A couple of months back, Echoes in the Wind linked to the video for Dennis DeYoung’s 1984 hit “Desert Moon.” If you had asked me over the last 20 years or so to name my favorite video of all time, “Desert Moon” might be the one—even though until whiteray found it, I’d seen it a grand total of once, back in 1984 when it was briefly on MTV. And here it is again:
There’s a lot to chuckle about there. For one thing, the video’s basic premise is lifted wholesale from The Big Chill. The opening sequence could double as the first scene in a gay porn film, and the acting is pretty bad generally. At least half of the videos made in the 80s featured either a Mustang or Corvette convertible, and if every rock star who sang about taking a train ever actually rode one, Amtrak wouldn’t be in such bad shape. Most of all, the overt sentimentality of it offends our new-millennium sense of what’s cool now. But despite all that, you can’t watch it without getting caught up in it.
Not long ago I heard TV writer David Milch, creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, say that “all storytelling is about the weight of the past on the present.” We never really learn what happened at Desert Moon, but we don’t have to. It’s everywhere in DeYoung’s story. And on some level—perhaps not the romantic, but on some level, somewhere—his story is our story.
William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
Filed under: YouTube
