Harry Styles’ “Aperture” Video: David Bowie Meets Fatboy Slim Meets Dirty Dancing

In choosing Aube Perrie to direct the video for “Aperture,” Harry Styles clearly knew he wanted a tone that was both playful and satirical. After all, Perrie’s best-known videos before he started working with American artists were Angèle’s “La Thune” and L’Impératrice’s “Peur des Filles.” Perrie’s vibrant style then caught the attention of Megan Thee Stallion, who used his skills for the “Thot Shit” video. After that, Styles began collaborating with Perrie for “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” and “Satellite,” both from his Harry’s House album. And now, for “Aperture,” the lead single from Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Perrie establishes a muted, yet surreal world, grounded in the kind of isolation and alienation vibes that the twenty-first century is known for.

So, obviously, what better place to set the “narrative” of the video than in a liminal space like a hotel? Even if a “high-class” one. Which offers, if anything, an even more impersonal “feel” and look than a low-budget motel. And, as if to heighten that sense of “impersonality,” during the first forty-three seconds of the video, the viewer can only see either Styles’ back or his figure in profile as he makes a call to the concierge, who demands, “Room number please.” Styles replies, “Uh, 605.” The person on the other end of the line then “assures,” “One moment.” But it’s hardly that as Styles eventually sets the phone down on his nightstand before falling back onto his bed in something like exasperation. Perrie then cuts to a frontal view of Styles looking at himself in the mirror of the hotel bathroom as he brushes his teeth. In this instant, the song’s opening musical notes continue to build, with Styles vaguely bopping his head along to the rhythm (which comes courtesy of Styles’ frequent producer, Kid Harpoon, who first collaborated with Styles in 2017).  

After getting that bit of “hygiene business” out of the way, Styles proceeds to leave his room—but not before Perrie shows a close-up/mise-en-scène shot of the phone still off its cradle, as if Styles has left it like that in the hope that whoever he’s calling might come back on the line. And as he makes his way through the halls and down toward the front desk, he finds that, just as it was on the phone, there is no one there. Except a “shadowy” sort of figure that passes him from behind. The ominousness of said person being deliberate when considering what happens next. A tussle, to use understatement, that arises after Styles roams the spaces of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in search of some other sign of life apart from this hostile presence.

The emptiness of the hotel as Styles wanders through it, of course, immediately conjures the intertext of Fatboy Slim’s 2000 video for “Weapon of Choice” (directed by Spike Jonze), starring Christopher Walken. Indeed, the entire “gimmick” of the video is that it’s Christopher Walken—more to the point, Walken busting out into the kind of insane, dynamic dance moves that one would never expect of him. The hotel that the video was filmed in (presently called the L.A. Grand Hotel) is also located in Downtown Los Angeles, lending it that certain kind of eerie, overpowering aesthetic that the architecture and interiors of this area are often associated with.

And while Styles, too, breaks out into the sort of Walken-esque moves that he never did while with One Direction, it’s another music video’s intertext that appears before the “Weapon of Choice” one fully crystallizes through bombastic choreography. And that video is the Dom and Nic-directed “I’m Afraid of Americans,” during which Trent Reznor (whose mix of the song has become the most “definitive”) embodies the stalking, unshakeable presence in Bowie’s paranoid existence. One that takes place out in the streets of NYC rather than inside a hotel, which almost makes it somehow more unsettling (along with the fact that everyone is pantomiming that they’re shooting one another with their hands formed into the shape of guns). The antagonizer (let’s call him Arbitrary Aggressor) in Styles’ video also has long black hair, as if to really drive home the “codedness” point as it relates to “I’m Afraid of Americans.” Along with Arbitrary Aggressor running after Styles after a certain amount of stalking, as though to deliberately confirm Styles’ worst fears.

Incidentally, Arbitrary Aggressor doesn’t start to chase Styles until the chorus, which goes, “It’s best you know/What you don’t/Aperture lets the light in/We belong together [okay Mariah]/It finally appears it’s only love.” Only it hardly appears it’s love at all as Arbitrary Aggressor and Styles descend a spiral staircase again and again, with Perrie ostensibly trying to give Alfred Hitchcock a run for his money on what spiral staircases are meant to represent: imminent doom and a descent into madness/chaos. As for Styles repeatedly hitting those stairs as he rolls down them (and doing most of his own stunts throughout), the crew was able to build a “soft” staircase for him in order to achieve the effect without too much pain.

After the initial violence exhibited in their “exchange,” the dance they do becomes more literal, with Styles pulling a Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) in Dirty Dancing as he allows Arbitrary Aggressor to lift him up like Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) would. Though Johnny wouldn’t have the ability or gumption to twirl Baby in mid-air, to boot. Following this “little nod” to the 1987 classic, Styles then gets his Christopher Walken on with choreography done in sync with Arbitrary Aggressor, who clearly just wanted to be Styles’ friend all along. And in the moments when Styles sings, “I wanna know what safe is/I won’t stray from it/I don’t know these spaces,” it goes back to something he mentioned during a radio interview for L.A.’s KIIS-FM. That something being,

“Really, everyone wants to feel safe. That’s, like, all anybody really wants. Whether it’s relationships in your life or the spaces that you occupy or when you’re at home you want to feel safe… All of those things, I think, sound so simple but I think when you’re closed off in certain ways, then it’s harder to feel, like, known and therefore harder to feel accepted and therefore harder to feel safe. And so, I think, for me, I’ve found the more, like, vulnerable I’ve ever been with people, the safer I end up feeling even if it’s scary in the moment.”

A pretty message in theory, though try doing it in the U.S. and see where it gets you (more than likely shot or attacked, as Arbitrary Aggressor initially confirms). What’s more, no sooner do Styles and Arbitrary Aggressor hit their stride as dance partners than they go back to pretending as if they don’t know one another at all, with Styles ascending the escalator and returning to the concierge desk to find that, at last, someone is there. However, at the bare minimum, the tension between these erstwhile strangers has been defused as a result of Styles confronting his fear of “go[ing] forth, ask[ing] questions later” and acknowledging how “aperture lets the light in” (a metaphor for how much a person is willing to let others—especially strangers—in and become vulnerable in general).

When he returns to his hotel room, the phone is back in its cradle and he sings to himself, “We belong together,” before lying back down calmly and somewhat dreamily on his bed. Perhaps (even if only for a little while) no longer afraid or paranoid when it comes to the outside world.