For Your Pleasure

It’s videos like this that make me pine for MTV’s golden years. A time when pretty bands didn’t just settle for being pretty, but toyed around with their own aesthetic by making it full-blown cinematic. The Human League’s video for “Love Action (I Believe in Love)” offhandedly pays homage to The Graduate with Phil Oakey starring as a New Romantic Benjamin Braddock, but in this incarnation there’s a lot more posing and pouting involved. And he’s not the only group member to delve into the histrionics with gusto. Female vocalist Susan Ann Sulley is shown throwing vases and other objects at the camera during presumably what is a lover’s quarrel. It’s also interesting how the video deals with these different layers of voyeurism and who’s being watched when and who’s doing the watching through the overriding theme of romance-fueled espionage and then having all the band members meet at the end of the video in a screening room gazing at the projected iconic images of Marilyn Monroe and her famous paramours. (Too good!) Aligning themselves with old Hollywood this way, The Human League position themselves at the heart of the spectacle—just where they should be.