What Kind of Man - Music Video Analysis (The Odyssey Chapter 1)

What Kind of Man

The Odyssey, Chapter 1 Analysis

To quote Florence:
'There's such an extreme feeling to be in love, especially in quite an emotionally destructive relationship, where you’re both kind of really bad for each other, but you love each other so much. Those extreme emotions, I think, can only be described with extreme imagery.’

Florence begins by talking about how her boyfriend thinks that suffering physically (e.g. a storm, earthquake) in a situation together brings people closer together.
“But what if they are creating the disaster within themselves?” Florence asks. The video is about the difference in physical suffering, and mental suffering in a relationship.

This is the basis of the video. Florence is haunted by her past-lovers, who all grew apart from her, but still weigh her down. When she’s with her new man, she can’t help but have all these old boyfriends drag her down. It’s ruining her relationship. THIS is the disaster being created within themselves. Both of them know that their relationship isn’t working, and it isn’t right, but they keep going with it. Florence tries to fight it alone, but it doesn’t work, and needs her man to help her through the suffering together…

At the start, Florence’s dream was probably about how bad her relationship is with this guy. She was dreaming about all her old relationships dragging her down and hurting them both. He didn’t wake her up though; he didn’t suffer with her.
The scene cuts to Florence and boyfriend (BF from now on) standing on a balcony. A storm is coming. Florence is facing it, ready to take it on (physical suffering), but her boyfriend isn’t interested. He’s looking at her. He’s content, when she’s ready to suffer.

The scene cuts back to them in the car, and BF agrees that people suffering together (physically) are more connected than those that are happy together. This is completely contradictory to the previous scene, where Florence is ready to suffer during the storm and he isn’t. There is disconnection. The scene cuts again to Florence in the car, in the storm, alone. She’s physically suffering alone again. There’s a pink/blue tinge to the scene, maybe signifying how Florence is trying to look at the relationship through rose-tinted glasses, but can’t help feeling down about it still (blue colour). This is still contradictory to her BF saying that suffering together connects them. Maybe this shows he doesn’t want to be close to Florence.

The scene then cuts to Flo emerging from a bath, presumably deciding that suicide is not the way to deal with her suffering. Once again, she’s alone.

Florence realises the only way to get his attention, for them to be connected, is to please him, since clearly being content makes him feel closer than suffering. She decides to have sex with him to please him, even though she knows it’s not right, and it’s not helping them resolve their differences.

Whenever she’s with him, even when having dinner, she’s being suffocated and dragged down by her experiences she’s had with her old boyfriends.

It makes her ignorant, because she doesn’t want to let this new man go in fear that he’ll just be an addition to those old boyfriends, even though he doesn’t understand her needs. The disaster IS being created within themselves, and the video explores what happens when it is…

The scene cuts to them again, after having sex during a storm. There’s still no connection, even though they are going through a storm and have just been intimate. This is symbolised by them being on different corners of the bed. Back on the balcony, Florence diverts away from the storm, and tastes her boyfriend, almost like she’s trying to see what he’s really like, using all her senses to gauge whether he truly cares for her. Tasting him is also the closest connection you can get; she’s trying to relive that thrill of him and force a connection that’s not there during the storm.  

Florence tries to wash her suffering away by undergoing a baptism in the ocean. It’s a huge body of water, showing how she needs a lot of water to get rid of these thoughts she’s suffering with. She goes to church to confess them out. Notice how she’s suffering with other women in the ocean, but was alone in the confined bath. Her boyfriend is still not there to help.

She’s now sitting in the bedroom alone during the storm, once again highlighting how, even though BF said it’d connect them, he lied. He’s only there when times are happy, but as soon as she needs him, he’s gone. He holds her hand in the back of a car, showing that they’re together in it, and the car crash happens. Even when a huge catastrophe like a car crash happens, they are still separate (at the end, Flo crawls out alone again. She’s physically suffering alone again, even though they were both involved in the crash).

In the next scene, Flo is in panic, surrounded in her head by these men that haunt her. She’s carried into a vault/prison by them. She tries to fight them, but alone, she can’t overcome them. This is why she attempted suicide, baptism etc. In the vault, the other men are just watching her suffer, and not helping her. She feels trapped and under their control. However, BF appears and things begin to change. In the vault, the men disappear when he’s by her side, and likewise they stop fighting her when he appears in the hotel room.

