Keith Girard
Katy Perry drops her cotton-candy image in a new video for her song “Wide Awake” that has elements of Snow White and Alice in Wonderland. She’s a Gothic vixen and a princess, and there’s even a handsome prince.
The song is widely believed to deal with her divorce from UK comedian Russell Brand.
To make sure the distinction isn’t lost between her stage persona and personal life, the video opens with her wrapping a video within the video. She’s wearing an electric blue wig and lying nude in a bed of pink cotton.
But when she disappears into her dressing room, the wig comes off, her mood changes and the scene cuts to her dressed in black in a dark foreboding landscape. She sings:
“I’m wide awake.
I was in the dark,
I was falling hard with an open heart.
How did I read the stars so wrong.
I was dreaming for so long.
I wish I knew then what I know now.
I wouldn’t dive in,
I wouldn’t bow down.”
She walks with a lantern held high trough a medieval stone labyrinth, slowly searching her way through. She goes through a couple of incarnations after meeting herself as a child, including a weird scene in a wheelchair.
She emerges in a garden dressed as a princess facing a deviously handsome prince. He keeps one hand behind his back, fingers crossed. They smile she socks him in the jaw. She says goodbye to her former self and emerges from her daydream, back on stage.
She and Brand got engaged after dating for three months of dating and married after a year together. But they called it quits on the marriage after 14 months over a clash in lifestyles.
The moral of the story: look before you leap.