Love Is Invisibly Abusive in Charli XCX’s Billie Eilish-esque Video for “Chains of Love”

Though Charli XCX is, of course, a music video innovator in her own right (see: “Beg For You,” “Hot In It” and “360”), it doesn’t mean she can’t pull inspiration from others now and again. Even if it’s someone who’s been in the game for much less time, to boot. That person being none other than her “Guess” cohort, Billie Eilish. Because when one sees XCX’s latest video for “Chains of Love,” directed by C Prinz (marking XCX’s first collaboration with her), the connection to Eilish’s 2024 video for “Birds of a Feather” is almost immediate.

“Chains of Love” starts dramatically enough with the camera focused on the interior dome of what those who have been inside will recognize as the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, complete with the Star of David flourishes etched into the ornate ceiling (a bit of an unwitting “political” move on Charli’s part at this moment in time). The circular windows letting the light into the space then abruptly start to close, one by one. The blackness holds for a moment before Prinz then pans upward from behind a gate to reveal a table that puts the one Jesus sat at during The Last Supper to shame, length-wise anyway. The glass-top table is placed over a gray slab with many bentwood chairs on either side of it and at the heads of the table. Lying in the center, as though “the meal” herself, is none other than XCX (sandwiched between two candelabra for an added sense of drama and “wistful” ambience).

As the camera slowly zooms in for a closer look, Charli begins to “awaken,” rising from her “slumbering” (read: passed out/totally spent) position as the music (co-produced by Finn Keane and Justin Raisen) starts to surge. And, as for the sonic comparison to her True Romance album, the musical tone also comes across like a lovechild of The Cure and New Order. It’s during this initial “cresting” moment that she delivers her first moody declaration of the track: “I’d rather lay down in thorns/I’d rather drown in a stream/I’d rather light myself on fire/I’d rather wear all these scars/I’d rather watch my skin bleed/In the eye of your storm/I can’t let go.”

At a certain point while serving this level of Catherine Earnshaw “emo-ness,” XCX begins to stand on the table, whipping her hair back (you know, to really maximize how worth it the extensions are) and showcasing her rather 80s-inspired bridal aesthetic (almost as if it’s a subtle nod to Madonna’s Like A Virgin era). And yes, from her Catherine perspective, she’s clearly waiting to marry Heathcliff on “Chains of Love,” the second offering from the Wuthering Heights soundtrack album (following the divisive “House” featuring John Cale).

At around the fifty-nine-second mark, the music crescendos just as a knife that’s been set on the table spontaneously lunges toward Charli (side note: the silverware and other aspects of the place settings that will assault her appear seemingly out of thin air, for the long shots of the table always show it as being bare, apart from Charli). And even though the knife ends up piercing the wall rather than her flesh, it’s as though XCX truly was stabbed by it, suddenly looking as though she’s been wounded while subsequently getting kicked around by an invisible presence. Much the same as Billie Eilish in the “Birds of a Feather” video. For she, too, gets knocked about by the invisible presence meant to represent a love (and lover) so great that it even has the power to communicate invisibly and telekinetically.

Of course, XCX’s “Von Dutch” video also has elements of this “being tossed about” premise, even if it’s meant to be seen as a tussle with a real person (just one that the viewer also can’t see thanks to Torso’s deft camerawork). With “Chains of Love,” however, it isn’t a real-life nemesis thrashing Charli around, but a spectral beloved. One who continues to put the chains of love on her so that she can never escape. And though it might be a romantic turn of phrase (one that The Beatles also used on their cover of The Cookies’ “Chains,” singing in a slightly less tortured manner than XCX, “Chains/My baby’s got me locked up in chains/And they ain’t the kind that you can see/Whoa, these chains of love got a hold on me”), it’s indicative of the toxic l’amour that Catherine and Heathcliff share. Of the sort so often still romanticized to this day.

And XCX does a stand-up job of helping with that as she belts out, “Shattering like glass [said in a manner not unlike Britney on, what else, “Shattered Glass”]/Yes, they’re breaking up my heart/The chains of love are cruel/I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner, oh/My face is turning blue/Can’t breathe without you here/The chains of love are cruel/I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner, oh.” While she says all of this, she keeps fighting against the invisible force that’s throwing her around. Though things do get a bit dicier and dodgier when a plate is heaved at her head, breaking into pieces before she’s chucked toward the ceiling.

Luckily, the table happens to now be in a tilted position (and, because of its size, that means one side is extremely elevated) that allows her to grab onto the side of it, suspended in midair, much like Eilish for many of the moments during “Birds of a Feather” (even if what she’s gripping to [or rather, being gripped by] isn’t tangible most of the time). While holding on, Charli chooses that ironic moment to pronounce, “No matter how hard I try/I’m here so permanently, yeah/And I wait for you call/I can’t let go.” But something else makes her let go by pushing her legs upward so that she flips up into the air again, doing a twirl that lends a kind of spiritual/“Christlike” aura to the scene, as though she’s “ascending” somewhere far beyond the confines of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank.

In the next scene, however, the viewer sees that she’s twirling on the table again, which has returned to its normal, flat position—with one side of it no longer extending upward. After finishing this twirl, Charli runs away from the table and toward a small hallway in the bank, this portion filmed in an occasionally choppy, slow-motion manner to lend an even more romantic and surreal tincture to the video. It’s here, too, that XCX starts to get violent and aggressive with the camera in a way that also recalls “Von Dutch.”

When she runs back to the table again, the chairs in front of it start to fall over, once again indicating the forceful strength of this invisible love, and the power it has to lead to a poltergeist-level haunting. After offering up some more stripper-inspired dance moves on the tabletop, Charli then delivers the truly “big budget” moment of the video by using her white stiletto boot to stomp down as hard as she can on the glass to shatter it, sending the shards swirling all around her (therefore making the lyric, “Shattering like glass” much more literal). And yes, Katy Perry tries to make glass shattering happen too in her own recent “Bandaids” video, albeit done with far less style.

In any case, it’s the kind of pain that feels like pleasure to a masochist (in other words, a woman channeling Catherine). And as she basks in the pain-pleasure of the shards, one is reminded that, like Eilish, XCX often favors simple video concepts such as these that are made complicated by the technical approach to filming them. In addition to how a strong element of physical pain is usually involved (with Eilish herself having once said that she doesn’t feel like her videos are good enough if she’s not suffering at least a little bit while making them). Though, in this instance, despite XCX being visibly cut up by the glass, the table miraculously restores itself in the next scene, as though Charli got her Brat wish to “rewind.” Starting over yet again so that she can repeat this vicious cycle of being caught in the chains of love. Because coke isn’t half as addictive as a love like Catherine and Heathcliff’s. A bond of which Charli rightly says, “I know the chains of love won’t break.”