The Cars - Double Life

JUL 01 1979 · 12:00

The Cars - Double Life (1979) Director: Gerald V. Casale Era: New Wave Dawn (1979) - Pre-MTV promotional clip era; band performance video shot for Elektra Records in support of the third single from Candy-O, capturing The Cars at the cusp of the new wave explosion before music video became a mass-market medium. High curatorial value as a dual artifact: both a document of The Cars' early visual identity and a verified piece of MTV launch-day programming history. The extreme single-take structure (1 scene change over 237.52 seconds) and low-brightness tungsten palette make it a visually distinctive outlier within the Cars' video catalog, and an authentic record of pre-MTV performance clip conventions. Essential for any archive focused on the 1979–1981 transitional period in music video history. Context: Released in December 1979 as the third single from The Cars' sophomore album Candy-O, 'Double Life' arrived at the precise moment when new wave was consolidating its commercial foothold in the United States. The Cars occupied a unique position, critically celebrated for bridging 1970s guitar rock, punk minimalism, synthesizer-driven art rock, and melodic power pop, yet 'Double Life' failed to chart despite the album's considerable success (No. 3 Billboard 200). The video's subsequent placement as the 21st clip on MTV's inaugural broadcast on August 1, 1981, transformed it into a foundational artifact of the cable music television era. Its stark, low-lit performance aesthetic is a direct visual document of the pre-MTV promotional film tradition, where bands performed to playback on minimalist stages without narrative or conceptual overlay. Director notes: IMVDb credits Gerald V. Casale as director of 'Double Life' (1979), and the credit appears consistently on that platform. However, detailed Casale filmographies, including the Wikipedia article on Gerald Casale and the profward.com comprehensive videography, list his Cars work as 'Panorama' (1980, co-directed with Chuck Statler) and 'Touch and Go' (1980), but do not enumerate 'Double Life' (1979) in his credits. This discrepancy may reflect the informal and underdocumented nature of pre-MTV promotional clips, where directorial attribution was rarely formalized. The video is consistent in aesthetic with low-budget performance clips of 1979, single static or near-static camera, tungsten stage lighting, band miming, and predates the era of high-concept music video production. The video was notably among the first 21 clips aired on MTV on August 1, 1981, cementing its historical significance. Casale's involvement with The Cars' Panorama-era videos (both 1980) makes a 1979 engagement plausible but not documentarily confirmed.