I am so utterly excited about today’s post! Last year, I did a run-through of the music video series that one of my favourite bands had put out. This year, along with a brand new album, the same band have done yet another series of interrelated stories in their music videos! The Lumineers third studio album III was released at the beginning of September, and with it, a ten-part music video series. I will go through all three parts and divide them into three separate blog posts as I could not do them justice if I had to condense them into one.
If you are not aware, in 2016, for their second album Cleopatra, the band put out a four part music video they entitled ‘The Ballad of Cleopatra’, for which I put up a blog post last year (also one of our most popular posts). So of course, when I found out about the latest short film project the band was developing, I knew I had to write about it.
The short film was teased at the end of August with a trailer put out by the band, hinting at the storyline and focus. The film was described as a ‘visual exploration’ of the album, following three generations of a working-class family, as they battle through addiction, familial, and financial difficulties and the inter-generational trauma that comes from addiction. The short film was debuted in its entirety for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8th, 2019.
Divided into three parts of three songs each, with a final tenth song rounding up the story written by the band’s frontman Wesley Schultz. The story focus on three members of the family and mimics the way the album itself is organised in which the album name itself is not only a reference to it being the third studio album but also of the three acts and the three characters: Gloria Sparks, Junior Sparks and Jimmy Sparks. In a tweet, the band confirmed the relationship between the main characters, where Gloria is Jimmy’s mother and Junior’s grandmother.
Trigger warning: The post and the videos included show depictions of addiction, drug use and alcoholism.
Donna
Part I opens with the song ‘Donna’. The opening frame shows a baby in the arm of his father, before being handed over to his mother for a family photo. The song is often unclear about who it is referring to, but it seems to be oscillating between the mother of the baby, Gloria, and her own mother, Donna whose gravestone is shown in the video. The story shows Gloria to be deeply unhappy, an alcoholic, drinking and stumbling in her house while her child plays on the floor who we come to realise is Jimmy. The lyrics on the other hand provide an insight to the reasons for alcoholism, indicating a lack of love from her own mother (‘You told your daughter she was ordinary’ and ‘Your mother never was one’) as reasons for the strained relationship.
True to form, the Lumineers include a possible reason for this relationship. With small glimpses into the past showing Gloria’s parents, building a house that is possibly the very house Gloria lives in now, they seem to be deeply in love. However, the snippets of the gravestones also indicate that Donna was most likely a single mother, as her father Frank dies at the age of 43, while her mother only dies 25 years later. The pain of losing her husband are possibly a reason for the lack of affection she was able to show to Gloria.
The inclusion of the line ‘You hate the name Junior’ similarly links Gloria to her (as of yet unborn) grandson, who is the focus of Part II. Indeed, because of the mirroring of the line ‘You hate the name Donna’, it suggests an equally unhappy and possibly abusive relationship between Gloria and Jimmy, where she criticises his choices going so far as to criticise her grandson’s name.
The most poignant part of the song comes at the end when Gloria runs out of her house having a mental breakdown, while the line ‘You’re praying for a funeral’ plays in the background, an unquestionable indication of pain. In this first introduction to Gloria, we see her pain and the suffering she has gone through without the love of a mother, seeing how it has driven her to drinking. She is found by her husband, clearly concerned and caring, though possibly absent (‘Your husband loved his computers’) while baby Jimmy sits all alone in the house, no one watching him, a reoccurring theme in the following songs.
Life in the City
‘Life in the City’ shows the demons and the hopefulness of big city living. We meet a younger Gloria in the bathroom of a bar taking cocaine. Aside from being a visually stunning moment, with slow motion shots of the compact Gloria is taking the hit of cocaine from and the dollar bill she uses, it is incredibly poignant that you see nothing of her face until she takes the hit and the lyrics start. The video then pans into a bar on New Year’s Eve, welcoming in 1979, where Gloria sits alone drinking a beer. We know from the previous music video that this is the same year Gloria’s mother Donna dies, meaning that she is still alive supporting the notion that as Gloria is clearly not spending New Year’s Eve with her mother, the relationship between them is strained in some manner.
