Castle Of Glass Analysis

By Will Yeates

This opening shot of the young boy coming to the door and us seeing his small hand in contrast to the large door knob emphasizes just how small/ young the boy is.

When the boy sees the man in the military uniform and his head drops down it implies to us that something is wrong. The fact the song has not even started yet and there is just a somber sounding piano in the background adds to this.

The music of the song begins to play after the boy has heard the news from the military officer and as he turns away from his mother. Thus symbolizing that he is turning away from what he knows and is going to guard himself in his “Castle of Glass”.

As the singer starts to sing the first lines of the song the house begins to deteriorate around him, due to what we assume to be the death of the boys father, as the song is about the families of those who have lost people in the Armed Forces, we can assume that this is a metaphor for the boys world collapsing around him. The use of the house deteriorating around the singer is a clear example of Sven Carlsson’s Electric Shaman.

The way the camera quickly switches between the boy and his mother, the mother looking like she is moving on or at least trying too, and the boy isolating himself is shows how the death of the boys father is taking a much heavier toll on him so that the boy can’t see past “crack in the castle of glass” as although this is only a small part of his life he is struggling to deal with the enormity of it to him personally.

As the boy enters his fathers study we hear the line “show me how to be whole again” this is a symbol of the boy trying to fix the crack in the “castle of glass” by going to the place he associates with his father.

“Only a crack in this castle of glass” Metaphor that the death of the boys father will not result in his world falling down, but it is only one bad thing in a lifetime of good ones.

Putting on his fathers hat after seeing his medals shows us that the boy has taken inspiration from his father, something we see a few moments later when the boy looks up and he is now fully grown and we see he too has joined the Armed Forces like his father had.

Seeing the grown up boy visiting a little girl like the other soldier visited him at the start of the video, most likely to give her the same terrible news, shows us how the boy has come full circle but that also while the loss of his father was a huge life altering experience for the boy really he is a small cog in a much larger machine.