Bella Poarch may have risen so fast to stardom that she didn’t quite have time to check on a more original idea for the video for her first official single as more than just a TikTok star. While “Build-a-Bitch” is obviously teeming with the potential for use in a factory setting, the unfortunate reality is that “Save Your Tears Remix” from The Weeknd and Ariana Grande already left an indelible imprint in the brain with that setting in April of this year. Poarch waited until May to put her “version” out (like that was going to be enough space between to allow people time to “forget”), though it seems a thinly veiled remake.
Except the primary difference in messaging between these two videos is that “Save Your Tears Remix” espouses the idea of a man going into a factory and having his perfect woman assembled, whereas the entire point of “Build-a-Bitch” is to emphasize the opposite: that a woman can’t and should never have to fit into any mold for the sake of placating male desire (often ephemeral anyway). The animated “Save Your Tears Remix” video from Jack Brown offers a scene early on of The Weeknd’s hands (in their signature black gloves of the After Hours era) removing Ariana Grande’s head—packed in void fill (so symbolic)—from a box and placing it gently on a conveyor belt. In fact, the gentleness with which he places the head more than borders on giving one the creeps, yet he’s only a cartoon.
Looking a bit like The Inventor’s workshop in Edward Scissorhands, Ariana’s head passes through a series of body parts, including arms and fingers, before she makes her way to “center stage,” so to speak. It’s at this point she’s directly placed in front of The Weeknd, who watches her from a control room while moving a joystick (not the only one, to be sure) like he’s working a teddy picker to put the “perfect” female together.
In Poarch’s video, directed by Andrew Donoho, the scene opens with the sound of a disembodied voice announcing, “Welcome to Match Made, home of the perfect woman.” The bright, rosy picture of men waiting in line up top is instantly negated by the panning down to what’s actually going on in the factory, a gray, bleak environment where women’s parts are treated like capital. In some sense, it reminds one of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, with the notion that the “clean, white do-nothings” aboveground reap all the benefits of those toiling beneath them.
As Poarch sings, “This ain’t Build-a-Bitch/You don’t get to pick and choose/Different ass and bigger boobs/If my eyes are brown or blue,” she’s forced through the motions of the assembly line, eventually found to be “defective” and therefore relegated to the incinerator. Except what they (a pronoun ultimately signifying society) didn’t count on was her clinging to life, crawling up the shaft (again, more metaphors here) and rising up to lead a revolution against Match Made a.k.a. the Institution…of what we’ve all been told is the beauty standard to achieve.
Her doll’s eye askew, Poarch becomes more confident as a result of her “uniqueness” (granted, she looks like a Filipina Barbie herself, so the message basically gets negated—as is the “Hollywood” way). She then punches through a glass encasement to grab an axe and get to work on dismantling. Something the fembot Ariana would never dream of doing in “Save Your Tears Remix.” She’s far too docile (read: the male ideal) to rebel in such a violent way… or any way, for that matter. And perhaps that’s a testament to the fact that “Save Your Tears” is a song written by a man, with orchestrated visuals to go with the rather hollow lyrics (hollow in that The Weeknd does not genuinely mean it when he says such sweet nothings as, “You deserve someone better”).
Blending the vocal styles of Ava Max and Melanie Martinez, Poarch’s aesthetic also mirrors their “kitschy” video approaches as well. Taking an axe to the very machinery that has “built” her, Poarch leads the revolution of “bitches” no longer willing to exist just to cater to the whims of male taste. Thus, the declarative statement, “This ain’t Build-a-Bitch/I’m filled with flaws and attitude/So if you need perfect, I’m not built for you.”
By the end of the Sub Urban-aided narrative, Poarch has effectively “incinerated” the entire factory instead of allowing herself and “her kind” (the imperfect) to be. In contrast, Grande is quite pleased with her Build-a-Bitch results and is all too happy to be the fembot/Barbie trope at “Bob the Builder’s” side. Poarch does her best to counter that level of servility and acquiescence with a concept that would technically be more body positive if there were actually any women in her video who didn’t conform to normalized beauty standards.
