PSY- Gentleman- video analysis

The Gangnam Style music video does its job mainly thanks to attractive video editing, unexpected combinations of  'luxury and disgust' (e.g. dancing among flying garbage), and comprehensible parody. Inevitably, Gentleman doesn't come up with anything entirely new, it rather evolves the bizzare themes of Gangnam Style. We cannot expect anything more - and to be honest, who does; PSY has a talent to speak about uncomfortable truth pleasantly, nobody gets hurt and everyone's happy.

Regarding the video itself, its form is based on simple gradation, using broken narrative plus occasionally appearing weird Gangnam characters and pointless epilogue made of deleted scenes. In the final dance, PSY is accompanied by his famme fatale - this time it's Ga-In from girl group Girls Brown Eyed. As in Gangnam Style, PSY tries several girls until he finds his chosen one. Ga-In means not only peace for his soul, but the whole choreography they dance together is a reference to her band's music video "Abracadabra" (2009).

In the opening scene, when PSY comes to the city for the first time, his step is being abrupted by video cut. Elderly fellows follow him, carrying his material property.  Then PSY finds himself in fashion interior - world of women, he touches mannequins, presenting himself as materialistic bourgeois (like in Gangnam Style), getting lost in the whirl of changes of the "civilized" lifestyle. In the next scene, he's sitting having coffee with his friends, with a deviless dancing behind his left shoulder - blunt lust, 'the essence of the city'- and tempting him. PSY's diamond glasses illustrate his view of reality, and what he considers important. Idiotic mind is expressed by a mobile game, his first contact with a woman is made through stupid playing as well - PSY changes her treadmil settings, making her to fall down. Then he's having coffee with another girl, while a character from Gangnam Style - representing PSY's peasant origin and negligence - is replicates his repetitive dance in the background. Another Gangnam style character - yellow-dressed individual from the city - is being ruined by PSY, who inhibits this person from going to the toilet (in an elevator). He manages to make one more childish prank before the chorus - farting in library. The chorus is followed by typical geometrical choreography and playing with children; PSY's puerileness and spontaneity win this time.

As already mentioned, PSY appears as a vulgar townsman, but it needs to be added that he is rather pretending this image in order to disguise his social background and his roots. South Korea isn't only about pink luxury, as he already pointed out in Gangnam Style. PSY's figure is savage and robust, despite this he formalizes himself as a party king. He sways between his city temper and countryside nature.
In the second verse, he's again an embellished city-man, applying sun cream on women in swimsuits, only to be lying defeated by his peasant side (illustrated by two obscenely dancing men) in the very next scene.

He behaves odiously when meeting next woman, and he's not alone after all; there comes another man who hurts her. 

And then there comes Ga-In, working out in a gym. She gets hard luck falling in love with PSY after he "makes out" with her (visualized by PSY hanging from a workout machine frame, while she is holding his jacket in dread). PSY has had enough and leaves, Ga-In in love follows him.

In Gangnam Style already, PSY wanted to sell us the idea of love existing in a nasty city, or that even a ridiculous savage masked as a townsman can find happiness in love. In Gangnam style, he loves pure girl Hyuna, who travels by tube and wears street clothes. Ga-In exercises in a gym; two materialists meet in a place which serves the cult of carnality, filled by metal constructions and digital numbers. Whilst the romantic moment with Hyuna was parodically-sentimental, it is coarsely erotic with Ga-In. Worth-noticing is Ga-In getting up after the "intercourse" droping a white handkerchief from her crotch.

Rural dinner in a tent which follows is somewhat different. Ga-In larks PSY in the way he did to other girls, he's enjoying rustic fun. After that, even more meaningful metaphors come: flirting suggesting mutual oral sex concludes in success. Spectacular choreography compostition, now also with Ga-In, intersects again the tent dinner scene, where PSY is celebrating with beer. Then he introduces an ecstatic picture of himself sitting between two women: one with curly hair and wavelets and one with straight hair and tassels on her swimsuit, representing his countryside vs city nature. In a frantic montage, PSY is - together with the girls- thrown into a pool. Dancing sequences follow - at the pool, with city panorama, and in a football stadium with Ga-In. The sun sets behind electric wires. If it is correct to say that football stadium is temple of manhood, PSY has won. His balance between nature and city is shown by sunset behind buildings and dancing in front of the panorama of the city in the middle of two girls - one wearing street clothes, one with glittering jacket. The video closes with PSY in the stadium with his femme fatale.

The epilogue consists of dance on crosswalks, illustrating renewed love towards the city, not omitting Ga-In's presence. In the very last scene, PSY scans himself, making copies of his face with eccentric glasses - multiplying his looks and message for others.

Gentleman is a story of a free natural man coming to city. This theme of jerk in town has been used for a long time (Chaplin, e.g. Modern Times). PSY as a video character could be some kind of South Korean Chaplin, although his "poetics" is of course incomparably more barbaric, and present time requires visual elaboration. 

Anyways, PSY crumbles our comfortable images of what is a rapper like, who is the hero of a video clip, what he looks like and how he treats women. Instead of detailed studies of sensual touch in slow motion, as common in standard music video cliché, we get paradoxically more powerful erotic moments in metaphors. And that itself is significant.