Why BTS’s music videos feel like films: Decoding Merry Go Round, Suga’s storm and the carousel of emotions
The imagery occurs in repetition and restraint: doors that divide, spaces that isolate
To twist the old saying, life is like a box of chocolates, you never quite know what you’re going to get, it feels strangely fitting for BTS. You never really know what a music video from them will deliver until you finally press play. Sometimes it's an angst-ridden narrative like I Need U and Run from the HYYH era, where seven boys drift through the edges of youth, bound together by fragile ties of time and fate.
Other times it erupts into something surreal and intoxicating, like Blood, Sweat & Tears, or turns into something looser and self-aware, where the group is simply having fun with concept and chaos, reimagining familiar cinematic tropes through their own lens.
And then there are works like Merry Go Round, which arrive like a slow bruise. This time, the video is monochrome, brooding, suspended between melancholy and fleeting light. Often read as a meditation on separation and distance, it brings the sensation of being caught in cycles that feel impossible to escape, where adulthood itself becomes a spinning ride you can’t quite step off.
The imagery occurs in repetition and restraint: doors that divide, spaces that isolate, and a central carousel that keeps turning no matter how far each member seems to drift. Some sequences feel especially heavy with interpretation. Suga’s room is the most turbulent: He walks through a dark cloud, with papers flying everywhere, and many fans have interpreted it as newspaper clippings, referring to the 2024 DUI incident.
His service was the most silent: Fans did not hear from him practically between September 2023 to June 2025, and even then, he finally came live for fans on the last day of the year.
Perhaps, he was waiting to dry himself from the storm.
While Suga walks through the storm, RM sits on what appears to be a coffin, which was interpreted as a reminder of his military days, where he shared that he suffered deeply from insomnia.
Another interpreted reference to his service: Throughout that time, RM had been most vocal about wanting to leave: The leader had even kept a countdown till the last, waiting to be free and reunite with his family, band, and fans. In fact, he had once shared with his fans, that for the first time in his life, RM wasn’t able to write songs, something that he had been doing since the age of 14. “I lived like a zombie,” he had said, explaining that even simple daily tasks became difficult and that he went more than 70 hours without sleep. He had fear of nightfall. Later he had explained Merry Go Round too: "During the military too, even living this life, I kept imagining a merry go round, I couldn't get off.."
These moments feed into a larger emotional current: the disorientation of time away, of distance from creation, from each other, and from their audience. Yet even within that stillness, there is motion toward return.
The carousel keeps turning, but so does the possibility of reassembly, of coming back into orbit. Merry Go Round hovers not quite, as despair, but as duality, hurt and healing existing in the same breath, circling each other until they almost, briefly, align.
