WS - Deconstruction 8 - Die Another Day - Madonna

Artist - Madonna

Song Title - Die Another Day

Year - 2002

Genre - Dance-Pop

Director - Traktor


Madonna has been a huge figure to date in the Music Video industry, and so it seems appropriate to do a blog post on one of her videos. The video I have chosen to look at by Madonna is 'Die Another Day' (Another video used for a James Bond film). The reason I have chosen to look at this is because of it's high budget; it is the second highest budget Music Video (using Production Costs at time of production) ever made behind Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson's 'Scream'.This song is part of the Dance-Pop genre. The label that the song is under is Warner Bros. Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. This goes a long way to explaining how the video can have access to a very large budget.

The music video includes an extroadinary amount of intertextuality, with most of the references been to the James Bond film series. A paragraph from Wikipedia summarises the references to different charcters from film's seen in the video:

"The video features references to Honey Ryder (from 1962's Dr No), Rosa Klebb and Blofeld's white Persian cat (from 1963's From Russia With Love), Oddjob and Jill Masterson (from 1964's Goldfinger), Tee Hee's metal arm from the 1973 Live and Let Die, Francisco Scaramanga's golden gun from 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun, as well as a spacesuit, a fencing battle in a Venetian glass factory, and a Jaws-like man with metal teeth, all referencing 1979's Moonraker, and even contains a reference to Luke Skywalker's lightsaber battle with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back"

Madonna as seen in the film

As well as the intertextual references mentioned above, the video also contains a large number of references, and copy-cat scenes of what can be seen in the film, 'Die Another Day', for which this song is the theme tune. Character's such as General Moon can be seen in the video as well as a poster of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, like he was in the film. Added to this are the settings and situations played out in the music video, for example the Fencing scenes, fighting scenes and the torture scenes, as seen at the start of the video. All of these scenes are taken from the film, but are using different people to portray them here, an examle of this been Madonna replacing James Bond as the person being tortured. Another character that Madonna replaces in the video is Miranda Frost, who takes part in the fencing in the film. Frost was a protogee of another character seen in the actual film, Verity, played by Madonna.

Throughout the video there are a number of close-ups of Madonna, who is a huge international star. The close-up's emphasise that it is her song and her video, and may in some cases apply to the Male Gaze theory.


The main part of this video is Narrative based. The narrative aspects of the ideo are throughout the whole video, and even when Madonna is performing in parts of the video, there are still aspects of narrative to it. Madonna does however, perform to camera at points throughout, for example when she is struggling against the torturers; it is still during a narrative part of the video but is incorporating performance aspects too. 


Below is the official music video for the song:

The song was also used as a theme song for the film 'Die Another Day'. Below is  link to the version seen in the film:

Die Another Day Theme Song