Bad Liar Analysis

As our chosen song has a narrative which tells a story part of my research is to look at music videos that have a similar type of story narrative.

Selena Gomez - Bad Liar

This video is the same strand of narrative as many of Halsey's music videos. It's a narrative video describing a teenager's day at school, while she seemingly has a crush on one of her teachers. While it is assumed that she likes the male teacher that always seems to be in the shot of her looking wistfully out the windows or classrooms, it is revealed that he is actually her dad and she is looking past him at the gym teacher. It is also to be assumed that her dad is flirting with the gym teacher and she always seems unimpressed to see her dad at the end of each day, knowing that he's trying to cheat on his wife.

The lyrics of the video are matching to the video that accompanies it due to the theme of trying to hide secrets from everyone. The main character's secret is her crush on her gym teacher while her dad's secret is from his wife about his secret affair. But at the end of the day, all her friends know she has a crush on the teacher and his wife knows about his flirting. Proving that indeed they are bad liars.

The artist is trying to tell the audience that at the end of the day you can't deny or hide who you want. She's also trying to tell people that they shouldn't assume who people have crushes on, essentially shouldn't assume everyone is heterosexual. At the end of the day this video did spark controversy by the surprise twist that in fact she was crushing on her female teacher and not the male one.