A Ghostly Vision in the Night: How Radiohead's "Karma Police" Echoes Edward Hopper's Haunted Scenes.
“You are what your deep driving desire is,” the sages tell us.
The other evening, I was up late randomly flipping through TV channels when I stumbled upon MTV Classic playing Radiohead videos. Though I’ve seen “Karma Police” countless times before, this viewing struck me anew. As Thom Yorke raced down the night freeway pursued by a spectral taxi, surrounded by eerie purple-and-blue hues, I was filled with a startling realization — this video uncannily echoes the haunted urban landscapes of my favourite painter, Edward Hopper.
In the familiar opening shot peering through Venetian blinds towards the singer under stark ceiling light, in the neon-lit tunnels and desolate overpasses, I saw such a kinship to seminal Hopper works like “Nighthawks,” “Gas,” and “Night Windows.” The cloaked nighttime setting, slashes of vivid colour contrasting against the pervading blues, the profound solitude of the figures wandering in Hopperesque anonymity — Radiohead had somehow channelled the master’s signature style.
I’ve always felt an intimacy towards Hopper’s silent scenes permeated by an otherworldly stillness. When the lockdown began, I returned to pore over his collected works, taking comfort in their quiet company as days blurred together. I believe Hopper would have felt an instant kinship with “Karma Police.” Both capture the strangeness of moving through a city late at night, where familiar streets turn uncanny, coloured by isolation and dislocation.
They give visual form to the floating unreality of night thoughts — our deepest fears and regrets projected onto shadows. The pursuing taxi is a literalized conscience: karmic fury for unnamed crimes, driven by flashbacks of past misdeeds. Hopper’s nightwalkers turn their faces away, not wanting to be seen.
Yorke races towards redemption or escape as time runs out — those familiar words echoing, “For a minute there, I lost myself…” Don’t we all lose ourselves sometimes on the lonely freeway backroads of the soul? Yet the night journey offers glimpses of grace — his pursuer is revealed as a lost spirit unable to move on, the singer turning with compassion to offer a hand.
Gazing at “Nighthawks” or “Night Windows,” don’t our eyes trace similar trajectories? The cobalt dimensions Hopper concoct form the perfect exhibition space for Radiohead’s haunted, hypnagogic chase scene. Half-lit signs and gaudy neon resemble portholes in other dimensions. Both artists excel at capturing eerie, liminal spaces filled with quiet foreboding.
As I rewatched Yorke’s pale face racing by in freeze-frame, I felt Hopper would have wanted to immortalize it among his pantheon of nocturnal figures dwelling in shadows. The video images have lingered with me since — stark interiors bleeding into speed-blurred nightscapes, all bathed in radioactive hues reminiscent of Hopper’s most experimental palettes.
Gazing at this haunting night journey, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to timeless Vedantic teachings about the illusion of ego. Like the taxi pursuing a man down deserted lanes, don’t our self-created demons sometimes torment us on the open road of life? The cosmic law of karma seems to dispense justice, but what we perceive as external judgment springs from within.
“You are what your deep driving desire is,” the sages tell us. When we forget our eternal Self, losing touch with inner stillness, then karmic fury seems to hound us. Yet the Nemesis is us, fleeing from our shadows. Awakening allows us to offer compassion even to our nightmare manifestations.
Portals everywhere beckon us to rediscover the way Home, even a highway under cold neon. No matter how lost we become, grace emerges in the strangest places when we remember to stop running.
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