Our Own Touch Could Save Us:
Florence + The Machine’s The Odyssey

By Annabel Tan

“The Odyssey, like the epic poem by Homer, is a journey… Its [sic] a metaphorical journey about escaping your demons, confronting yourself and returning to the original Florence, the dancer, the performer, the lover.”
Vincent Haycock, Director of The Odyssey

Irigaray argues that sexual difference is necessary before the intermingling of man and woman, placing an emphasis on the space between and the action of directing one’s love to the other in order to maintain each person as a separate and specific individual. ‘Desire and pleasure are then cultivated by and for each sex with the intention of accomplishing the perfection of its gender’ and the ‘couple sexuality finds its actualization, its realization, an in-itself and a for-itself corresponding to the poles needed for the perfect incarnation of every man and woman’s humanity. This task is realized separately and together’ (I Love to You 28-29). Using Florence + The Machine’s The Odyssey (2016), a 47 minute film for nine songs from the album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015), I will focus on analysing how the female body overcomes a difference in “relationship potential” to receive a culture that fits her identity. Rather than expecting either man or woman to be the hospitable host in this contemporary journey through storms and facing personal monsters, the film posits moments of interdependence which enable the female to face her own battles. While the relationships presented are threateningly faced with the possibility of being exploitative, the journey explores the dynamic of maintaining distance between the self and other. "The highs and the lows of love and performance, how out of control I felt, the purgatory of heartbreak, and how I was trying to change and trying to be free" is how Florence Welch describes the odyssey that she is charting with the album and film made (Sarah Grant).

Using Irigaray’s ideas, I posit that the individual’s understanding of touch itself, and the desire and pleasure that it has the potential to experience and give, can also be metaphorically transcribed to the atmospheres and spaces of the city. By moving away from a heteronormative structure of sexual difference between man and woman, Florence Welch’s persona (henceforth known as Florence) recognises each person as an individual who is negotiating boundaries and hospitality for oneself. Within the individual, “they are creating the disaster within themselves” to bring the self “closer together” (The Odyssey 2:55-3:17). For this odyssey, the relationship between man and woman becomes an allegory for this catastrophic experience that brings the self together. While the music videos as film are explicitly about romantic and sexual relationships between man and woman, especially with the opening track “What Kind of Man”, they are specifically addressing the process of learning, finding meaning, and finding a way to harness the wild self.

Sexual difference between men and women is a difference in the “relationship potential” that the two types of biological bodies have. Irigaray concisely discusses the difference in the language used by men and women using the word avec (with). Men tend to write sentences privileging “I”/“I belong” in terms of doing something with an object as a tool or implement, as well as a sexual preference for being together with a group of other men. In contrast, women focus on “I”/“Another person” where doing something is with another individual as a unique subject, and togetherness requires the opposite sex. These are entirely different worlds of experiencing and relating oneself to the world. Moreover, it is a larger problem where a woman cannot “receive a culture that fits their identity” and is forced to submit to a predominantly masculine culture. Irigaray’s definition of hospitality focuses on reciprocity rather than one which merely gives without receiving. The host-guest relationship is then defined by an exchange rather than a one-directional flow of resources from women. With The Odyssey, Florence Welch and Vincent Haycock use modern dance choreography influenced by Pina Bausch, whose practice is noted for wildness, dream-like, poetic imagery, and bodily language that takes people's essential emotions as its starting point (Norbert Servos). This forms a counterpoint to the Marxian form of exploitative labour demanded from woman by man that Irigaray describes. Who is the tool, or the object, for the other is not set out in the interactions across the different songs, a dynamic facilitated by the wildness of the choreography that focuses on fostering empathy between individuals (see Appendix G). Working in this convention, Florence’s Odyssey is both looking unflinchingly at her psychological reality of trying to differentiate herself from her lover while inviting the audience into a dreamscape where the self is split into numerous personas and identities.

