Carlile’s ex can’t stop the surveillance state

Directed by Flavor’s Mack Neaton, Spare Me is a rancid Pepto-Bismol video that captures the hollow feeling of being left behind, ignored, and overlooked. 

As a young woman sits at a table of strange, gelatinous aspics shaped like pineapples and human brains, digital flies buzz around her head.  The setting and design of Spare Me is a campy, kitsch-filled nightmare, full of neon florals and crossed wires. Disembodied voices, digital overlays, bizarre breakdowns of boundaries and consent all combine in this lurid, candy-colored nightmare. 

Terrifying and strange, Neaton’s vision of the rotten future is a speculative monstrosity. Capturing the sense of an ending, the video shifts in between focusing on the couple and the passive bystander who can only narrate the Stepford terror that they’re shown. Every moment in Spare Me is tight, focused, and takes less and less from reality, while still remaining recognizable. This is Neaton’s first music video, and the strength of her vision comes through in a troubling tumult, a manifestation of a bad relationship and a truly bizarro aesthetic.