Winter Ahead: V of BTS noir symphony - Jazz, Desire, and Lynchian depths

In November 2024, V of BTS released the MV of Winter Ahead. Fast-forward to April 17, 2025, when Mulholland Drive returned to Brazilian cinemas, and not as nostalgia, but as something else. Something slower. Stranger. A wake, maybe. A final reel for David Lynch, who died on January 16, 2025. His absence is loud, like static behind the eyes. And Lynch's influence lingers in this music video of V of BTS.

And the film keeps moving. Australia is next. Mulholland Drive will reportedly screen inside the Sydney Opera House on May 3. The building's shape already looks like a dream that never resolved.

Some say a sequel is coming. Mulholland Drive 2. Others say nothing is coming at all. That the story was always a loop. That we’ve already watched the sequel and didn’t know it.

There’s no date. No confirmation. Just shadows on celluloid.

When V of BTS meets David Lynch: A dream into a dream into a dream

And then, there are the influences that have ingrained themselves into pop culture as deeply as Lynchian roots. So, it's a good time to analyze Winter Ahead, a very Lynchian MV by Kim Taehyung, known worldwide as V of BTS.

Whenever he releases a music video, it’s never just an add-on. It’s an atmosphere. A secret whispered through red velvet curtains, a puzzle made of shadows. Winter Ahead follows that same instinct but goes even further. It unspools like a fever dream stitched together by loneliness and longing, held in place by jazz and dim lighting, framed in crimson, and drenched in surrealism. Just like Mullholland Drive.

While surface-level readings might cling to Greek myth or classical tragedy, this piece demands something deeper. It doesn’t ask to be understood. It begs to be felt.

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Disclaimer: This isn’t casual commentary.

It’s smoke and mirrors, stitched with jazz and shadows. A felt interpretation—haunted, deliberate, and deeply personal.

It doesn’t explain. It lingers.

Born in silence, built on longing.

Tread gently.

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A stage soaked in noir: The elegance of loneliness

From the very first frame, V offers us not a stage, but a confession. The opera house, empty and humming with ghosts, becomes a shrine to solitude. He walks through it like a memory made flesh—dressed in a deep red coat, somewhere between flame and wound. Every gesture feels like a ritual. Every glance, a plea. This isn’t a man performing; it’s a man revealing. Standing in a space once meant for applause, he carries a silence that feels heavier than noise.

Noir isn’t just an aesthetic here. It’s the bloodline of the piece. A genre haunted by moral dissonance and cigarette smoke, where every corner hides a secret and every light flickers like a heartbeat. For V, the empty theater is not absence. It’s reflection. The stage becomes a cracked mirror, echoing his own interior spaces. Even in motion, he seems suspended. A dancer drifting through molasses. He moves, not because he wants to, but because he must. That’s what makes this performance so sharp—it cuts softly. Loneliness isn’t the absence of presence here. It’s the fullness of it.

Jazz as heartbeat, tension, release

The music doesn’t accompany the visuals. It conjures them. The jazz that flows through the MV is smoke and pulse, breath and bruise. It doesn’t explain—it aches. Jazz has always carried a strange intimacy, a kind of chaos dressed in silk. And here, that duality becomes language. The MV doesn’t follow a structure. It improvises. It falters. It catches its breath and sighs.

Jazz, with its scattered rhythms and unpredictable flourishes, becomes V’s co-star. Not just a soundtrack, but a presence. A ghost dancing beside him. There’s an improvisational quality to how the MV unfolds, as if it’s being shaped in real time by emotion alone. Silence becomes just as crucial as sound. Every pause hums. Every swell feels like a confession. You don’t just listen to and watch this MV. You lean into it.

And that’s the magic of it. Jazz doesn’t provide comfort. It seduces and unsettles. It mirrors the MV’s emotional dissonance, its quiet battles between freedom and restraint. Between reaching out and pulling away. V doesn’t just perform within the music. He disappears into it.

Lynchian surrealism: When meaning dissolves

There are no clear answers here. Only doorways. V of BTS wanders through them like someone trying to remember a dream already slipping away. Opera house. Empty street. Rain-soaked car. Intimate room. And again. And again. The transitions aren’t meant to make sense—they’re meant to create feeling. Disjointed, eerie, tender.

David Lynch doesn’t influence this MV in style alone, but in spirit. That quiet sense of wrongness. That beauty that feels just slightly out of phase. The logic here is emotional, not linear. Symbols repeat like echoes: a hand under the eye, the sculpted figure, a flicker of blood. These aren’t narrative tools. They’re talismans. Anchors in a world that keeps slipping sideways.

And like Lynch, V of BTS doesn’t care about closure. He invites interpretation only to refuse resolution. It’s disorienting by design. The surrealism doesn’t ask to be solved. It asks to be surrendered to. Because sometimes the most honest stories aren’t told. They’re felt in the stomach, behind the eyes, somewhere soft and undefended.

Desire and despair: Echoes of The Sandman

Watch closely, and you’ll see Desire. Not the romantic kind. The Sandman kind. Neil Gaiman’s twin Endless, Desire and Despair, hum quietly beneath the MV’s surface. One pulls forward. The other drowns. And V stands caught between them, sculpting a body out of stone and want. He creates his muse but can never truly hold her.

The statue is more than a metaphor. It’s yearning given form. And like all desire, it cuts both ways. There’s pleasure in pursuit, yes—but agony in knowing it may never be returned. The bloodied, fragmented version of himself that appears again and again isn’t a ghost. It’s a consequence. To long for something so deeply is to risk being shattered by it.

That’s the dance here. The tenderness of creation colliding with the violence of emptiness. Desire sculpts. Despair breaks. And V holds both in his hands like they’re the same thing.

A fractured self: Mulholland mirrors

If you’ve seen Mulholland Drive, you know the feeling. That creeping blur where identity unravels, where memory shifts shape, and nothing stays still. V’s MV taps into that same dream logic, where every person and every place could mean something else. Or nothing at all.

The woman who shifts from statue to living form is more than a muse. She’s a vessel. A projection. A whisper of something he wants, or once had, or never did. And the alternate V—bloody, watching—isn’t the villain. He’s the mirror. The self that couldn’t look away.

The visuals echo Lynch’s language: hallways that lead nowhere, rooms that hum with absence, and touches that land like aftershocks. Everything here is double. Everything is dissolving. And the deeper you go, the more it slips through your fingers.

Let the silence speak

V of BTS doesn’t hand us meaning. He lays it out like a scattered deck of cards, face-down, and dares us to feel our way through. This MV doesn’t beg to be decoded. It asks for surrender. For quiet. For attention. And for the kind of gaze that isn’t looking for answers, but resonance.

In the end, it’s not about understanding. It’s about ache. About the softness inside the rupture. About the stillness between notes. Some stories aren’t linear. They’re emotional weather. They drift, hum, and haunt.

And this one, like winter, arrives in silence, and it stays in the bones.