The songs of The Odyssey are directed to a “you”, ostensibly the changing male lovers that Florence encounters over the course of the film’s trajectory. However, to be consistent, the lyrics in the third and calmest song of the sequence, “St. Jude”, is about her own journey independent of the lover as she leaves to learn through grieving since “somehow through the storm I couldn’t get to you”. The journey of the courtly lover or Odysseus coming back home to Penelope in Ithaca is implied, however:

…it is no longer a question of looking for some thing, of appropriating a beloved, an ideal located outside the self. The path is an internal one, accompanied by that of a male or female other who keeps him or her self outside of me, while pointing the way for me all the same…without taking leave of either the earth or flesh, the places we inhabit. (I Love to You 127)

Complicating Irigaray’s position of an internal path accompanied by a distinct male or female other is the problem of the “selfish” female who demands independence and thrusts aside other individuals once she has used them for her purposes. To a certain degree, The Odyssey has adopted the model of the masculine bildungsroman where the idealised lover becomes a means of discovering one’s identity either as an illusory end goal or an enabling partner (Paula Brown 222). However, instead of being the beloved forming the impetus or end goal for a masculine protagonist or making a male lover take on the passive position of the quested-for object, Florence uses the distance between her lovers as form of propulsion and energy that enables the couple to separate and walk their own paths (see Appendix H). An exploitative and objectifying structure for human relations is however a dominant feature in the development of masculine bildungsromans. Focusing on the main and male character of the narrative, the female lovers, monsters, and goddesses are lacklustre in comparison to the complexity facilitated by the narrative genre. In contrast, the film presents a version of femininity that encounters violence less with men than with a doppelganger of herself as a wild, untameable force (see Appendix C). Even in her most violently aggressive states, the men around her do not hit back in response, taking on at most a restraining force or letting her scream and rage against them. Frequently, she hangs passively limp in their arms as they carry her from one place to another. This potentially suggests that something transformative occurs when a female can interact safely with men as others.

Skin as a threshold in Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference and touch is represented in a clarified gesture of female agency and volition. Rather than allowing the men she encounters to enter her, potentially violating the integrity of the female body, Florence is repeatedly seen touching the lips of her lover or the environment she is in before touching her own lips, symbolising a form of consumption which is self-driven and self-mediated without the requirement of the lover or city to cross that distance between (see Appendix B). As a gestural motif, these moments of transference can be read as a metaphor for the exchange of spiritual energy, facilitating the propulsion forward and away from the person or place that Florence has become dependent upon. However, even though she violently thrusts away at numerous moments, this gesture of intimacy forms a kind of reassurance and even self-assurance. At particularly passionate moments by herself, she rapidly feeds her own mouth with both hands instead of one. In addition to this indirect touching of the lips, the touching in the choreographed dance sequences in “Queen of Peace” and “Delilah” are particularly poignant in revealing how the synchronised contact is not exploitative or demanding, but mutually enabling (see Appendix G and H).

Moreover, this responds to Irigaray’s remarks in “I Love to You”:

And so: you do not know me, but you know something of my appearance. You can also perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality. You cannot know who I am but you can help me to be by perceiving that in me which escapes me, my fidelity or infidelity to myself. In this way you can help me get away from inertia, tautology, repetition, or even from errancy, from error. You can help me become while remaining myself. (112)

Communication and exchange is a necessary element in Irigaray’s sketch for felicity. Later in the film, her male lover gazes at Florence’s almost naked body and delivers this monologue as a voiceover: “To give yourself over to another body, that’s all you want really…But you can’t live on love; and salt water’s no drink” (27:58-28:13). The passion of love is compared to living on the passionate and heroic journey upon the water, and Florence is seen exhaustedly falling to her knees in supplication or submission to the pressures around her. In terms of strenuousness, it is however the two songs “Ship to Wreck” and “Delilah” which feature Florence’s wild doppelganger that are the most intense and exhausting for Florence rather than those with negotiating distance with the male lover (see Appendix F). In both these songs, the male lover is stunned by the intensity of the wild and tame Florences, functioning as a form of check that she references to find some form of stability again, allowing her to become her wild side while remaining herself.

