by Carrie Scott
There are music videos that are just generational, defining a moment and capturing our anxiety or ambitions. For my generation, it was Björk’s Human Behaviour, directed by French director Michel Gondry. It’s a story of predator and prey. Björk walks through a forest, seemingly followed by a bear, and the whole thing turns the usual hierarchy of human and animal on its head. Who is predator and who is prey and which one of us is actually behaving badly?
God. Even Björk chose the bear.
Then there was Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity. The song is concerned with overpopulation, genetic manipulation, technology, artificial intelligence and ecological collapse. And the video makes that instability physical. Jay Kay dances through this apparently simple white room while the floor seems to move beneath his feet, the ground literally falling out from under him.
These two videos that I instantly call to mind, nearly 30 years later, because I want to think about videos that really stuck with me are wrestling with truths we STILL have to wrangle. In Björk, it’s our human behaviour that’s called into question against an animalistic perspective. Which is better? Which is more savage? In Jamiroquai, it’s the possibility that the things we invent, supposedly in the name of progress, could ultimately lead to our demise. They weren’t just brilliant songs with brilliant videos. They were using the music video to ask something.
Which brings me to STORM. The seven-and-a-half-minute film for GENER8ION, directed by Romain Gavras, starring Yung Lean, with choreography by Damien Jalet that is currently making the rounds on social media. I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen at least part of it because the choreography is absolutely extraordinary and therefore it has enjoyed a real moment of virality. I’ve watched it over and over. But then a friend (and a great artist) called Brent Showalter asked me if I had watched the first three and a half minutes? And I hadn’t and that turns out to be a problem.
Before these boys ever move together, Gavras puts us inside a near-future British boys’ boarding school, watching the class of 2034. The visual language is pregnant with rules in the form of uniforms, classrooms, corridors, cold institutional bathrooms, assembly halls, and school photographs but there appear to be no adults, or teachers. No parents and no women.
And into that vacuum comes Yung Lean, not playing some cartoonish villain, but the bully who has somehow acquired power through intimidation. His character teeters on the very edge. In one scene someone strikes back and the cinematic tension is so high, you’re really not sure how far the Director is going to take it. Lean feels capable of the very worst. In another shot, Lean has clearly dared a couple of his prodigy to play a “no hands” game from 30 feet up. If they don’t grab the railing in time it is “game over.”
In other words, for the entirety of the first half of this video, we watch boys being dared and coerced into things. At one point Lean presides over what looks like a makeshift fight club. And what started to occur to me, is that most of the boys aren't doing what he is doing. They’re just watching, too frightened to be anything but accommodating and as a result they are learning the rules of the world he has created.
And this is where it gets really unsettling for me. Because this isn't “Lord of the Flies”. These boys haven't been dumped on an island where all the structures of civilization have disappeared. They are at SCHOOL, wearing their uniforms and blazers and ties. They walk through corridors and classrooms. They stand on steps that have presumably held a thousand school photographs before this one. Everything around them tells us: there are rules here and someone is in charge here, except no one is. Or rather, none of the people who are SUPPOSED to be in charge are.
Where are the teachers? Where are the parents? Where are the adults who are meant to notice that something has gone badly wrong? And I think that is what’s most worth talking about. The boys haven't escaped the institution. They're still completely inside it. They look like good little schoolboys. From the outside, the whole thing might even look reassuringly normal. It's just that the actual, responsible authority has disappeared.
And into that gap steps Yung Lean, an authority who is not elected, nor qualified and crucially, not an adult. Just the person everyone else has somehow agreed has power. And isn't THAT how so much of this stuff actually works? Someone doesn't need to be given authority officially. A group can give it to them by laughing and following. By wanting their approval and not challenging them.
And suddenly, I'm not really spectating upon a dystopian school anymore. This feels like a universal truth. I'm looking at every closed system where the official rules say one thing but the social rules say something completely different. This happens in our society, time and time again, at schools, on teams, in FRATERNITIES, on social media. These are places where technically there ARE rules. There ARE adults. There ARE consequences. But in the room, in that moment, there is another hierarchy entirely. And everyone knows it.
Then the film changes. The boys assemble on the school steps as though they are about to do the most ordinary thing imaginable and take a class photograph. We see rows and rows of uniformed and uniform boys, that part when Yung Lean enters at the centre. The song changes, and the boys all begin to move. This is the part of the video that went everywhere. And my GOD, it is good. Damien Jalet’s choreography is extraordinary, we see bodies almost ripple and twist while groups break apart and reform. Dozens of what were once individual boys suddenly seem capable of moving as one enormous organism.
And while all of this is happening, Yung Lean himself barely moves. He still stands in the middle smoking while the choreography gets bigger and bigger around him. He has quite obviously created a “storm” (get it?) And once you've watched the first half, I don't know how you can watch that dance in quite the same way. Because the unison is unsettling as a second act. We have spent three and a half minutes watching one boy establish power through intimidation and violence. And then we watch everyone else fall into formation around him.
And this is where I want to put a feminist reading onto STORM. But let’s be very clear here. I'm not saying STORM is a feminist film. And I'm certainly not saying this is what Gavras intended. I'm saying that, as a feminist, and as the mother of two boys, this is what I can't stop seeing in it. There are no women in the world of STORM and that is interesting. This is a world of boys looking at boys, performing for boys, frightening boys, impressing boys, and most importantly watching what other boys will tolerate and learning where the boundaries are from one another.
