In the Spiderman trilogy, Norman Osborne better known as the Green Goblin suffered a tragic death. In Antony and the Johnsons‘ video for “Cut The World,” Willem Dafoe‘s character is once again killed off violently as his secretary goes insane and slashes his neck. The music video features Dafoe, Carice Van Houten (from Game of Thrones) and an appearance from performance artist Marina Abramovic.
Antony originally wrote “Cut The World” for Abramovic’s upcoming opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, which features the artist and Dafoe. The music video displays what happens in world where secretaries go crazy and kill their bosses. Like many Abramovic performances, the Nabil directed music video explores the limits of the body and the mind, and what happens when thoughts and feeling takes control of the actions performed by the body.
At the end of the music video, a mass of murderers unite outside of their office buildings, blood covered, knives in hand, and looking destroyed on the inside. Here, it is where Abramovic and Van Houten meet and connect in one long stare, in the same way that Abramovic did with visitors in her The Artist Is Present performance.