The men in her thoughts eventually separate the two, but Florence and BF persist even when they’re being pulled apart. He finally cares, and realises that they must fight their relationship problems together. It’s this that brings them closer together. The problems created between the two of them are finally actually being dealt by both of them, and although it hurts them (the man gets a black eye, for example), it connects them. Florence herself said that "people think the men in the video represent my ex-boyfriends, but they really represent a lot of different forces that weren’t working for me".
Notice now how in the flash of a sex scene, Florence is finally above him, pushing BF down. She’s triumphant in her fight, but only after BF was there to help.

In the scene where she's wrapping her hands around herself, it's as if she's blocking out all the thoughts now; she's conquered her negative forces.

To summarise, Florence’s boyfriend feels that being in a physical disaster with Florence will bring them together. It’s clear that it doesn’t (in the storms, the car-crash etc. Florence is left on her own, isolated). Florence then asks whether a disaster created within themselves (a love that both of them know is wrong, and a love that’s tainted with past experiences in relationships) will bring them closer together. The answer here is yes. At first, Florence is left to suffer alone, and she completely fails, resorting to suicide attempts, loveless sex and more to make them feel connected or just escape all together. Her boyfriend finally sees that both of them must try to conquer their relationship problems together, and they do, and it works.

The now-hurt boyfriend and Florence caress. If you look closely, now that they’re holding on to each other, the other men can’t break them up and are losing the fight. Florence and BF are truly connected to each other, the other men can’t hurt them anymore. They can’t break them up, and this proves Florence’s question; suffering together DOES make relationships stronger, and helps you get through anything.

But what do you think the video is about? Did we miss something?

FAN ANALYSES

Natalja Woody

Right now i think that the conversation in the beginning, between Florence and her lover, is the last thing that happens. This conversation brings up the idea of dreams and suffering (nightmares). Then there's a flash of a few nightmares (the hands grabbing florence) and memories (them standing on a balcony). I think that the car crash is the first thing that happens. Florence crawls out of the upturned car and passes out from trauma. I also think that her lover dies in the car (since you can see his head dangling while Flo crawls out of the car). Then a man comes and picks Florence up and carries her into a metal building (?). During this Florence remembers/dreams of other nightmares and sexual experiences. It becomes apparent that the man has brought Flo to be sexually abused by all the men in the metal building (im not sure what the venue is) as they sit around her as she lies on a dirty mattress. In the video she screams and makes to attack these men, and even slaps away one if their hands when they touch her. During this the scenes of her being attacked by men (the choreographed part in a different room somewhere) is paralleling this experience in a dream. Florence searches through the men for her lover, and when she finds him they all work to keep them apart. Flo embraces him and its clear he has wounds (bleeding from the head), meaning shes aware that he is hurt (since she wouldn't be seeing wounds on him in her dreams if she didn't think he was hurt, ie dead in the car accident). The men pull her away from him as she reaches after him. This eludes to the men raping Florence (pulling her away from her lover, polluting and perverting sex "what kind of man loves like this") Then i think the men throw her into the ocean, after which she is found by a couple of women. Then, as seen in a scene about halfway through the video, Florence, completely distraught, runs to a church still soaking wet and falls to her knees in it's entrance. Then she dreams of her lover and her driving down an infinite and isolated road discussing love and suffering.

Mary E. Gootee- Schafers
The story of the film is about a young women played by Florence who is talking to her boyfriend in the car about when she was talking in her sleep. He did not wake her because she seemed to be in pain and he did not want to intrude on her suffering. She responds cheerfully that she thinks that people who share their sufferings would grow closer together. He points out that suffering is personal and is often in the individuals mind. She laughs and says, “It’s almost like they are making their own suffering.”

Flashback to the young women again in a car with another guy also talking about the nature of suffering but he doesn’t really seem to be listening to her.

A lot of the video is cut out of order but I think I have the story’s order of events now that I have seen the video a few times.

Spoilers Ahead: Flo is seen with the man from the car on a balcony, in a fancy dress, trying to prevent him from ditching her in Mexico. We go back to the car with the same guy and mid sentence the car is hit by another car. This leads to Flo and the guy being tossed against the interior of the car.