Artistically influenced by the concept of “Storms and Saints”, the credit song, the film also charts a personal narrative allegorised by male-female relationships in conversation with the female wandering through natural environments and cities (see Appendix A). Walking with her own two feet, Florence’s body takes the place of Odysseus’ ship. By being a lone woman walking in twilight, she is already an anomaly and an intrusion in the landscape of vehicles and men who walk the streets. Analysing the nature of the female flâneur, or flâneuse, Lauren Elkin comments that the walking female radically changes the position of women as observed, passive, and stationary objects. They become the observers, free to move and interact with the streets, and the act of walking away or with no fixed destination in mind is a liberating power that marks socio-economic leisure and a public acceptance of female identities. The Odyssey is a journey where “every city was a gift/ And every skyline was like a kiss upon the lips” (9:20-9:27, see Appendix D). “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” is the title song for this album, and is sung as a solo without musical accompaniment, with the sound of the highway underneath the bridge forming the acoustic backdrop. Her breath and voices perform:

This touching upon…is a grammar which prefers the question to the imperative…it uses to, between, with, together, rather than transitive forms, which always risk reducing the other to an object. (I Love to You 125)

The film for this song strips back from the crowd of elements and heavy use of spliced together clips of the first section, such as taking away the crowd of men surrounding her and the claustrophobic space of a car that meets with an accident in the first song. This makes the montage comprise a continuous shot with a few clips inserted with an ode directed to the “atmosphere” that Florence walks in rather than the lover as an object who must be possessed and kept close. By negotiating her relationships using the surrounding environment, she maintains a distance between herself and the male other, emphasising the space between and the transformative journey taken in order to go back to the lover and understand their hurt. Settings gain an anthropomorphised quality not merely because they could be a spiritual being but because the kinaesthetic energy from the dance choreography and the aural quality of the songs imbues them with their atmospheric quality. The human bodies have activated the space in a way that charts the personal emotions, however tumultuous or momentarily calmed. By touching these environs first before addressing the lover, a distance to feel, recalibrate, and reconsider, is possible.

This is seen in the trajectory of the last three songs. “Mother” is a song of Florence singing solo without accompaniment. It is spliced with a conversation between Florence and her lover discussing her leaving a place where the lover says: “Nobody stays here, if you can leave, you will leave here” (33:53-8). The lyrics explicitly address a supernatural maternal force while also appealing with “Oh Lord”, alluding to a Christ or masculine God. Underlying the narrative arc of The Odyssey is a strong desire and movement towards reclaiming a classical and biblical Western tradition for the secular and feminine (Appendix E). Contemporary remakes of Homer’s Odyssey emphasise the motif of turning and changing as a feminist interpretation of the role of creativity. Athena’s sponsorship of Odysseus’ stratagems (Mihoko Suzuki) is translated into a female tutelage under the influence of “Delilah”. The Odyssey facilitates this by playing on the polytropic nature of the hero Odysseus, where the turns that Florence takes from emotional highs to lows become mapped as a special form of intelligence and resilience. Strengthening herself, Florence accepts the inspiration from Delilah and cuts off the hair of her “Samson” who accused her of leaving and dragging his inert body through the hallway of the motel. Noticeably in the lyrics, she is both a contemporised Delilah and Samson who “pull[s] the pillars down”. This moment in the biblical story is when Samson regains his strength after being shorn by Delilah, positing the possibility for regeneration and forgiveness that helps the individual to overcome wrongs and trespasses done in the past. Significantly, this forgiveness is addressed by a self-love evangelist who sits in the front lobby of the motel as Florence stares at the hand that has been doing the touching throughout the journey. While she has touched, thereby forgiving or seeking forgiveness from characters who have resisted her, she has not touched herself apart from the light grazing of her lips as a symbolic sign of connection and distance with others.

Analysing relational energy, Irigaray proposes ‘that Dionysos corresponds to a matter without adequate forms and Apollo to a form without adequate matter’ (“Perhaps Cultivating Touch” 132). Using these archetypal mythological figures as examples of nature and culture that are two individuations which are out of touch, Florence and her doppelganger oscillate between these two poles. Paralleling the explosive dining table scene between a domesticized and tame Florence against a wild and violent doppelganger in “Ship to Wreck”, “Delilah” shows the most aggressive transformation of Florence’s persona. The doppelganger who is unmasked in “Delilah” is first in a state of shock, but immediately tries to speak in order to explain herself. Ironically, the doppelganger can be seen thrusting back at Florence the actions which veer on the abusive, shouting and pushing her away even while having moments of intimate touch. Confronting her doppelganger, she is an Apollo who suddenly becomes formless and weak against the Dionysian doppelganger who has blonde hair plaited close to her head and is now recognisably different from herself. This wild persona is touched and touches Florence, becoming the only self in the narrative who can show Florence what she is and what she has done to others. Reconciling these double selves, Florence has to learn to forgive the parts of her which have vigorously pushed lovers away and tried to compel others with embraces. To some degree, the Apollonian and Dionysian divide has been bridged, but the movement motif of supplication with gestures of prayer suggest that this is a continuous process that still inflicts turmoil for Florence in search of herself.

