Since its premiere last week, Sia’s newest music video, ‘Elastic Heart,’ has been blowing up across the internet. The video has been routinely criticized because of its interpretive dance between the young dancer, 12-year old Maddie Ziegler (who you might also recognize from Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ video) and 28-year old actor Shia LaBeouf.
The video itself is LaBeouf and Ziegler in a cage dancing together. They go after one another at first, with Ziegler and LaBeouf’s characters fending off each other. Ziegler’s character escapes the cage and LaBeouf’s is in turmoil, so Ziegler returns to try and aid LaBeouf. Towards the end of the song Ziegler tries to help LaBeouf escape the cage, but to no avail.
The critics are claiming that the video is one big blob of pedophilia because of their skin-coloured attire and how they are “wrestling with each other.”
TMZ made a post about how Cathy Nesbitt-Stein, one of the moms from the reality show Dance Moms (Maddie Ziegler first appeared in this show) claimed that the video is “vile” and the video is quite close to being considered pedophilia.
On the other hand, the chieftain of Dance Moms, Abby Lee Miller has another opinion. She thinks that critics of the video are stupid for not understanding how LaBeouf and Ziegler were acting like wolves while exhibiting amazing athleticism and timing.
Other people applauded the video with their own interpretations of it, believing that the video is about Sia and her father each fighting their own mental illnesses. Her father was also an alcoholic and young Sia tries to help her father, but he lashes out. In the end Sia gets better but her father is unable to escape his mental illness, or the cage.
Sia herself has responded to the backlash. On Twitter, Sia posted, “I anticipated some ‘pedophelia!!!’ Cries for this video. All I can say is Maddie and Shia are two of the only actors I felt could play these two warring ‘sia’ self states.”
Eight minutes later, Sia posted another tweet, but this time she apologized. “I apologize to those who feel triggered by #ElasticHeart. My intention was to create some emotional content, not to upset anybody.” Sia later explained to a Twitter user that both Ziegler and LaBeouf were playing the same person.
This week, Sia plans to post a “making of” video for ‘Elastic Heart’ – perhaps it will help explain the video a little better.
What do you think? Is Sia’s video is a form of pedophilia, or is it a dramatic interpretive dance?