Queen of Peace / Long & Lost - Music Video Analysis (The Odyssey Chapters 5 & 6

Queen of Peace

The Odyssey, Chapters 5 & 6 Analysis

And so continues the odyssey of “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful”. “Queen of Peace” dropped today at 3pm BST, along with “Long and Lost” which features in the same video.

There are two families in this video – Florence’s, and the man’s that she falls in love with. These families dislike each other, and often fights occur.
The start of the video sees crashing waves against the coastline. It gives the impression of entrapment on this island. The waves are violent, just like the war between these two families that feature in it. If you try and escape from the violence, it only pushes you back in to the rocky shore. This theme runs throughout the video.
Young Florence is then seen walking to the edge of a cliff, stretching out her arm to symbolise the freedom from it all that she longs for. The scene then cuts to present Florence using the same gesture but towards her love, showing how her idea of freedom is being with her man, since her family forbids it. Her love sits with her in a field, and Florence steps over to her younger self, as if forcing herself to remember how this all started.

We then see that Florence first meets her love when the boy was fighting with a member of Florence’s family. Young Flo pulls the boy away from the fight, acting as the peace-maker. The scene jumps to older Florence, still trying to mediate the fight between the two families, but this time she’s on the outside of it all, unable to get it. All she can do is try and show affection to each member; she tries to remind them that they don’t need to fight if they show a little love.
Florence is then seen with her older man, except even though her love was the one fighting, it’s Florence that appears weak, as if the fighting is making her tired, and mentally hurting her more than the physical hurt being inflicted on her lover.

Throughout the video, Florence’s family keeps pulling her away from her love, leading her back home and keeping her there, away from him. Florence runs her hand over the walls of the house, once again highlighting her sense of no escape. Florence appears to be pleading with her family for escape through her movements, showing them affection throughout (although pushing her brother’s face, probably to show the stereotypical sibling feuds in a normal family).
Florence then appears on the cliff edge with her father (the symbol of freedom), again pleading with him. They both look tearful, and we’re not sure why, until the camera pans out and we then see that Florence has asked her father about being with the man from the other family, and he agrees to allow it. The father holds the man’s hand in acceptance, although the man is on his knees, showing how there is still a level of dominance between the families.

Now that Florence and her man are together, we see that their relationship is still strained because of the background dislike between the two families. A family photo is then set up during the (insinuated) marriage of the couple. None of the family members are smiling – the family has been forced together by the love of their children, but they are clearly still bitter about the situation.
Florence can’t keep up the façade of appearing normal for a photograph, just as she can’t keep up the lie that she feels comfortable in a relationship strained by feud. She bows her head to show this. Florence, and young Florence hiding in the background in the photo, are both holding daffodils, which are commonly used to symbolise new beginnings but also unrequited love – it’s as if young Florence knew the relationship wouldn’t hold, but went along with it in the hope that it would.

The scene cuts to young Florence and her love running away. Their families chase them, hunting them down to tear them apart. Notice how they are running away towards the cliff edge, once again alluding to the idea of the cliff edge meaning escape and freedom. Meanwhile, present day Florence is trying to stop another night-time fight from happening between her brother than her love.

The next scenes get even sadder. Florence is being locked out of her home, allowing her and her love to be swarmed by the mob and attack them. The scene where Florence’s dad accepts her lover on the cliff edge turns into her dad attacking him, in a scene that should symbolise freedom.

The narrator (presumably Florence’s love) says how the only thing they wanted from the love was to be accepted by each other, but not owned, since ownership means love so intense, that you can’t live. “Salt water’s no drink” explains this further – all water, just like love, looks safe to drink. Drink the wrong type, and instead of being given hydrated (living), the opposite can happen and you can dehydrate (not live), just as the wrong type of love can trap you from living your life.

Long and Lost begins. Florence’s family have decided to take her away from the island. Florence wanted freedom from the fighting, but now she has it, she wants to return. “Is it too late to come on home” back to the island. Unlike when she was trying to fix her family’s relationship with love, now that there’s nothing more to fix, she shows anger at them for taking her away. Once again, she touches the barriers, just like she touched the walls of her house, to highlight the constraint that still exists, even away from the island that was her prison. She feels as though her cause is lost. Her family try to hold her on their side, but she breaks free and moves to the complete opposite side of the boat’s deck. Two families with a divide have now become one family, still with a divide. One island that was once her prison has now become the boat to freedom, which is still her prison. That same “freedom” hand gesture at the beginning of the video appears again to emphasise this. No matter where she goes, whether she’s with or away from her love, she will be trapped. Nothing can make her truly free, since being in love is just as trapping as being out of it.

This fact really gives us an insight into how Florence felt in her 2013 relationship, and we can now begin to empathise with her during her year off, where she was constantly being reunited and then withdrawn from her man. The narration again at the end talks of waves crashing on shore; water and love are drawn together again, and both are used to explain how Florence felt that her love was just crashing her back into the coast that was her prison. When she tried to swim away, she’d get even more hurt when the waves pushed her back.