Music Video deconstruction

Adele - Rolling In The Deep

According to Andrew Goodwin's music video theory, this music video is a narrative performance video. This means that the video will show the artist performing the song with on beat editing and miming but may fail to show complete narrative. This means that the audience only get the gist of the story and are left to fill in the blanks themselves.

I started by researching the meaning of this song on the internet and now i know that it telling the story of a break up between Adele and an ex partner. The song opens with a mid shot of Adele sitting in a room on her own which shows she is alone and that something is missing. She is also sitting in a civilised manner which implies maturity and perfection. This shows that she felt she was the adult of the situation and she did everything she could to keep everything together. The mis en scene around her is furniture kept under wraps but also looking very old. This could show that there is things left unsaid and things that they should have done but instead were kept bottled up inside. This is backed up by the line "there's a fire burning in my heart" This shows that all these things were on the verge of bursting out. Also in the room is an empty chair next to her. This reaffirms the fact that they are no longer together but also shows that she has left the chair free for another person. Later on in the video there is someone with a sword seeming to be fighting. This shows that although she is lonely she is fighting back. The final scene of the video is the finale where the song hits a climax where it is louder than the start. In this scene the paper city gets set on fire, this refers back to the "fire burning in my heart line" and implies that at end  of the relationship she said all these things and destroyed what they had. 

The use of on beat editing is very prominent during the video with the close up shots of the bass drum, glasses smashing against the wall and the glasses of water shaking.