetal” film noir city - it’s dense and busy, populated with tall, tightly-packed apartment blocks. Grand Central Station must usher thousands of people into close quarters to fulfil its architectural remit.
Centrifugal means “fleeing the centre,” and Dimendberg poses Los Angeles as a contrasting “centrifugal” film noir city. Its skyline is sparser: buildings are low-slung, and Hollywood’s metaphorically central film studios really just look like blank warehouses. You’ve got to drive to get around, which consequently means spending far more time alone and experiencing far more of the open road. Other centripetal spaces include “suburban settlements, industrial landscapes, shopping malls, but also urban regions that have lost their former centripetal features.”8
Interestingly, the postwar shift from centripetal to centrifugal living had a close parallel in the collapse of the Hollywood star system. Most major Hollywood studios were only viable business operations because they also owned their own cinema chains, at which they block-scheduled their own films. Starmaking was an expensive operation, and required central coordination. In-house stylists and make-up artists created consistent looks for “contract players”; executives conspired to create “star vehicles.” Studios ran press offices in New York to guarantee physical proximity to legacy outlets. They also published their own “fan magazines,” disseminating (and sometimes inventing) information about their own stars. The most successful actors and actresses became studio assets.9
Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939) portrayed the major studios as narrative equivalents of Grand Central Station, with the ability to handle multiple narratives at light speed.10 The MGM and Paramount backlots would once have been centripetal features on an otherwise-sparse Hollywood landscape, attracting the passage of physical traffic and the public imagination. After the block-booking system fell victim to an antitrust lawsuit in the late 1940s, the original functions of the “star machine” spread to a number of decentralised systems, with independent PR managers handling star narratives and talent agents bargaining for roles on individual projects.
This process of decentralisation has had consequences for larger celebrity culture. Modern It Girls are, by definition, centripetal women. Things revolve around them: nightlife, language, fashion designers, magazine editors, film directors. There is no single corporation pulling strings. They must do much of the necessary networking themselves. There’s a reason why so many postwar It Girls come from New York, Dimendberg’s vertical, centripetal city. You can’t have an It Girl culture without paparazzi, and the walkable density of urbanised space means paparazzi can operate with relative ease.
By the late 1960s, New Hollywood’s anxious auteurs had taken hold of the movie business; Warhol’s New York Factory had to fill in for the randomness and artificiality of the Hollywood star machine, and the Factory could never have sustained itself without random people walking in from the street. (This was quite often how someone became a Superstar).
Academic Mikel Koven continues Dimendberg’s analogy in the giallo context. She points out that gialli are often set on the edge of urban space, in “clearly bounded” locations, where
the accoutrements of modernity are present or available to the characters but not necessarily immediately available to them.11
Whole films sometimes take place in mansions in the middle of nowhere. Pivotal plot points occur in lonely, transitional parts of the built environment. If you’re walking through a dark car park, someone will probably stab you. Ditto if you are getting into a lift in your apartment block.
This tendency also exists in my provisional giallobrutalist canon. 360 shows us how it might map onto the dynamics of the “Khia Asylum.” As a fashion-forward symbol of public life in dense, vertical New York, Chloe Sevigny is a “centripetal” icon. Here she’s transplanted to the run-down outskirts of Dimendberg’s “centrifugal” city - sparse, flat Los Angeles:
The contrast is an integral part of giallobrutalist visual language, and it continues for the entire 360 video. Charli and her friends are centripetal girls in a centrifugal world. They have nothing to do and nowhere to go.
There might be a broader political conclusion here: a growing worldwide housing crisis has forced the low-earning “creative class” onto the outskirts of major cities. Sometimes these regions don’t look and feel like cities at all; they might resemble industrial areas, or suburbs, or even bear the visual hallmarks of countryside. We see the same visual contrast in Pinky Up, where non-Khias Katseye are dressed to go clubbing and confined (alternately) to a quiet suburban road, a Shining-esque mental facility, a waiting-room, a Deep End-esque bathroom, and a fussily-decorated house (a la Agoura Hills).