After rejecting the advances of a clearly drunk, but passive, man in the bar, Gloria moves to another section of the bar. As she sits down, her hand moves to her chest, rubbing clearly in discomfort or pain. From what we know of Gloria so far as an addict, we can infer that she is in pain probably emotional. where another man approaches her. This man in comparison is very direct, taking a drag of her cigarette without asking right as the line ‘They won’t take it from me’ plays in the back. This entire scene plays in a single shot as the chorus plays, signalling a connection between life in the city and Gloria’s unhappiness. Where the lyrics cry out of a desire to take control of one’s own life, the visuals demonstrate a contrast, where someone taking charge is appreciated by Gloria, who seems to enjoy this man’s approach, giving him a smile. He follows this up with a very direct move, the man rubs away the evidence of cocaine from her nose with his thumb.
In an interview, Schultz admitted how he used to view addiction as a matter of willpower as opposed to the complex series of trauma, mental health issues and brain chemistry that it is. Referencing a family member’s journey with addiction that sparked the entire album theme, Schultz explains, ‘We tried to put her in rehab almost a half dozen times overall, and nothing worked. We tried all of these spots for her to succeed in and ‘beat this addiction,’ but it’s become a really humbling experience. That whole willpower thing was thrown out the window really quickly.’[1] ‘Life in the City’ explores exactly this issue, in which the hope and dream of taking control and dealing with the rough world of a big city are overshadowed not by willpower, but trauma, fear and mental health struggles.
The second verse plays as the video goes on, Gloria continues to talk to the man, culminating in having sex with him in a phone booth. The section voices a fear of being abandoned and alone. As the man makes a direct sexual advance on Gloria, the lyrics reference Cleopatra from the band’s second album with the same name (‘And I miss my dad and Cleopatra sitting on a plane’). From the Ballad of Cleopatra video series, we know that Cleopatra lost her chance of true love out of fear. While the videos seem only to be loosely based on the songs themselves, the parallel to Cleopatra is interesting, particularly in the following scenes.
In a cinematic rendition of the reproductive process, it is implied that Gloria is impregnated by this man. Clearly still drunk and high, Gloria returns home to lyrics directly pulled from ‘Sleep on the Floor’, the second reference to the band’s second album:
And if the sun don’t shine on me today
And if the subways flood and bridges break
Will you just lay down and dig your grave?
Or will you rail against your dying day?
The lines from the original song refer to taking chances to do the things that make you the happiest, taking the risk, letting the potential for joy overtake the fear of the unknown. However, in ‘Life in the City’ the meaning twists, where at her worst, Gloria cannot refuse the temptations that come her way, and makes decisions that risk her entire life. We see at this moment that Gloria has returned home to her husband, on a mattress asleep on the floor. The implication of her affair with the man at the bar lead the viewer to speculate that the baby seen in the previous video may not have been her husbands after all, further explaining Gloria’s personal struggle with motherhood and her addiction.
This is compounded by the note left by her husband, explaining that her mother is in the hospital. Knowing as we do that Donna dies in March 1979, we can assume that this is the cause. Gloria’s emotional pain and reckless decisions come under a more sympathetic light knowing this. As the music ends, Gloria sits on the mattress in silence, takes off her jacket and returns her wedding band to her finger. Where the first video had detailed the toll Gloria’s trauma and emotions had taken in her life, resulting in her addiction problems, ‘Life in the City’ begins to hint at the consequences it has on others, particularly those who love her, like her husband.
