"Best Friend" is a song by American Indie Pop band Foster the People. It was the seventh track on their album Supermodel and the third single off of said album. It reached number 48 on Billboard's "US Alternative Songs" chart and number 19 on their US "Bubbling Under The Hot 100 Singles" chart.
The song also featured an accompanying Music Video directed by Ben Brewer. The video follows a struggling supermodel (played by Melissa Stetten) working her way up in the industry by swallowing her fellow models whole and absorbing different desirable aspects of their appearance. This continues on until the model slowly starts to completely become warped and unrecognizable. And things only get worse from there.
The song and music video can be seen here
.
"Best Friend" contains examples of:
- An Aesop: The video is one about not trying to live up to the unrealistic expectations of the fashion and beauty industries. Even as the supermodel becomes less and less human-looking, the modeling industry barely bats an eye - by the time she's reached the apotheosis of her inhuman appearance, they just split her picture across three separate billboards to fit it.
- Ambiguously Human: The supermodel. She looks human at first, but her Cannibalism Superpower and abilities to unhinge her jaws like a snake and not show an inch of weight gain after swallowing another woman whole are certainly not something a normal human typically has. An animated portion of the video also has her morph into a Venus flytrap looking thing.
- Black-Hole Belly: After The Supermodel swallows her victims she keeps her waistline, not showing any visible signs that she just ate a full-grown woman whole.
- Body Horror: Overtime, eating all the different women and taking on their clashing features, the supermodel starts to become a twisted, spindly horror, rather than the natural beauty she was at the start. When she barfs up a dress and chokes to death on it, she reverts back to her original appearance.
- Concept Video: The video tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
- Eat the Camera: Happens twice. Once at the beginning when the The Supermodel swallows her first victim. And again part way through when the camera goes into her mouth and slides down her throat to reveal the souls of the previous women she had eaten trapped in her stomach.
- Empty Piles of Clothing: When the woman scarfs down her first victim, all she leaves behind is her dress in a messy pile on the dressing room floor. This is noticeably different from her later victims, who she eats dress and all.
- Fairest of Them All: The woman's motivation for devouring her fellow supermodels is to accumulate all the most desirable physical traits.
- Fashion Show: The climax of the video takes place at a fashion show.
- Foreshadowing: About halfway through the video, the Supermodel vomits up a shoe from her most recent victim. Vomiting up a dress is what ultimately kills her.
- Helpless Kicking: When the supermodel eats another model just before the show where she dies, all the woman can do is flail her legs as she's going down the supermodel's mouth, and the latter looks particularly monster-like during that moment.
- Humanoid Abomination: The protagonist of the music video seems to be one of these — she eats women to absorb their physical traits, of which she is envious, and ends up distorting her body horrifically to the point of looking inhuman, before vomiting on the stage at a runway show and seemingly dying painfully.
- Leg Focus: The Supermodel gets jealous of the praise one of her fellow models gets for her shapely legs. So while they're at the gym she corners her in the locker room and eats her. This grants the supermodel longer, shapelier legs, which she shows off to a guy at a nightclub. There's also a lot of focus on her last victim frantically kicking her legs as she's getting swallowed alive.
- Modeling is Glamorous: Subverted. While the supermodel protagonist of the video does get to bask in the adoration of onlookers, wear fancy clothes, and get into hot nightclubs, it all comes at a great cost. Not only does modeling feed her insecurities, but the actions she takes to stay on top make her both metaphorically and literally a monster. And several women die when she ravenously devours them alive in order to steal their beauty.
- Right Out of My Clothes: The first woman we see the supermodel eat gets yanked right out of her dress as she's Swallowed Whole, leaving her empty dress behind, lying in a pile on the floor.
- Rubber Orifice: The woman in the video is able to swallow other supermodels whole by unhinging her jaws and devouring them alive in a single go. One
memorable moment shows her with her head tossed back and her mouth stretched freakishly wide, and a woman's bare legs sticking out, desperately kicking as she's Swallowed Whole. - This Was Her True Form: After The Supermodel barfs up and chokes to death on her last victim's dress and dies she reverts from her spindly, Body Horror form and back to her original appearance.
- Writer's Block: One of the things the song can and has been interpreted to be about is the fleeting nature of creativity and artistic inspiration in the face of creative blocks.Feelings sleeping in the field again
But I can feel, I can feel, I can feel it's beginning to end
Yeah, premonitions smiling in the dark
Well, I can see, I can see, I can see the story's starting to arc - You Are Not Alone: One of the songs key messages."I'm here, no matter where you are / I'm waiting here with open arms, no matter where you are..."
- You Are Who You Eat: The Supermodel steals the best features from each person she devours. This eventually adds up until she looks like a nightmarish mockery of a human, since the parts don't have the same proportions from one person to another. At one point we see a billboard of her freakish form, which (contrasting to billboards shown earlier) is gigantic to fit her warped proportions.
