Paris Paloma’s music video for her new track Good Boy captures a feeling women and queer people known only too well. The video follows the character of Good Boy as he tries to mimic the misogyny he sees the men in his office enact. Patriarchy (personified by Paloma herself) rubs her hands with glee as he plays right into her trap – though he has more in common with the Everyday Woman (also played. by Paloma), his desperate need for validation leads to his inevitable downfall.

It is a beautifully cinematic, narrative-driven video starring Tom Blyth. Here, the music video’s director Georgie Cowan-Turner breaks it down for Short Stuff scene by scene.

17 August 2025 – as told to Molly Lipson

Our story of Good Boy is a bit of a tragedy. He’s not necessarily “bad”, but he’s passive and tries to emulate these other, misogynistic men around him. He's kind of in awe of them, and he has a vision of being one of the lads, but despite his attempts he ends up falling for Patriarchy’s trap and gets nothing in return. It's quite an emotional story, it was more about showing the journey of a character who signs a kind of Faustian pact, and the realisation that what he’s signed up to is actually against his own interests.

I was so happy with these stairs. The shot really viscerally conveys that idea of men getting in women's faces, and yes, it’s a little bit exaggerated, but it's also something I’ve both seen and experienced, and we wanted to have stand out visuals. I think it also works really well as a still.

Then we’re back in the boardroom and we wanted to create the dynamic of this man who’s left out. I think it was actually Tom who came up with the idea of being the little guy with the notepad. It feels like he’s more of a secretary, what you’d imagine a woman’s position to be at that table.

If you’ve seen the film Cries and Whispers, there are these great red colours, but we turned it a little bit more Hitchcock to make it like a sort of dirtied up dream, so we’re seeing what he’s seeing as he goes into this darker space. This was the first time that Tom had acted with Paris as Patriarchy, and the costume was intense but they both got into this strange zone and it was amazing. The way the character moves is more physical so we tried to counterbalance Paris’s movements – if she went in one direction, we went in the other – and it made it quite disorientating, shifting where she was in frame.

We exhausted Good Boy up those stairs, where we see him becoming more and more aggressive and more violent and angry. Then we’re back in the boardroom and this scene was a kind of release for him. We wanted to express Good Boy’s rage, but then it moulds into something almost feral. I could tell by that point in the day I had broken everyone down enough to the stage that we all wanted to have a bit of fun. Harvey, our character who played Top Dog, did this fantastic bark and it just broke any kind of timidity that was in the room.

The idea of the dogs came from Paris and her team early on, and in the song at this point there are male backing vocals and dogs barking, so it feels like it really had to happen. Actually, this was the sequence that before we shot it I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to make it work. But then there’s this moment where Paris pulls Tom by the scruff of his neck, and then Tom starts to have some kind of realisation, and that movement provided a really great transition into the next shot.

At this point of the day, everyone was working really collaboratively and really well together. Narrative wise, it needed that chaos and that idea that these men that he aspired to be at the start, who I wanted to seem a little bit dog-like from the very first shot you see of them together, are now Patriarchy’s dogs. They’re a pack and he's never going to be one of them. These final shots are about that sense of fear and panic and terror. It felt like having him running through the woods was the best way to do it, making it feel more like a 60s or 70s horror film.

I felt like I needed an end shot and I wasn’t quite sure what that should be. Paris had been standing there for the previous shots and I’d had this idea of him falling over and wondered what it would look like with a lackey upside down shot. And Paris and Tom worked so well off each other, and it tuned out so well in the end. I love that it has that kind of dance-like feeling, a sense of complete control from Patriarchy and just defeat and sadness for Good Boy. It’s a little ambiguous, I wanted to leave it as an anything-can-happen type of ending.