to let me dangle at a cruel angle: bad love in florence and the machine’s “what kind of man”

(content warning for sexuality and strong depictions of physical and emotional violence)

I think of cathedrals a lot when I think of Florence Welch. Like, aesthetically speaking. Cathedrals and vanitases and deep red velvet and paper ladies glittering in art deco gowns. She’s porcelain and statuesque and impeccably lit, invoking Fabergé egg nostalgia for the 19th century heiress-at-a-masque I’ll never quite be.

Here is where the image falters. Here, her hair is unkempt under a dingy light and she can ugly-cry with the best of us. In an older mythos, she left the world in the guise of Millais’ Ophelia, took what the water gave her, and returned fauve in this, the lead single from “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.”

What if they are creating the disaster within themselves?

This is a toast to, a lament for, a war cry against the harrowing violence of loving a man, of being pushed into the role of tortured and torturer, when you yourself are ready to love and be loved, eyes open, eyes bright. It’s about who you become when you are told who you are — a perfect torture, a salvation in sin — but are not given access to what you’re not. And it goes and it goes until you’re asking What is it about me that you don’t want? And you find yourself promising I will throw it away. This is a documentation, a dramatization of how you begin to drown in somebody who will only say yes to you when what they really mean is “I could suffer over you for a time.”

It’s about becoming an unreliable narrator because of the way your good and bad, no, your best and worst, no, your awfullest and most transcendent moments are all intercut at light speed. You think, maybe I would have seen you for what you did if you hadn’t loved me so well just this morning. It comes in the wake of “Kiss with a Fist,” when still, somehow, it’s better than none, but you know that’s wrong but you don’t know why because you’re in the middle of a circle of addicts, just a girl on a mattress, and they’re all talking about you, “Hi, my name is [redacted] and I’m addicted to [your name here]” the way you poison them, these Lovers Anonymous, but you are not a poison, you are a creature of skin and want and you tried for something good but ended up on your knees, screaming in the face/s of your love/r/s. There is something here you used to call passion, but has grown over you and sharpened your nails to claws and curled your hands to fists and maybe he kneels before you when you make love but you only make love in windowless rooms or cheap hotels and it feels good but it doesn’t feel right.

But I can’t beat ya, cause I’m still with ya/Oh mercy, I implore

What recurs is all these men in this room, and it’s both What kind of man loves like this? — one man multiplied into many bodies through his sheer inescapability — and What kind of man loves like these? — the answer a whisper: many men, maybe all the men you’ve known. It’s your love is ugly but also so why do I still want you? There is no quiet kiss unless it’s a disinterested kiss. Already out of breath, already gasping, it’s you reaching until you’re held down, holding until you have to push away — you get your punches in, ones you never wanted to throw, but there are so many of him, and he has so many hands and they were grasping for you and dragging you away all at once and when you thrash alone in the bathtub you aren’t sure if you’re waking from a good dream or a bad one, if he’s here or gone, if you’re better or worse now than before. You taste your fingers where his last brushed them and for now that’s all you can remember about yourself.

Why didn’t you wake me?

Florence asks gently, smilingly ”So you think people who suffered together would be more connected than people who were content?” Asks with a sunshine sorta laugh “If you’d been through, like, like a storm, or an earthquake together, or something horrendous, you… it would bring you closer together?” and the man in the driver’s seat begins to say “Yes,” to explain himself, but is faded out. This is all aftermath. It’s ultimately empty arms, closing over a new-baptized self. When the crash comes she crawls out and he does not, but she still has to crawl (out the window, through the glass, away from the wreckage and out of the frame, or almost).