Bleachers You and Forever

In what marks Margaret Qualley’s third role in a Bleachers’ video (following “Alma Mater” and “Tiny Moves”) for the band’s latest single, “You and Forever,” the actress now perhaps best known for being Demi Moore’s younger self in The Substance ramps up her cinematic performance all the more. Because, where her dance prowess was the primary “instrument” she wielded in “Tiny Moves,” Qualley presently seems keener to exercise her acting chops in a part that exemplifies just how much men and women are living in separate realities. Particularly those men and women trying to engage in something like a “romance” with each other.

Directed once again by Alex Lockett (who also got behind the camera for “Alma Mater” and “Tiny Moves”), the video opens on a brief shot of Qualley languidly walking through her apartment as she puts on a white silk robe. So it is that, in barely two seconds, her “character” is established as someone who takes her time, someone who goes through life rather unhurried and unbothered—a real princess in an ivory tower type. A quick crosscut to Jack Antonoff (Qualley’s husband, naturellement, with their relationship even inspiring his frequent collaborator, Lana Del Rey, to write a song called “Margaret”) shows him looking more than slightly unsettled and disoriented as he walks down the street in a far less lackadaisical manner than Qualley is back inside. And while she continues to act “frivolous” and carefree as she pulls back her curtains and then cavorts in front of her window while wearing white lingerie (as if taunting any lurking Peeping Toms [or Jacks, in this case] to eat their heart out), Antonoff appears as if he’s positively going through it out there in the cold, harsh world. Especially since that cold, harsh world is being depicted somewhere in NYC.

And after about twenty-seconds of Antonoff making various kinds of “harmonizing” noises, he finally delves into the first verse, which goes, “Who could catch their breath at a crime scene?/Born and raised to keep dark findings in my mind/Numbers blurring, streets are feeling different/Losing track of all of God’s indifference.” So much so that it doesn’t even seem to faze him when a massive plume of street smoke (because, again, it’s NYC) blows in his face or, soon after, when he instigates a weird “bumping into others” scenario on the sidewalk (let’s put it this way, Richard Ashcroft makes it look a lot more graceful in the “Bitter Sweet Symphony” video).

Meanwhile, Qualley twirls whimsically in front of her window, not a care in the world. It is her energy, so antithetical to Antonoff’s angry, neuroses-laden one, that will “save” him by the end of the video (with a conclusion not totally unlike the one in “Alma Mater”). For the song is, in large part, about the way that one “special person” can make all the ick of the world just fade away once you get behind the door of your (likely) shared abode and drown all the rest of the noise out. For Antonoff, part of that noise has always been the death of his younger sister, Sarah, from brain cancer when she was thirteen (at which time, Antonoff was eighteen). As his cover story for i-D, phrased it, “Antonoff has said in the past that everything he makes is in some way about his sister, the pain of reaching for answers to unanswerable sorrow.”

It is, thus, his sister who comes to mind when he speaks of a ghost in the lyrics, “Well, walking with a ghost [how Tegan and Sara], that shit was tearing me to shreds/I had never known my name until you spoke it from your chest/Yes, the heavens opened up and pulled me in/I stared and said, ‘Oh, yeah.’” And so, on the one hand, it is a verse that conveys the sadness of Antonoff’s perpetual feeling of loss, but, on the other, it expresses the joy of finding the one. That person who can make a rainstorm feel like a rainbow, etc., etc. And yes, for a producer who often amounts to the musical equivalent of a rom-com writer, this is only too fitting an analogy. What’s more, as he told i-D, “The second I met my partner, a cynical part of me died—the very Jewish, analytical, endlessly-weighing-everything part.” Or, as he phrases it in “You and Forever,” “Fuck everything that I’ve been told/‘Cause I just saw the heavens open up.”

What it opened on, needless to say, was Qualley, doing her best to embody that “piece of heaven” as she parades her salacious dance moves in front of the window. As this happens, Antonoff is subjected to being randomly punched in the face while still doing his best to walk down various streets without incident. Alas, as this video is one extended metaphor for the many ways in which the outside world can be merciless and cruel, such a feat ends up being all but impossible until he arrives at Qualley’s door. Before which time he, of course, ends up getting caught in a downpour and offering some not-so-coded “Taylor Swift in the ‘Delicate’ video” moments. All as Qualley keeps having a grand old time in her apartment, yukking it up with her sweet, playful dog (played by Qualley’s real-life canine, Smokey). But also waiting for “her person” to show up. Even revealing faint signs of anxiousness by changing into multiple different outfits in front of the mirror and eventually standing by the door and ostensibly wondering where he is.

When a weather-beaten Antonoff finally does knock on the door, the viewer doesn’t get the privilege of seeing their reunion—for that, presumably, is a little bit of “heaven” reserved for their private world only. But one assumes that it’s a meeting that leaves Antonoff feeling soothed after the roughness he endured “out there,” telling Jack Saunders of Radio 1’s New Music Show, “I always try to write love songs, and then they always end up being about how life is a little bit more tolerable because you love someone…this is all the things that make my life impossible, and because of that, because I have you, I can deal with it.” Of course, it doesn’t hurt, “loveable-to-a-straight-man”-wise, that Qualley is living her best “Lana-core” lifestyle in this video, aesthetically speaking (complete with a cameo by an old-school-looking stove). You know, with the lingerie and the evening dresses and the “traditional femininity” of it all.