Remember that Saturday Night Live bit where everyone starts crying when "Someone Like You" by Adele comes on? Emotionally reacting to that song briefly became something that we all decided was a thing. The issue I have with that is I don't find "Someone Like You" to be a particularly emotional song. First of all, it doesn't really make sense. Adele is saying she'll find someone like her former lover, but apparently they broke up long enough ago that he got married - the sentiment that she is going to find someone new now doesn't really add up in the sequence of events. Also, Adele isn't even that broken up about it - the whole concept of the song is about the fact that her former lover is replaceable.
In my opinion, in the category of "I miss my old lover" songs, there were several much more deserving pieces floating around at the time. One of the was "The One That Got Away" by Katy Perry, which actually hinted at some sort of emotional attachment to who the song was about. So today let's take a look at the 2011 video for "The One That Got Away", directed by Floria Sigismondi.
The video for this song reminds me a little bit of fan fiction. The song is the primary source material, and Perry and Sigismondi have decided to flesh it out into an actual story that the song is ostensibly about. It opens with Perry coming home to her very modern and clean home - she looks to be around 65ish years old and is married to some dude. She sits on her bed and thinks about a past relationship with a dude (played by Diego Luna), which looks fun and exciting and is full of art and doing wacky things together. It's soon revealed that they had a fight, and he died after some boulders on the road caused him to swerve off the road and crash the car. The video ends with Perry visiting the place where he died.
"The One That Got Away" was the fifth single off of Teenage Dream, so by this time we had already seen some pretty wacky stuff from Perry, including the Matthew Cullen-directed "California Gurls", so her going for an Oscars performance and being aged so dramatically was a pretty big, bold step. It's also a bold step to make a video this serious, and for the most part I think Perry and Sigismondi manage to stay away from anything too over the top and saccharine (the scene at the end comes close, though).
One issue I have with this video is that it doesn't err on the side of ambiguity like the song does. The story of a woman who gave up young, passionate love and now pines for it is very common in film, tv, and music, and there are a few ways to play it. One way, like Rufus Wainwright did in his song "The Art Teacher", is playing devil's advocate by talking about some of the things that were traded for a the new life (as a young person, the subject of the song admires a J. M. W. Turner painting with the art teacher, and after marrying an executive, now owns one). The other is to simply ignore the current life, and instead focus on regret of losing someone that they were happy with in simpler times.
The video "The One That Got Away" doesn't deal in ambiguities - Perry's life is unabashedly sterile, and her brief interaction with her husband makes it clear that they're probably miserable. Besides the fact that their house is nice, there's nothing in this video to indicate that Perry is happy with anything about how her life turned out. Making the comparison between her two lives is problematic, and stories that deal with a false dichotomy like this usually end up exposing the hard realities underneath expectations. Films like Juno and countless others have brought this up and dealt with it.
Overall, though, I think this is a video that took a chance and made it work. This could have turned out much differently, and in the end Sigismondi's guidance and Perry's devotion to making her part work are what keeps it a highlight of Perry's video catalog.
