How Florence + the Machine’s Shake It Out music video could portray a psychologic process regarding past traumas / treatment / recovery:
Shake It Out is divided into 4 irregular scenarios but as they join it all together, it figures internal processes that are needed when one is dealing with a psychological disorder related to a traumatic past:
- 1) getaways / instabilities
- 2) acceptance / knowledge
- 3) extravasation / catharsis
- 4) awareness / consciousness
- 1) A Florence’s version dressed in red initially dances unsteady and sings about being “fool and blind” when it comes to the consciousness of her past, and she’s visibly drunk on unstable and unsteady getaways with a depressive state of mind as a hangover – it could represent the initial process of dealing with a trauma in general.
- 1.2) At some limitary point, when she’s worn-out, Florence overflow herself singing and dancing about shaking off her personal demons; in a treatment for such subjects, it is necessary that one occur at the beginning, and during it, emotional overflows are needed so the person’s psychologic can untie nodes to a catharsis.
- 2) When she goes downstairs timidly to an other masked ball, there is a connotation of fearful explorations and knowledge about something; in this scenario, Florence sings, “looking for heaven, found the devil in me”, as well as she sings about hope and being ready for it all – the most important step on a psychologic recovery.
- 3) x 1.3) After she overflow it all off, Florence runs out of the mansion where the ball takes place dressed in white and climbs on a tree, connoting freedom, purification, lightness, ascension, and she smiles stunningly – finally a psychologic catharsis occurred, one of the most important steps.
- 4) When Florence is formally dressed in black, she is accompanied by a couple of men in a room while she wanders her fingers along the bed next to one of them and sings about the past being present while one of the men is shown being known by her; however, in this scenario, Florence figures some strong consciousness about it all and sings about preferring to keep her issues drawn / clear.
- 4.1) Both masked men are accompanying Florence in this scene as well on the masked ball in which she dresses a red dress symbolizing that they’re both specific parts / occurrences of her traumatic past; both men dance with her, trying to dominate her, and this is what the song’s refrain is all about.
- 1) x 2) Both the festive scenarios are into a similar room, but with different situations, which it connotes being the disturbed psyche of Florence and in which she needs to work it all out; now, the scene in which she dresses black, it connotes the core of her subconscious, now conscious, and it is where everything concludes.
Shake It Out, personally for me, it symbolizes the steps involved in dealing with past traumas, each step being necessary, and yet, despite the past continuing to exist even afterwards, specifically the awareness about it all and the consciousness on how to deal with it, which are specifically the points on a psychologic treatment.
