In the modern music industry’s bid for our bucks, the music video has become an almost necessary advertising tool. And in considering the video for “Love the Way You Lie,” it’s important to remember that its whole production – song and visuals – is an advertisement for Eminem’s album, Recovery, not a public service announcement. While it’s true that we’ve been witness to both Eminem’s and – much more graphically – Rihanna’s struggle with abuse and violence, and while it’s true that Rihanna is an artist musically and publicly coping with a traumatic incident, none of it comes altruistically. There is still a patriachally oppressive industry orchestrating the movements of both Eminem and Rihanna, and in the end, they all want your ninety-nine cents at the iTunes checkout screen.

Nonetheless, the “abuse ballad” has become a high point of discussion, and it is in this way that it becomes a social activist tool. So let’s talk about it.

Since the single’s release, there has been great anticipation for its high production video, which was uploaded and unveiled August 5th, 2010 to 6.6 million hits in its first twenty-four hours. Directed by Joseph Kahn – who is also responsible for Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” and Brandy & Monica’s “The Boy is Mine” – the video stars Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan, and is cinematically rather gorgeous and coated in golden hour tones. The video further muddies the song’s controversy over whether or not it glorifies domestic violence.

With a BA in Cinema-Television Production, I can’t find a job right now, but I can say with some authority that almost all cinema – movies and music videos alike – glorify the human condition in a sensationally oversimplified and male-centered way. And therein lies the true problem with the video for “Love the Way You Lie.”

As someone who has sung both Rihanna’s chorus and Eminem’s rap, I feel that domestic violence and abuse isn’t as black and blue as a couple repeatedly slapping and dragging each other around. From middle school until my first year of college, I was emotionally abused by a boyfriend, my self-esteem so low that I stayed because I feared no other man would love me. The first of many times he broke up with me, he told me it was because he was “embarrassed” of me, which eventually led to a brush with disordered eating that put me at ninety-five pounds and dry heaving into the toilet. He pressured me to have sex with him and then told me that vaginas are “ugly.” When I did something “wrong” – which was unpredictable – he yelled at me or withheld affection, mirroring his treatment of his mother. Our “honeymoons” included diamond necklaces and fireworks at a beach side hotel in Malibu. When we finally broke up, he followed me to work and sat outside my dorm room, and I had to seriously consider a restraining order. Attending the same college, whenever I glimpsed him on campus, I would become sick with panic. Though he never touched me, I am burdened with scars of insecurity, mistrust, and saddest of all, a habit of abuse.

In my most powerless rages, I hit my next boyfriend, not once, but a few times, one time in public to the jeers of onlookers. Though we are friends forgiven now, I see how I diminished his sense of self-worth. Recently, I’ve asked for space from my current boyfriend after a moment of relapse wherein I used pointed words to undermine him. I don’t want to promise “Never again” ever again. It is a complex cycle of learned behavior that requires time, effort, and support to overcome, and for a woman such as myself, who has internalized the actions perpetrated against her, it is a difficult and sometimes puzzling process to recognize yourself as someone who has been abused and who is an abuser in a world where violence is the male normative.

The video for “Love the Way You Lie” is so far removed from some of the realities of domestic violence and abuse that it seems almost satirical. Kahn’s vision, though well crafted, clumsily stumbles through a sequence of visual clichés that reveal no real contemplation of the subject matter. Acting as beautiful paradigms, Fox and Monaghan slap, hump, and finally set each other on fire, devoid of any context. Monaghan is simplistically vilified (he steals a bottle of liquor) and Fox is still a representation of Hollywood’s unrealistic and damaging expectations (as she stalks like a runway model through the house, her profile is slender and fashionable) which, confusingly, won’t allay her the tabloids’ slut-calling. The video’s settings and dingy, cluttered production design seem to evoke a lower social status, relegating the song’s subject matter to a class that Rihanna did not inhabit when Chris Brown hit her.

Moreover, the video is a reflection of the larger film industry’s male gaze, where “chick flicks” stand as an exception to the normative explosive blockbuster. Since its inception, Hollywood has established and perpetuated a patriarchal line of assembly, starting with the salaried studio system. American cinema’s brief and modern history still lacks a strong female presence. “Love the Way You Lie” was written by Marshall Mathers and two other men, who then approached Rihanna with the song. Considering that one of the song’s two producers is a man and the video’s director is also a man, Rihanna’s role in “Love the Way You Lie” becomes more decorative than declarative, and in the video, Fox never really confronts her situation (she smiles with fire in her hands, but then we watch Monaghan strike her in slow motion), and the last image we’re left with is her scantily sprawled body. It’s still a part of the same grotesque male-interpreted fairy tale we’ve been cultivated to believe in.

“Love the Way You Lie” is no groundbreaking anthem, nor does its video glorify as much as simplify the complex realities of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse. It is, however, a tremendous avenue of dialog, though not down our familiar streets of controversy. Kahn’s video and its tedious triteness is proof that there is still much to uncover regarding violence in a world that continues to lord one narrow sex and gender expression over all the rest. More importantly, our romantic visions of domestic violence and abuse are in desperate need of a reality check so that its diverse range of victims can more easily identify with each other regardless of our differences. Whether we’re women, men, movie stars, pop singers, or just broke college students, the true scars of domestic violence and abuse are deep and powerful, and it takes a lot more than a burning house to understand and heal them.