And surely feminism has to be interested in that too. Because we can't only start talking about male violence when a woman enters the story and gets hurt. We have to be interested in what happens before that, in the rooms we're not in and the hierarchies that form between boys. Boys learn how to be men from watching other boys and men so we need to be paying attention.
And all of this feels even more important or urgent or painful against the backdrop of what is unravelling at Cornell because of what happened in October 2024 when a woman, who was then a 20-year-old Cornell student, says she went to the Chi Phi fraternity house to see someone she considered a friend. According to the civil lawsuit she has now filed, two men pressured her to take what they said was ketamine. She alleges that a combination of drugs and alcohol left her increasingly incapacitated while more men came into the room. In Cornell's own investigation at the time, Jane Doe said she felt like “bait.” Like there were “lions around me.”
And then there is the group chat. At around 1:42 in the morning, according to the lawsuit, a message went out to a Snapchat group for active members of the fraternity that said a woman upstairs was being advertised to the other men as available for sex. Later, someone asks whether the “shop” is still open. The answer is yes. There was apparently a photograph of her shared into that group too. And this is the bit I cannot get out of my head. Because this isn't an allegation about one monstrous man doing something monstrous in secret. The lawsuit names SEVEN men, in a fraternity house. There is a group chat of 50 more men. There are people coming in and out of a room. There are people allegedly seeing messages, and responding to them. There is an entire social structure around what this woman alleges happened to her.
Now, nearly two years later, after she filed a civil lawsuit and more of the evidence and investigative record became public, the criminal investigation has been reopened. And this week the Governor of New York took the extraordinary step of removing the local District Attorney from the investigation and appointing the state Attorney General as special prosecutor. I want to be careful here. These are allegations and have not yet been proven in criminal court. Lawyers for some of the men have denied wrongdoing. But this is precisely why Cornell keeps colliding with STORM in my head. I'm interested in the group mentality in reality and pictured in art. I’m interested in how power and violence moves through an all-male group and becomes normal. How watching becomes participating. How a room full of people can apparently have entirely different rules from the institution surrounding it. There were university policies, and police and a Title IX office. An entire institutional architecture supposedly built around these young people, just like the school in STORM, the structure is there. And yet, according to this woman's allegations, inside that fraternity house, another system was operating with another understanding of what was permissible. And, allegedly, enough people understood those rules that someone could send a message to a group chat about a woman upstairs and other men knew exactly how to respond.
And suddenly I am back on those steps in STORM and TERRIFIED. All those boys are individual bodies, but then the music starts and everybody knows the choreography. We are seeing how power moves through an all-male group. How one person acquires authority, and how everybody else learns where they sit in relation to him. How intimidation and violence and watching becomes normal. How the group decides what is funny or acceptable and what can be ignored.
The allegations coming out of Cornell aren't only horrifying because of what one woman says was done to her. But that 57 men went along with it. And did nothing to stop it.
I think it’s important to take a step back and look at who made Storm. The music is by GENER8ION and Yung Lean. GENER8ION is the project of French musician and producer Surkin, Benoit Heitz, and director Romain Gavras. STORM I is written by Heitz, Yung Lean, Jonatan Leandoer, and Canblaster. Gavras directs the film. Surkin is creative director. Damien Jalet choreographs it. The song is written by men. It's performed by men. And the world they've chosen to build is entirely male. That's important to me. Because this isn't a woman standing outside male culture, pointing at it and saying: look what men do. These are men making a work about boys and power and violence and belonging and following. About what happens when a group of boys begins to move as one. Which makes me wonder whether I've got this backwards. Maybe I'm not imposing a feminist reading onto STORM at all. Maybe these young men are creating their warning shot, showing us something they desperately want us, and perhaps other men, to see.
Or maybe I am reading too much into all of this. Maybe I am being hysterical!? Maybe Cornell is sitting so heavily in my head and heart that I've brought it with me into STORM. Maybe I'm joining dots that Gavras, GENER8ION and Yung Lean never intended me to join. Or maybe this is exactly what they wanted us to see. Maybe we're supposed to be seduced by the choreography, and watch all those bodies moving together and think: my God, that's beautiful, and forget all the intimidation and violence we just watched. Maybe the beauty IS the trap. I don't know. But I do know why I can't leave it alone. I am a woman and I have two boys and I have spent my entire life understanding, in ways big and small, what male behaviour can mean for women.
And now I'm raising two of them. Two boys who will become men in rooms I will never enter, have friendships I won't know everything about, will be in changing rooms and parties and WhatsApp groups and teams and, who knows, maybe fraternities and I won't be there. That is the bit that scares me. Of course I can teach them not to be the bully or to hurt people, or humiliate. I can tell them to respect women and never assault them.
Surely that's the easy, obvious bit.
The much harder thing is teaching them what to do when it isn't them, when it's their friend, and everybody else is laughing and saying it’s okay. The much harder thing to do is teach them what to do when they know something isn't right but saying so will make THEM the problem. When doing the right thing might cost them their place in the room. Because as a woman, I know something about what can happen when nobody steps out. I don't just want to raise sons who would never hurt a woman, I want to raise sons who won't stand by while somebody else does. Who will ruin the joke, and leave the group chat. The guy who will say stop and get help, and will risk being the unpopular one.
And maybe that is what STORM has made me realise. I've spent years teaching my boys not to be the bully. Maybe I need to spend just as much time teaching them to recognise the moment the choreography begins and to know that sometimes being a good man means being the one willing to fuck it all up.