Synopsis

A disheveled man wanders through a busy road tunnel, muttering to himself as traffic races past. Drivers honk, offer brief gestures of concern, and repeatedly strike him, yet he keeps rising and continuing forward. As the collisions grow more brutal, he removes his coat and confronts the traffic with eerie calm. The final impact transforms the video from grim realism into a surreal, almost biblical image of endurance, reversal, and possible transcendence.

Factoids & Trivia

• The central figure is played by French actor Denis Lavant, known for physically demanding and highly expressive performances in films such as *Mauvais sang* and *The Lovers on the Bridge*.

• The song was released in 1998 as part of UNKLE's debut album, *Psyence Fiction*. Thom Yorke wrote and performed the vocal with UNKLE's Josh Davis, better known as DJ Shadow.

• The track incorporates dialogue from the 1990 psychological horror film *Jacob's Ladder*. The sampled voices help give the song, and by extension the video, its unsettling religious and hallucination-like atmosphere.

• The car collisions were more complicated to create than the finished clip suggests. The original idea involved making the cars appear invisible, but early tests did not work. The production instead used a padded stunt vehicle, carefully timed passing cars, and computer-generated cars created during the post-production process.

• The video's apparent realism is central to its impact: the camera stays close to the pedestrian, while the tunnel's confined space makes every approaching headlight feel unavoidable.

• In 2010, Pitchfork ranked the video eighth on its list of the greatest music videos of the 1990s. Rolling Stone later placed it at number 28 on its 2021 list of the greatest music videos ever made.

• The clip is often discussed alongside Radiohead's "Karma Police," partly because both songs feature Yorke and use a lone man, a road, and approaching danger to build tension.