Gloria
The final song in the first chapter goes further into the theme of the effect of addiction on those around the addict. In an interview to The Times, Schutlz said, ‘Gloria is real, and she’s close to me. The reason I created characters around her was to give me a buffer to be explicit without exploiting her pain. But it has become my family’s pain, and it was a relief to play them the songs. They feel like I have given them a voice and that it is an honest depiction of an awful situation.’[2]
The narrative of the story is directed towards Gloria herself and is the voice of someone who loves her, but cannot get through to her to help her. Where the previous two songs were more abstract in nature, ‘Gloria’ is very direct. The song begins with the rapid switching of frames between a watch and a vodka bottle, before quickly moving in on a shot of Gloria back in the country house from the first video (which she most likely inherited after her mother’s passing) holding her baby and taking a swig from the vodka bottle simultaneously. Her stance is wide and almost comically determined, as she tips back her entire head to finish off the bottle. While she does this, the frames switch to close ups of Gloria and then her husband, clearly in love. Gloria finishes the bottle, putting a peppermint into her mouth to distract from the scent of alcohol (‘Gloria, I smell it on your breath/Gloria, booze and peppermint’) we begin to understand the narrative to be that of her child, Jimmy, speaking to her, who though a baby, remembers the scent.
At this point, her husband bursts through the door, and with a disappointed face, sees her collapse to the floor, with the baby still in her arm. The next scene shows a similar situation, but as the husband enters the room, Gloria is having a seizure induced by a possible overdose. As she is put in the ambulance by her husband, with the line ‘Gloria, did you finally see that enough is enough’ playing behind, we are left with the shot of the baby staring out the window as he is left alone in the house.
The following chorus takes place while Gloria is in hospital and explores the worry that comes from those who care about the addict and are forced to watch as it eats away at them, those who are left worrying into the night, hoping that the addict is not doing the same thing because they understand it will result in more drinking. When Gloria returns to the house, she holds her baby in happiness, but this happy moment is nevertheless marred by her temptations to drink, to which she returns to.
In a scene prefaced momentarily by the loving moment between husband and wife shown before, Gloria and her husband are shown to be screaming at each other. The following verse illustrates how those around her can see her inching towards her grave but will not speak about it:
Gloria, you crawled up on your cross
Gloria, you made us sit and watch
Gloria, no one said enough is enough
These lines suggest the danger of the taboo around the conversation of addiction, where not talking about it makes the problem bigger for everyone involved. Gloria’s husband is in the loop of fighting and dodging whatever she throws at him because he loves her and making up but nothing ever changes. Until Gloria throws a bottle at him and it does hit him. The moment signals that no matter how much you love someone everyone has a breaking point. More tragically, try as she might, Gloria cannot help him, because she cannot help herself. On her way to the hospital to help her husband, she tries to light a cigarette and drives through an intersection right as another car is coming the other way.
The car hits them and in a moment of panic, knowing she is intoxicated, and the accident was her fault, Gloria runs away, leaving her husband in the crash alone. The scene is interspersed with frames of baby Jimmy, left home alone once again, playing with an empty vodka bottle and police sirens. This foreshadows Jimmy’s own issues brought about by an alcoholic and potentially absentee mother. The final scenes play as the narrative lyrics as Gloria to finally decide if she wants to get better or not, and that enough is finally enough, and those around her will tell her so.
Schultz has previously said that ‘Gloria is an addict. No amount of love or resources could save her. She’s now been homeless for over a year. Loving an addict is like standing among the crashing waves, trying to bend the will of the sea.’[3] Gloria Sparks is the protagonist of the first part but it is clear that she is not the only one hurting, and the broader implications and complex relationships with others are explored in a new way. Indeed, as mentioned previously, the songs give voice to all parties, refusing to shy away from the pain and tragedy of her addiction. The next two chapters further delve into the inter-generational effects of her addiction and the trauma that is inherited by Gloria’s son and grandson.
Part II coming soon!
~S~
[1] https://variety.com/2019/music/news/lumineers-addiction-music-videos-gloria-1203219390/
[2]https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-lumineers-interview-the-band-on-their-new-album-iii-and-its-family-of-addicts-6zccz7225#
[3] https://variety.com/2019/music/news/lumineers-addiction-music-videos-gloria-1203219390/
