
Beyoncé is one of the best performers ever to live and she uses her celebrity platform in a very interesting way. Beyoncé has very loyal followers and can make major impacts with just about anything she says or any action she performs. A lot of the time Beyoncé uses the power of her videos to turn heads all around the world to major social issues and that is exactly what she does with her new song and video named “Formation”. Since Beyoncé is part of the African American community, the worldwide issue of race-fueled police violence really hits home to her as she is personally affected and feels that these problems need to be addressed in a more efficient way than they currently are. The only way that these problems will be resolved is starting from the source and that’s why throughout the video the motif of Law Enforcement is extremely prevalent. 

In the first scene of Beyoncé’s “Formation”, the viewer can see what appears to be a young to middle-aged African American boy dancing to the beat of the music. All of a sudden, the boy stops dancing and puts his hands in the air. The camera slowly turns so the audience sees a line of police officers, dressed in riot gear. The shot looks like your everyday police arrest until the scene progresses. What first looks like an apprehension turns out to be peace. The officers also put their hands in the air as the camera zooms out, the audience sees the officers put their hands in the air, just as the kid has done with his. After this shot, the camera turns to a spray painted wall that reads, “Stop Shooting Us.” This sequence of scenes goes down as one of the more powerful ever in a music video. 

The next scene worth exploring is powerful throughout the entire video, in which we see Beyoncé posing on a New Orleans Police car in the middle of rising flood waters. The car appears to be in the area of what used to be a street, but is now fully engulfed in water.  This can be taken two different ways. If you look at the scene without taking the repetition throughout the video into account, one would believe it simply represents the effects of Hurricane Katrina, as I did at first, but as the video progresses, the audience sees that the car is slowly sinking. Hurricane Katrina devastated the community of New Orleans and I believe she used this reference because it hits home and shows that what is happening in their community is a major problem, just as the hurricane was. Towards the end of the video, the car becomes fully engulfed by the water with Beyoncé laying on the roof. The video finally ends with Beyoncé partially underwater and the cop car is just about gone.  

Beyoncé uses a slummed area of Los Angeles to film this video for obvious reasons. The surrounding area where these scenes take place moves the audience out of their own suburban homes to a place most people probably have not been before. By doing this, Beyoncé raises awareness about the type of places in which the recent acts of police violence are occurring, and the living conditions many people in this country have to deal with. The scene where the officers raise their hands signifies the peace the Black community is looking for in their lives. Sometimes the victims of violence are just innocent people and law enforcement does not understand the repercussions of their violence and the toll it takes on families and the community as a whole. They feel as if they are being wronged by police and are receiving unfair treatment. The spray-painted wall brings the whole scene together after seeing the cops put their hands in the air, the wall is shown to reflect the peace the community has been seeking, which they received in the video. 

As I re-watched the music video as a whole, I believe that the deeper meaning of this is the point Beyoncé was really trying to make, but without making it obvious. As previously stated, Hurricane Katrina was one of the biggest disasters to ever devastate the African American community in New Orleans. I believe that if viewers can see past the flood waters, Beyoncé chose this setting to show the people of the United States that the problems African Americans are going through is almost as important, if not as important than one of the world’s most historic disasters recorded. The sinking police car with Beyoncé on it very acutely signifies the police in America dragging down the African American community with discrimination. With glimpses of glamor throughout the video, one can make the argument that Beyoncé is showing how they could be living if the police were not dragging them down. She is showing the potential African Americans have if they were just given the same chances to reach it. Most people that watch this video will take everything very literally and think what they see is all that it means, however viewers need to take a second to really think about what is happening in the United States currently and it becomes pretty obvious that Beyoncé has a deeper meaning to her video. At first glance, one might think that the video is against the police. Now, in some small ways this could be true, but if the viewer takes the bigger picture into account, the video is more so about discrimination and equality and less about anger directed at law enforcement. One of the video’s main objectives was to shine light on recent events throughout the Black community that have taken place in our country. 

Throughout her whole video, Beyoncé makes subtle references to the police and police violence within the African American community, but uses two scenes, as referenced above, to convey major points to the audience. In these scenes, she uses depressed towns, rising floods waters, and people to show a main theme: police brutality in America and African American community’s search for peace. Beyoncé uses her famous stature as a platform to send a message because she knows how big of a following she has and the impact her words can make on people. It is time that Americans are finally treated equally, no matter one’s sex, race, or nationality. Beyoncé knows she is only making small noise in this subject field, but if enough people make their voices heard, change is bound to happen.
