Dept. of culture

where rosy cheeks have an ax to grind

July 18, 2008  1:50 pm

If you’ve seen the debut video for She & Him’s single “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” the ethereal lighting and animated birds circling a wide-eyed, porcelain-faced Zooey Deschanel (in a wardrobe of signature sixties shifts) were probably what you were expecting from the two-piece fronted by Deschanel and producer extraordinaire M. Ward. The banjo-playing ghosts and the ax decapitations may have come as a bit of a surprise, though. “We put the kibosh on the fake blood,” makeup artist Vanessa Rose Price says of the terms she and Deschanel hashed out for the video’s exceedingly cute hair and makeup, which stand in stark opposition to the plot’s macabre leanings. “Zooey usually likes to look very pretty and very doll-like,” Price says, explaining that the extra lashes and deliberate excess of Benefit’s Posie Tint that she applied on the actress-turned-singer’s lips and cheeks were meant to be cartoonish—a compromise that didn’t involve the grotesque. That, Price says, was left for post-production. class="byline">—Celia Ellenberg