Sheila Whiteley’s analysis of popular women music artists who emphasise ‘authenticity, ‘truthfulness’ to personal experience and community’ (196) recognises them for having what Simon Frith identifies as ‘a believability…coherence (whether in terms of form or morality) and a usefulness – whether at the most material level, or at the most spiritual (does this experience uplift me, make me a better person?)’ (197). Threading together a cohesive narrative for an album through music videos is part of an increasingly popular genre adopted by singers like Melanie Martinez with thirteen videos for Cry Baby (2018), Beyoncé with Lemonade (2016), Marina and the Diamonds with the eleven-part Electra Heart (2012). Apart from being promotional teasers for the official release, monologues, struggles with conforming to stereotypes, and personal elements are a dominant part of the musician-performer personas presented in these visual albums. Intimacy with the psychological conflicts that the real-life artists experience is used as a means to authenticate the performances they do on a mass media stage. For Florence + The Machine, The Odyssey is distinctly less theatrical and outlandish in terms of staging the vocals, costuming, and atmosphere when compared to the ethereal gravitas of Ceremonials (2011). In particular, even the natural disasters and chaos used as a motif are held at a normalised and mundane distance. The storm’s lighting is in the distance, or only entering the rooms via a television broadcast. In interviews, Florence Welch talks about anxieties and personal struggles that motivated the album. Reflecting on her rise to fame, she describes it as: ‘totally thrilling and also completely terrifying. You're scared and want something to shield you, so you think you've got to have more hair, more makeup. To live in this creation, in this kind of magical alternate universe, kept me safe’ (David Browne). By stripping back this younger self and adopting a more “natural” look in jeans and casual tops, the personas alluded to through costuming and the wardrobe scenes are commenting on the breakdown of the “magical alternate universe” and trying to find a more authentic way of expressing one’s self at a point of personal and artistic exhaustion.

Poignantly in “Third Eye”, the last song in the sequence, the pre-chorus has the lines:

Cause there’s a whole where your heart lies
And I can see it with my third eye
And though my touch, it magnifies
You pull away, you don’t know why. (41:40-41:55)

In these lines, Florence claims the power of vision and understanding, causing repulsion from the lover because she has become the boundary or agent which defines him. Touch becomes a form of light to the relationship because it highlights the individuation between man and woman. This song ends with the outro: “I’m the same, I’m the same/ I’m trying to change” (43:44-44:50). Sung as Florence moves from the wings to centre stage just before the curtains open, it is accompanied by the roar of an excited audience waiting for the concert to begin. On a metafictional level, the film’s stylistic use of magical realism and the frequent cuts to the different selves of Florence and her doppelganger moves beyond a simple conversation between male and female lovers. This makes the odyssey undertaken primarily about a female artist reconciling her personal and performance personas in answer to the simultaneously pleading and independently strident refrain. Furthermore, it is about a battle between Florence’s different selves. The past and present are reassured by her identifying them as “the same” even as the present and future anticipate a “change”.

Understanding Florence as a feminist version of Odysseus the polytropic hero brings an interesting inflection to the reading of

Irigaray’s propositions for cultivating touch and a felicity within history. The Odyssey as spoken by Homer represents the monsters and threats of the sea as feminine. In the epic poem, fidelity to one’s lover is the test of love. In Florence + The Machine’s Odyssey, the human and natural environs are more ambivalent, possessing both masculine and feminine monsters which test the love of one’s self and how one can change while being true to the individual who has grown and who has left past personas behind. Touching with her fingertips the environs and her lover, she is repeatedly reaffirming and reasserting the distance she requires for her personal journey while allowing these lovers to accompany her. The narrative of Florence and her lover(s) is subservient to the greater journey she must take to “love and forgive” herself. Irigaray’s emphasis on sexual difference as a foundation for individuation can then be seen as something navigated in The Odyssey. Even though it is a personal journey, the male lover enables the female to negotiate distance and recognise herself through the catastrophic turmoil and possible disaster of the relationship. For this a personal journey of a woman through space and with her past, present, and potential personas, it would also be fruitful to analyse the possibility of individuation without relying on the sexual difference represented by the allegory of male-female relationships. Why the contrast between male and female bodies in the film provides a powerful means for delineating where one’s body begins and ends could be explored more by analysing the rise and fall of desire presented in The Odyssey.