At another metaphorical level, these are acute visual representations of the stagnancy of a “Khia” pop career. Pop stars fear the Khia Asylum. If you are in the Khia Asylum, you are, definitionally, not centripetal enough. You’re an exile, forced to the metaphorical banlieues of star culture. There are often corporate forces behind these periods of exile, which explains why so many giallobrutalist videos take place in quiet offices or “liminal” industrial “dead zones.” Billie, Harry, Adela, and Yves have to sing under fluorescent light; Seulgi and ILLIT are trapped in “dead malls,” building sites, or endless, Jacques Tati-esque car parks.
In Leak It, FLO are clearly set up to get caught off-guard by the British paparazzi (there are fake tabloids scattered through the music video). Instead, they’re ushered to a literal “Khia asylum,” a horizontal (thus also centrifugal) structure in the middle of a field:
Addendum: surveillance and action, or the Mario Bava - Laura Mars - David LaChapelle - 360 connection
A major thread across these music videos is the use of a “surveillance camera.” In some cases (Baby, Not Baby; Not Me), this is literal: the videos temporarily take on the quality of CCTV recordings. Sometimes it’s also conveyed to us through the use of “crash zooms,” which are a giallo convention:
Another function of the giallobrutalist “surveillance camera” is that it “eavesdrops,” peering past a foregrounded subject to show us a more interesting and dynamic background action. Either the foreground or background actors are usually unaware that they are on camera. The tendency is authentic to real Italian gialli.
I often notice the addition of background action inspired by 1990s photographer David LaChapelle. LaChapelle women are frozen in action. They run from explosions, Hitchcock-style. Sometimes they beat each other up. See the slow-motion fistfights in aespa’s Lemonade, and the car crashes at the end of 360:
See also the slow-motion action in this Argentinian music video:
This, too, has a slightly earlier giallo analogue. Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) is an American take on gialli. Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a NYC fashion photographer (THE job to have in gialli if you are not a model). Interestingly, her own visual style is very close to David LaChapelle’s:
And this scene in 360 might have been a deliberate reference:
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Simon and Schuster, p. 17.
Wheen, F. (2010) Strange Days Indeed. The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia. New York: Public Affairs, pp. 11-12.
There’s a newish trend for conspiracy on our current literary scene too - see the cool-girl duology of Flat Earth and Lost Lambs
Completely unrelated footnote to say Alan J. and Hannah Pakula were such a great power couple. Hannah wrote a fantastic biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. I think “biographer wife, paranoia director husband” is an underrated combo
If you read about Watergate in 2026 you’ll be like “Oh that’s so tame.” It’s hugely relevance to the theme of surveillance because it revolved around a plot to bug the DNC office.
Would highly recommend watching Paul Schrader’s Hardcore - he gets the mood totally right
NB. I think we’re fully in a “camp” phase, but also that most of it is completely intentional (what Sontag would call “camping”). For “true” camp, look to any prominent woman currently on the Right.
Dimendberg, E. (2004) Film noir and the spaces of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 176.
For further reading, Basinger’s The Star Machine
There are two or three passages in this book that feel VERY Gravity’s Rainbow three decades too early. It’s pretty visionary
Koven, M.J., 2006. La dolce morte: vernacular cinema and the Italian giallo film. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, pp. 52-53.
More music videos: Yseult’s bitch you could never, every FKA twigs eusexua mv, Megan thee stallion whenever, Tinashe cross that line, Lexie Liu delulu, Hearts2hearts focus, Enhypen no doubt
I’m never far from the observation made by Luis Buñuel as he drove through the American Landscape in the mid-70’s:
“I think this is the age that invented ugliness.”
In the past, ugliness was a byproduct of misfortune, poverty, or decay. By the 70’s it had become a goal. It was the only thing we could really count on.