"Hurt"

Rachel Oatman

September 23, 2008

English 9

                         "I will let you down I will make you hurt."

      “Hurt”, a song sung by Johnny Cash, a song originally sung by, "Nine Inch Nails," was his eulogy of his life. He made this music video in his last months. He knew that he was dying, and wanted to show his audience and listeners the mistakes that he had made. He wanted to show us what happens when people allow things to take over and destroy their lives. 

     He shows his life story through a series of pictures and videos depicting the duration of his life from birth to now, his final days. The video opens with a display of expensive, Roman antiques. You see Cash, now an old man, playing his guitar with a woebegone look on his weathered face. You see his museums, now closed, displaying how his life, and his influence was coming to a close. He perceives that his life life has been a waste and that no one will notice, care, or remember him when he is gone. 

     The symbolism in the video "Hurt" is very powerful. Johnny Cash uses Christ as a symbol of his own life's hurt, pain, and suffering. The video showed the intense affliction that Cash brought upon himself. Christ died so others could live he died by choice.  Cash was dying by choice too. The twisted morality of his younger years caught up with him in the end. He brought his own death upon himself by poisoning his body with drugs and alcohol. He shows this to his audience through the images he portrays in the midst of his interpretation of the song. The wine was another strong symbol. You see him pour out the wine onto a table filled with affluent objects, wasting the expensive wine. This symbolizes how Johnny poured out and wasted his whole life on his various addictions. His alcoholism was his major addiction or enslavement, which hurt everyone he knew, loved, and cared about.

     In order to understand Cash's flaws and failures, he reveals his full personality to the audience. This characterization can be seen throughout the entire music video, through the flashbacks of his life. He hurt many people by the mistakes that he made, but the person he hurt the most was the one person he loved and was closest to. His wife had stuck with him through everything his addictions, his being unfaithful, and his neglect of his children and his neglect of her as well. His viewers see her look at him, her face a picture of anguish and grief. Yet, her expression is also filled with undying love for this man, a man who ruined most of his life, and made her life extremely difficult. 

    Throughout the video, the audience can follow his life from the beginning to the end. This video shows how alcoholism can destroy a person's life and hurt the people around them. Johnny Cash uses his life as his own testimony for everyone else to learn from. He wanted to show people that the choices they make in their younger days, and even as they get older, really can make or break one's future. Perhaps he felt even if one person learned from his mistakes, his life's sufferings would have been worth it.