Works Cited

Brown, Paula. “Stardust as Allegorical Bildungsroman: An Apology for Platonic Idealism.” Extrapolation, vol. 51, no. 2, 2010, pp. 216–

234., doi:10.3828/extr.2010.51.2.3.

Browne, David. “Florence Welch.” Rolling Stones, no. 1261, 19 May 2016, p. 66.

Bonaud, Clement and William Buzy, directors. Of Relations and Rights - Interview with Luce Irigaray. Performance by Luce

Irigaray, GBTIMES, 12 Mar. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODD8-wayDhM.

Elkin, Lauren. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Chatto and Windus, 2016.

Grant, Sarah. “Watch Florence and the Machine's Dazzling Short Film.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 Apr. 2016,

www.rollingstone.com/music/news/watch-florence-and-the-machines-dazzling-short-film-the-odyssey-20160425.

Haycock, Vincent, director. The Odyssey. Performance by Florence Welch, Florence + The Machine - The Odyssey, VEVO, 13 May

2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HajiEqEtIRY&t=1915s.

Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch For a Felicity Within History. Translated by Alison Martin, Routledge, 1996.

---. “Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 126, ser. 3, 2011, pp. 130–140. 3, doi:10.1353/sub.2011.0035.

Klinger, Doug. “Behind the Video: 'The Odyssey' by Florence + the Machine.” The Vimeo Blog, Vimeo, 7 June 2016,

diffuser.fm/florence-welch-the-odyssey/++https://vimeo.com/blog/post/behind-the-video-the-odyssey-florence-the-machine+.Servos, Norbert. “Pina Bausch: Biography.” Translated by Steph Morris, Pina Bausch, Pina Bausch Foundation, www.pinabausch.org/en/pina/biography.

Suzuki, Mihoko. “Rewriting the Odyssey in the Twenty-First Century: Mary Zimmerman's Odyssey and Margaret Atwood's

Penelopiad.” College Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, 2007, pp. 263–278., doi:10.1353/lit.2007.0023.

Appendix A: The Storms

“Delilah”: This is the most aggressive sequence of confronting herself, having a moment where the doppelganger is unmasked. It is prefaced by this monologue by the man seated in the reception lobby of the motel where Florence and a lover she is thinking of leaving are staying. 34:20 – “Love yourself, forgive yourself, you can’t love and forgive other people if you can’t first love and forgive yourself. You have to realise that people are fallible beings. They make mistakes, they have to be excused from these mistakes and allowed to continue to go on in their quest for a better life and for goodness. So love yourself and then love other people, please forgive yourself, go on a journey of finding love and forgiveness, love people even though you…””
00:25 - Beginning the film is a panoramic zoom in on the city that zooms in on a neon cross.
01:43
01:59 – This meeting at the balcony features a lightning storm in the background. This man is the same person in the car with whom Florence discusses how relationships are changed by surviving something horrendous together.
04:24 -
06:31 – The television screen and the natural disasters are juxtaposed against the turmoil experienced alone and with a lover.
13:20 – The start of “St Jude” has the couple soaked in a rainstorm

Appendix B: Touching and Dependency on Touch

03:22
03:25 – This gesture is repeated throughout the film, and is associated with a kind of ecstatic or pleasurable consumption.
04:33
04:34
05:05 – In “What Kind of Man”, the potential for violation and exploitation is the most, with the male bodies posing a kind of threat to the sole female body.
05:15
05:17 - Quick cuts are made between the home and the subterranean space.
05:29
05:32 – Repeatedly, this power of the female to transfer touch to herself
05:48 – The imploring upwards look is repeated in several other scenes.
05:50 This gesture again.
06:46 – Feverish self-feeding
10:12 – This pagan ritual of bathing in the sea could symbolise maternal care and submission to mother nature, but it could also be a form of matriarchal baptism by immersion given the number of allusions to Christ in this film.
10:21 – As a parallel to the doppelganger scene in “Delilah”, this moment in “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” shows someone else touching Florence’s lips for her. Taking the agency and letting her experience the touch instead of making it happen and overcoming the distance for herself.
13:28
13:32 – Repeat of the wall movements in “What Kind of Man”, and again in “Ship to Wreck” at the entrance to Florence’s home from the back garden.
13:39
15:28
15:34 – Despite being tender, the repetition motion of using the touch of fingertips as a substitute for kissing could be potentially read as exploitative. She has agency and she can taste the other person, but a reciprocal option for the male lover is never made.
26:52 – Faced with a family member blocked off by the glass, Florence seems to be attempting communication but to no avail. “Queen of Peace” is ironically the most disempowering for female touch. As a grown woman, she is a kind of spiritual force that tries to protect and limit violence, but it occurs despite her pleading gestures. When embracing members of a violent gathering observing a fistfight, they continue without noticing her movements.

