Synopsis

INXS are ambushed and abducted by a gang of heavily armed women, who take the band to a hideout and hold them captive. Michael Hutchence is separated from the others and subjected to a flamboyant series of threats and humiliations, presented with exaggerated captions and pulp-style imagery. When the police close in, the captors make their escape by boat, leaving the band behind. The clip turns the kidnapping into a campy, surreal reversal of macho action-movie conventions.

Factoids & Trivia

• "The Messenger" was part of the *Full Moon, Dirty Hearts* visual-album project, created for the 1993 record. Each of the album's 12 songs received its own video.

• The project was designed to move away from the usual INXS performance clip. "The Messenger" functions more like a short exploitation film, with the band appearing as characters inside the story rather than simply performing the song.

• Its imagery deliberately draws on 1970s blaxploitation and pulp crime movies: oversized hairstyles, combat-style costumes, toy-like machine guns, tough-girl poses, and sensational newspaper-style captions.

• The on-screen phrases, including "Mama Boss" and "Torture chamber," operate as part of the visual storytelling. They add a comic-book quality while also making the video's depiction of power and violence deliberately artificial.

• The clip has attracted academic discussion because it places Aboriginal women in roles that combine stereotypes of the dangerous "bad girl" with control over the white male rock band. Interpretations have therefore focused on race, gender, colonial history, and who controls the meaning of the images.

• The video is unusual within the INXS catalog for placing Michael Hutchence and the rest of the group in a deliberately vulnerable, comic, and non-glamorous position. Its central joke is the reversal of the conventional male-dominated action narrative.