MCR's "Helena," That Ballet Dance, and Fan Cognition

Yeah I was definitely emo. I already said that.

One of the strongest elements of the emo music scene in the 2000s was that of the visual.

I think that’s the case with a lot of the songs and videos that were popular in the scene at that point. I remember having a few different crushes on the various emo musicians (none of whom I’m going to name here because some of them aren’t even that popular anymore). And even now on many Tumblr and other social media pages, there is a certain look that everyone recognizes. There are aesthetic elements that everyone knows and actively seeks out of they are into that scene.

And many of these are inspired by music videos that were popular in the emo genre in the 2000s.

One of my favorite music videos when I was younger was the one for My Chemical Romance’s “Helena,” and we all know what my favorite part was. (The song is having its 19th birthday right now, so I had to write about it.) My friends and I would totally try to duplicate the ballet dance that Helena does as she’s going down the aisle. I don’t even remember thinking much about the actual lyrics of the song; it was more about the visual for me. Her dress, her makeup, the bug-eyed expression that she does upon waking up and falling back into her casket…all of it.

Let’s face it. We literally wanted to be Helena.

And that didn’t necessarily have much to do with the band even though we wouldn’t have had the music video without them. It could have been any of the bands in that genre, and we still would have wanted to be the girl in the video. AFI, My Chemical Romance, Thirty Seconds to Mars…all of them had videos at the time that fit the dark, almost goth aesthetic. (Those of us who were in middle school at the time probably thought it was goth, to be honest. It was certainly goth-inspired.)

The fact that we wanted to be Helena in that way, almost separate from the band itself, makes a sort of statement about what these videos do for fans. They are an escape for a lot of people, and there is almost a sort of storytelling that the fan does within their own brain; it is a cognitive process. “The girl in the video wakes up from the dead and dances down a church aisle,” you think to yourself. The image itself implies other questions - Why does her character do that? Who is she supposed to be? Is this part of a bigger story? (Can you just imagine the hardcore MCR fans when this video came out?)

Hell, the girl in the video is almost as legendary as MCR is.

The result above very concisely summarizes what Helena symbolizes in the video, which most of us would arrive at, in any case. What is interesting to me is how they chose for her to do a ballet dance and what they chose for her to look like. Here, death is a production.

Again, this makes you think about the way fans like us think about these videos and representations about things like life and death. We may not relate the media to our own lives, necessarily, especially when we are in our younger ages. It might make a younger fan think about death in a general sense; I mostly remember using it as a way to think about fictional characters. (I think I wrote about this before, but I wrote vampire stories a lot when I was younger.) Even when we wanted to be Helena, it wasn’t in a literal sense, obviously. We wanted to be a pretty goth girl in a bitchin’ dress and do a cool dance down the aisle.

The visual tends to make you think in terms as though you are watching a film with characters, so that makes sense, honestly. I don’t even remember thinking much about the band members in relation to the song so much when I was first getting into this music. I think later I wondered about the song’s backstory (which you can easily find on the Internet), but not at first.

Does this article even have a point now? I don’t know. I just think the visuals of this music video are superb.

Talk again soon. :)

-Josee