Appendix C: The Wild Woman

05:33 – Florence is the most violent in the movements of this sequence, the men take on the role of restraining her while also trying to become physically intimate by touching and proximity.
05:37 – Violent, aggressive, but is it the men or the woman?
06:32 – What kind of man but also what kind of woman
06:34
06:41
06:54 – She is made strangely limp and inert when a man carries her in his arms. Is this a metaphor for the passiveness when held or surrounded by a relationship?
06:59
07:10
07:19 – Complicated dynamic of oppression/submission/violence/attraction/repulsion.
07:22
07:36 – End frame for “What Kind of Man”
25:57 – The family tableaux for “Queen of Peace”
26:12 – She breaks the pose maintained by the family tribe by looking down, possibly in exhaustion.
37:30
39:02 – Parallels made between this “tamed” body of the wild woman.
39:05 – This is the only image of death in the film, with the earlier frame suggesting that it was murder or negligence on the part of the male rather than an active suicide.
39:12 – Whose hands are these?

Appendix D: The City and Natural Landscape

07:38 – Crawling out from the car wreckage, a metaphor for a “car crash of a relationship” (qtd. Florence Welch)
09:27 – “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” as a song about the skyline
09:39 – A city asking for contact
10:00 – Again this gesture
10:07 – Touching the environs after touching her lips, or stretching the hand out as a form of benediction or supplication.
14:05 – Filmed in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, the streets here look are foreign.
15:56 – She is a foreigner and female, ironically being asked a question that could be applied to the questioner as well.
17:30 – The storm on the streets of California, foreshadowing the final song, “Third Eye”
21:45 – Filmed at Easdale, Seil, Argyll and Bute, Scotland, UK, this features the most of the waves and ocean imagery suggested by “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful”
21:54
22:00 – Collapsing to the ground, prostrate, but is this out of tiredness or grief or giving up?
27:44
31:45 – The city’s rusting and broken fences are also a source of wonder.
31:47 – Explicitly, trying to taste the city.
31:51 – Lifts fingers away and starts singing.
39:29 – This is one of the last moments in the motel, ending the song “Delilah”
39:30 – It immediately cuts to Florence riding on top of a car through the streets of California.
39:52 – The same act of strength: supplication or benediction.
39:58 – Each time, however, she collapses into this positon, suggesting that the tension or effort is too much for a single body to contain? It is in negotiation with the environs.

Appendix E: The Power of Spiritual Belief Systems and Mythology

12:32 – City escapes into nature. This is in Mexico, where migratory birds in a swarm form this magical symbol and pattern making in the sky.
12:46 – A possible allusion to the crucifix Christ, she falls to her knees after momentarily holding this posture.
13:00 Another pagan ritual trope; the ring of stones comes again in “Third Eye” where they are set ablaze in the middle of the road, producing smoke.
40:06 – The ring of fire blazing in the city.
14:43 –Spirituality with a difference in this video: the penance of carrying rocks and burdens.
38:07 – An image which hearkens back to that chapel in Mexico and the penitent carrying of rocks.
35:01 – Delilah cutting the hair of Samson.
35:08
35:10 – Insinuating voice of the double, who represents Delilah?
35:13 – The cutting of the hair is mostly permitted by the male lover, but also has an aggressive, shearing quality.
35:16 – There is a kind of mythological gravitas ascribed to these two still tableaux.
35:44 – Here, the doppelganger is observing Florence lying on the bed.
36:18 – Revealing stigmata or the blood on her hands?
36:23 – This is a possible allusion to The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli,
36:27 – A gesture repeated from earlier touching of faces.