I think after the car crash Flo and the guy are kidnapped by a group of men. The men first take Flo to a hotel to subdue her and she is made to eat and dress how they like without any say in the matter. (Sound familiar? The clothing change is not on screen but she is not wearing the same clothes from the crash so I think they forced her to change or the scene with the hands while she is eating my be her having a date with the boyfriend from the start of the video but she is hit with PTSD. I think this because she is wear a short sleeve shirt for the first car scene and not the long sleeved one from after the crash.)

The woman fights back against her attackers and tries to reconnect with her boyfriend. The guy is taken away and is never seen again. Then they take her an under group place where the women is presumably tortured and sexually assaulted. After the rape she angrily sings at her abusers on the mattress where she was attacked.

Off screen she escapes from the man. She takes a bath and tries to drown her self. (Their is a higher suicide rate for victims of rape and sexual abuse than the general public) On screen the women emerges from the bath water gasping for air. Off screen she goes to the ocean to try and drown her self again.

She is saved by a group of women in black mantillas (most likely they just got out of Mass and saw the women struggling in the ocean). The scene where the women take her out of the water looks like a baptism. (A symbol of new life maybe?) The woman struggles to the church and collapse sobbing. (Looking for sanctuary and peace maybe like in No Light No Light?)

Sometime after the car crash the women is in a new relationship with the guy in LA from the beginning of the video. She really likes him but the trauma of what she survived still makes it hard for her to get intimate. (It is very common for sexual abuse survivors to struggle with trust, intimacy, and PTSD) After trying to get something started the boyfriend leaves, confused, but respectful of the fact she is not ready to go farther. The woman is left to watch an oncoming storm while she re dresses. (In the beginning of the video she talks about a storm raging in a suffering persons mind.)

I think the conversation at the beginning of the video shows that she is testing the waters to she if he would be willing to hear her past struggles. He does not want to know her struggles and she keeps them to herself. (Even the best man in this video isn’t perfect and cannot complete her. No one can.)

The end of the video shows Florence pulling herself out of the crashed car, which is both lonely and triumphant. This video is dark, but I think a generation that flocks to 50 Shades Of Grey and makes Blurred Lines a number one hit needs this video!

LukeLovesFlorence

The last shot you see is her crawling out of the car crash. We know he was in the car with her, but we never see him again.

I just think that what she learned (and this seems evident in both the video and song alone), is that it’s not healthy to be in a relationship with someone who is okay with letting you suffer. “What kind of man loves like this?” Not a very good one. I think it’s about her realizing she needs out of it.

I also think there’s an interesting theory to be had in the prospect that WKOM is the flip side to Heavy in Your Arms. In one song, she blames herself for all the problems (“I’M so heavy…” “I was a heavy heart to carry… My love has concrete feet…”) Then in WKOM she realizes that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t all her fault. Maybe she needed to stop blaming herself. She had been blaming herself for her suffering… only to realize that HE watched her suffer while having the ability to stop it.. but then didn’t. That’s epic. I feel like she realized that she wasn’t the problem and that she needed to get out of it and move on.

I know that seems a little contradictory to the line “I can’t beat ya ‘cause I’m still with ya,” but I feel like that was just how she felt in the midst of it, before she made up her mind.

Jacqueline Naomi

To add some literary theory, the ‘Fallen Woman’ is an iconographic symbol found often in Victorian literature and art (likely the origin of Florence’s fascination with it). The Fallen Woman is a woman who - having ‘sinned’, either by premarital sex, infidelity or other immoral behaviour - drowns herself for absolution. The water is a purifying agent (think the flood in the Bible, or baptism, as you touched upon) and cleanses the woman not only physically but morally also. This adds another layer of depth to the video… Perhaps the Florence in the video feels ‘unclean’ from her past trysts?

Sean McInally

When Florence crawls out of the car at the end, I'd say that shows she's survived the wreckage of the relationship and she's leaving him behind.

Louie Addler

I infer the lyric of 'What Kind Of Man' also can be related to God.

The lyric says,

'With one kiss, you inspired a fire of devotion that lasted for 20 years.'

And you know, Florence is only 29, and it's hard to assume that she met love of her life when she was 9. (and it was devoted love.)

God, referring to any religion, loves us. But he's also so cruel. He's sometimes half in, sometimes half out, but he never let us go nor excludes someone who willingly wish to worship him.

He is always on the other side just watching us. Even if any terrible disaster strikes us, he just let us suffer.

Literally he manage to love us like heaven and torture us like hell.

What kind of man loves like this?