The Postal Service – A Tattered Line of String (Music Video)June 2013

There are two main characters in The Postal Service’s ‘A Tattered Line of String’ video, the main male we follow and a female who is introduced later, although her presence and connection to the protagonist is mostly enigmatic.

Before the song begins to play, the video starts with the main character wheeling his washing into a public washroom. He puts all of his washing into a machine. However, when he starts it, the room around him begins to spin instead of the interior of the washing machine. He desperately clings to his seat in fear of falling, before losing his grip and grabbing the machine. Eventually, he loses hold, and begins to drown in a sea of clothes as the room continues to spin around him.

At this point, there is a cut away to a woman on a swing in a local park. She is also affected by this unnatural force, and the world begins to turn upside down for her too. Where the man fears drowning in this sea of washing and seems extremely confused by what is happening, the woman smiles and jumps off her swing into the blue. Without fear or worry, she disappears into the sky. Meanwhile, the spinning of the room knocks the man out of the door, and he, extremely confused, worried and in fear, falls into the sky as well.This is the semantic code. Symbolically, there are hints to a much deeper narrative connecting the two characters.

The lyrics of the song make innocent a one night stand between two friends that sparks feelings between them. In this manner, the lyrics suggest a romance-based narrative. This is evident in three verses, where it says:

"When we woke, we agreedThat we would not ever speakOf this nightTo anyone, that we both knew

Then you said, “Every time we kissed, I felt something that couldn’t exist,”And I confessed that I thought I felt it too."

Nevertheless, there is no indication of this in the video itself. There is a stark contrast between the representations formed between the male and female character and the settings they are both in.

For the male protagonist, the most significant piece of iconography is the washing machine. As the song opens, the setting of the public washroom shows this man getting on with ordinary, dull tasks. For a music video, this setting is unusual as the colours are washed out and there is little of great interest. Instead of using the artist as the character, they use a typical American man who appears to be in his thirties. In contrast, when he turns on his washing machine, the world spins instead of the machine and eventually spills everywhere, him being buried in turn. This suggests, in accordance with the lyrics, that the main character is trying to keep on top of his everyday life and hold himself together, but he fails to do so. The clothes are representative of his problems and the fragility of his mind; he tries to control them but before the end of the video he is buried in an avalanche of clothes. The lyrics corresponding to this are in the chorus, where the artist sings:

"I’ve got a tattered line of stringAnd I tie it ‘round everythingThat I want to call my ownBut it never seems to hold"

Again, one cannot be sure what his issue is, but we can assume that it has something to do with the female we see when there is a cut away to the swingset outdoors. She appears to be liberated,

expressed by the freedom of her easy movement on the swings. This is a setting we would typically associate with a child, but the director is using it to display the free characteristic of this woman. The representation created is abstract, and the iconography is much harder for an ordinary viewer to understand in comparison to generic chart music videos. The metaphorical style appeals to fans of the indie genre, which is the demographic who will find this video particularly effective and clever.

Aside from the audio of the song itself, there is additional sound as the video opens of the wheels of the trolley squeaking along the tile floor. This is used to establish the beginning of the narrative.The shot types employed in the footage are all simple, but effectively edited to compose a music video which is mostly conceptual and very much thought-provoking.