Appendix F: The Doppelganger Self

14:37 – Doing penance? – the double appears.
16:14 – The double again, being observed, and carried with a fireman lift rather than the cradle that she is usually carried in.
17:40 – The upturned glance to the heavens.
17:43 – This continuous shot moves from a top-down view of Florence in the street in the rain into the domestic but chaotically messy space of her bedroom.
17:49 – Broken fragments and scattered items across the room.
18:26 – The rigorous shaking of the head as a motif. Staring herself at the mirror brings a moment of distraught recognition.
18:34 – As if to reassure after seeing herself in the mirror, back to this repeated gesture.
19:30 – Here is a violent red-room scene featuring a love triangle between the male lover and the two Florences.
19:37
19:40 – Thrusting the double aside to claim the lover.
19:51 – An act of prayer caused by the fear of what yourself has become.
20:21 – The pleasant family dinner.
20:18 – Host and wild woman in the same place and moment, when unconfronted by the wild Florence, the other guests act as though nothing is amiss.
20:33 – The dishevelled hair as an indicator of a loss of control.
20:37 – Outside getting a moment of peace and solitude from the company of people.
20:52 – The gesture of going past each other.
20:57 – The man gets thrust away and runs back into the home/family
21:05 – Fighting with the doppelganger.
22:33 – a Shamanistic gesture of transference?
22:38 – The younger self providing an option and agency for the older within the memory of a past.
34:51 – The doppelganger in “Delilah”.
34:55
35:26 – The embrace of the doppelganger.
38:33 – The moment before confronting the doppelganger who is dancing with the same man that Florence did earlier in “Delilah”.
38:37
38:40
38:44
38:45
38:50
38:52
38:52 – It is a form of support and distress simultaneously enacted by facing and confronting this other self.

Appendix G: Touching to Heal Violence and Allow for Reconciliation

23:17 – Incomprehension of the violence is responded with touch.
23:25
23:34
23:44
24:05 – As though giving up, she stretches out her hands, anticipating the same gesture of wanting to become a bird of prey in “Mother”.
24:41
25:22 – A truce?
25:26 – Beautiful movement sequence of touching, slowed down and sped up as the two of them try to understand what each other needs, and what can bring them closer.
25:48 – The innocence of a young girl trying to help and heal. It is a form of game that causes a smile on her face, of becoming closer to this boy.

Appendix H: Maintaining Distance

27:57 – Male monologue: To give yourself over to another body, that's all you want really. To be out of your own and consumed by another. To swim inside the skin of your lover. Not to have to breathe, not to have to think. But you can't live on love; and salt water's no drink. (27:58-28:13)
31:02 – Distress upon being separated from her lover in “Long and Lost”
31:20
31:25
31:38 – Finishing the male monologue: “we break, and break, and break, and break ourselves upon the beach.”
32:03 – The male performer is similar to the one from “Lover to Lover. Man: What are you thinking of now? Florence: I don’t know, maybe I’ll stay. Man: Is this just a place you visit, pass through. Florence: No – I thought – I guess I thought this was all I wanted and erm sometimes I still think that I should stay. Man: Nobody stays here, if you can leave, you will leave here.
33:57
34:07
36:46
36:53 – He makes her rise to the dance?
36:57
37:05 – Being thrust forward and propelled to move by the male dancer.
37:12
40:58 – A kind of trust fall motif.
41:00 – Which regenerates and gives her momentum to propel forward again.
41:02 – “I know my touch, it magnifies”
41:28
41:55 – Going underground
42:17 – This is a parallel to “What Kind of Man”, only now all the men are in movement alongside with her instead of still in opposition or dancing to constrain her.
42:39 – Repeat motif of violently praying.
43:04 – The supplicant’s raised arms are better sustained in this song.
43:16 – Confronting her double in the mirror, while doing an action to prepare for the performance.
43:20 – Out of the magical realism, it is the guitar strumming that brings her back.
44:44 – Embodying her role on stage, distant from the audience that is calling out for her.

Our Own Touch Could Save Us: Florence + The Machine’s The Odyssey

Appendix A: The Storms

Appendix B: Touching and Dependency on Touch

Appendix F: The Doppelganger Self

​

Appendix H: Maintaining Distance

​

Our Own Touch Could Save Us:
Florence + The Machine’s The Odyssey