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.