Bleed Like Me (song) - Music Video

Music Video

"Shirley sees the video being about love and the nurse as a caring specialist."

The music video for "Bleed Like Me" was filmed on April 11 in the disused Linda Vista Hospital in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles and directed by Sophie Muller. During the filming, CNN interviewed the band and broadcast behind-the-scenes footage of the video.

The video begins with Manson, as a nurse, reading medical records onto a dictation machine. She is then accompanied by Erikson, Marker, and Vig, as doctors, as they view patients on their rounds. Manson is then seen preparing a ward for use - opening curtains, preparing beds and medicine. Manson breaks into a file storage, where she reads her own medical file (placed in front of director Sophie Muller's file), and later speaks to her therapist, but she is startled by a raven. In the hospital's educational room, Manson stands at a lectern, which she pushes away to perform under disco lights. The video ends with Erikson, Marker and Vig watching Manson through a two-way mirror: she is their patient. Manson finishes her dictation and ejects the cassette from the machine.

Using Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a starting point, Manson's character was created from a mix of 1950s European nurse in costume, and evoking Helmut Newton's "strong yet vulnerable" photography subjects in her make-up. Manson herself wanted the video "to have a Hitchcockian feel" referencing his films Marnie, The Birds, and Psycho, choosing graphic colours to enable to the video to "be as powerful as the song. I thought it was a brilliant concept".

In 2006, the video was a "Director of the Year" nominee at the 15th Annual MVPA Awards. The video for "Bleed Like Me" was included on Garbage's 2007 greatest hits DVD Absolute Garbage.