1988 Countdown #93: Cher, “I Found Someone”

The video opens with Cher and some boytoy looking at themselves in the same mirror. He’s wearing a white scoop-neck t-shirt, cut low in both the back and the front, and has a big puffy poodle haircut. Cher looks exactly like she did in 1978, or in 1998. The boytoy is fussing with his hair. The camera pulls back to reveal his studded belt, Cher’s gray mini-dress, and the dozen burning candles.

Cher walks out of the mirror room into a bedroom, which like the mirror room, appears to be decorated by Pottery Barn. Her hair is bigger and more lustrous than the boytoy’s–as always, Cher wins! Boytoy angrily follows her, and snatches a black jacket out of her hands as he leaves. Flashback: Cher rubbing foreheads with Boytoy in happier times, when he had bigger hair than the current version. (Boytoy, by the way, is Rob Camilletti, who was her actual 24-year-old boyfriend at the time.) Neither of them appear to be wearing a shirt, so rubbing foreheads basically equals full-frontal on-camera penetration.

The music swells. (This song was cowritten by Michael Bolton, and is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from him: a competent but uninspired radio-ready power ballad. Inspirational lyric: “I remember the thunder talkin’ about that fire in your eyes.” Most of the single’s kick comes from Cher selling the hell out of it.) We return briefly to the present day, where Cher looks pensive while reclining on her bed, turning her head so we can better see the full volume of her hair.

Another flashback: a nightclub with just enough extras to make it look populated, if not crowded. There’s some neon dangling from the ceiling. Cher is dancing with Boytoy, who dips her, and then spots a pissy blonde girl, who walks by with a meaningful glance. Boytoy stares.

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We hit the chorus and cut to Cher in performance, leading her band in front of a sparse crowd. She’s wearing a totally indecent outfit: a black mesh bodysuit over a black bra and panties, covered by a black leather jacket that she keeps trying to shrug off. It’s not quite as provocative as the similar-but-crotchier ensemble in the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video the following year, when she cavorted with sailors, but I don’t think there’s another 42-year-old woman on the planet who could have pulled this look off.

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Back to the Pottery Barn bedroom. Cher pulls chainmail pantyhose up her leg, fluffs her hair, and fastens the chainmail pantyhose to (yes!) a chainmail garter. More hair-fluffing, just so we understand that her hair’s the real star of this video. She struts back into that club in her chainmail outfit, and embraces a guy with enormous hair, the only other person who can compete with Cher’s coiffure. He’s wearing a black wifebeater shirt, cut very low on the sides. Boytoy is in a booth with Pissy Blonde: they both stare at Cher.

Cut to Cher on the dancefloor with a totally new guy with tousled hair, groping her from behind and grinding against her. “I found someone to take away the heartache,” Cher sings as we hit the chorus again, but I’m losing track of all the someones she’s found in this video. Boytoy stares at her from across the dancefloor, ignoring how Pissy Blonde is rubbing against his leg and throwing her head back, offering up her throat. Cher hoists her leg onto the hipbone of Tousled Hair, and then pivots as she teases her hair with her fingers. Boytoy stalks across the dancefloor and pulls Cher towards him. She turns away, and Boytoy grabs her again. She slaps him, and then turns to walk away with Enormous Hair–not the guy she was just dancing with.

Cher, in the same chainmail outfit, struts down a traintrack. Her guitarist walks beside her, rocking out as he plays the solo. Wow, this is the most excellent video ever. Cher, no lie, is running her fingers through her hair.

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We return to the performance segment, and it turns out that the sparse crowd is actually a half-dozen pairs of dancers grinding against each other. One female dancer gets thrown into the air and twirled.

In the Pottery Barn bedroom, Cher throws some clothes into a suitcase, and then hurls a framed photo of her and Boytoy against the floor. If you watch in slow motion, you can see that the glass is broken before it hits the tiles. Then Boytoy glides into the frame and puts his arm around her. They press their foreheads together again. We cut to Cher in black-lace performance, overcome by emotion and on her knees, before we return to a tight shot of Cher and Boytoy, him with a delighted smile, her with a reluctant one.

“I Found Someone” hit #10 on the Billboard singles charts. You can watch it here.

posted 17 June 2008 in 1988 and tagged . 1 comment

One Comment Thus Far on 1988 Countdown #93: Cher, “I Found Someone”

  1. Chris M. Says:

    Brilliant! I feel like I was…there? (Wherever “there” is.)

    Man, I forgot what a good ’88 Cher had. I just poked around online and found out that Cher won her Moonstruck Oscar about a month or two after this song made the Top 10. A good winter/spring for Cher, and her hair.

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