Arcade Fire – “Afterlife (YouTube Music Awards version)" (Dir. Spike Jonze)

Suggested course of action: (1) See Frances Ha. (2) Watch this video. (3) Formulate an alternate-universe mental narrative where this video is the best possible happy ending for Greta Gerwig’s character. You’ll feel better afterwards, I promise.

Arcade Fire – “Afterlife (YouTube Music Awards version)" (Dir. Spike Jonze)

Arcade Fire - "Afterlife" (Official Video)

The members of Arcade Fire don’t appear in their brand-new video for the powerful Reflektor track “Afterlife,” and nobody in the clip adheres to the band’s live-show dress code. Instead, the great music-video director Emily Kai Bock starts things off with a tense Spanish dinner-table conversation, then goes deep into the dreams and longings of all the people involved. Produced by the Creators Project, it’s an empathetic and visually ravishing piece of work — to my mind, a vast improvement over the band’s “Reflektor” video, if not the version of “Afterlife” that Spike Jonze staged at the YouTube Music Awards.