Set on a barren mesa grassland, the video follows a man whose crime is never disclosed as he is marched toward his own televised execution. The event unfolds like a grotesque public exhibition. Crowds gather with picnic baskets and binoculars. A television host narrates the proceedings with pageant-level bravura. At the center sits a metal cage perched over a cliff, where a treadmill becomes the instrument of fate.
Takács leans into the absurdity of the setup, but resists letting it collapse into pure spectacle. Instead, the film turns toward something more defiant. With no context for the man’s alleged crime, the viewer is left without moral clarity, forced to consider whether any wrongdoing could justify a punishment so extreme. In doing so, Takács draws empathy from the audience for the condemned. As the pageantry swells around the accused, the question is not whether he will survive, but whether he can deny the crowd of consuming the ending they came for. With the advocate’s help, he stages one final act to reclaim a sense of dignity in the face of total abjection.
Takács adds: “Brush Me Like a Horse is an acid western about a man condemned to die in a cruel, humiliating public spectacle. Joe Newman came to me with the vivid image of a state execution via treadmill, and it immediately conjured this whole narrative world. In Joe’s songwriting, the images are layered and nested inside one another: a man is accused, the accused is a horse, the horse is a mouse in a field where cats roam. The track already contained multiple voices and characters; it cut so many strong silhouettes that my job was simply to fill them in.”
Like the debut single, the film lives in the space between metaphor and reality. It is playful, unsettling, and strangely beautiful.
The shoot itself was particularly challenging due to a tight schedule, large set pieces, and high ambition. On our second, fully sun-baked day we started running into massive rattlesnakes everywhere around the mesa – it was like they were all simultaneously waking up after weeks of rain. We kept having to pivot and find new spots to shoot that lacked tall grass, but it was basically everywhere.
Technical info to go with the shoot’s BTS below: We shot on the Alexa Mini with Master Primes and a Canon 150-600mm zoom. A few plates and additional shots were on an Alexa 35.
