Closer

Nine Inch Nails’ controversial industrial-rock opus ‘Closer’ is brilliantly, visually realised in a highly disturbing, but utterly compelling and slyly innovative short film, directed by award winning auteur Mark Romanek. Featuring all manner of unsettling, spine-chilling, truly graphic imagery, including scientific perverseness, sadomasochism, animal cruelty, sexual torture, and religious iconoclasm, this clip was deemed prominent enough to be added to the permanent electronic-media collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and litigious enough to be banned and/or censored by television networks the world over. Check out the edited version, which initially made its rounds on MTV in 1994, a multimedia set piece still miles ahead of any other music video put out since then.