The Violent Femmes didn’t make many videos. They had little 1980s MTV presence. I saw the video for Gone Daddy Gone just a few times, and it haunted my memory for decades. I mostly remembered an awful, depressing family dinner scene filmed in black and white, and that the song had a marimba, but I couldn’t remember anything else about it or even whom the band was. Whenever a video came on MTV with a marimba (such as Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way), I would think “maybe this is that depressing dinner-scene video” but it never was. Then finally I saw it on VH1 Classic 20 years later and was astounded at how funny it was. It is dark, bleak, and depressing, but also completely hysterical. I couldn’t stop laughing for days.
It has no overt queer elements (aside from the band name “Violent Femmes” and their “alternative” categorization) but it subverts 1980s “family values” political discourse in a way that would instantly appeal to many gay people. Gone Daddy Gone is brilliant, biting satire of the idealization of the American middle class family that was at the heart of 1980s culture. Instead of the perfect families on television like the Huxtables and Keatons (channeling 1950s family sitcoms), in this video we see Daddy getting drunk at a bar and flirting (unsuccessfully) with a trashy dancer while back home, his depressed wife and two kids eat a horrible looking dinner in morose silence. Amazingly, the video squeezes humor out of this scenario.
The video opens with a dinner plate, shot from above in black and white, establishing the video’s dreary tone. The film texture is grainy and scratchy, like it’s been deliberately damaged. Amidst flickering light we see a heaping plate of beans and gravy, slices of white bread, and a cheap plastic drinking glass with flowers on it. The glaring light washes the food of any visual appeal. The tablecloth is messy with crumbs and other debris. It’s Lynchian in its overstated despair, like something out of Eraserhead or the Elephant Man. No doubt those films (released just a few years before this video) served as a visual reference point for this video’s depiction of the middle class American family dinner as a surreal nightmare.
Once the song kicks in, the video focuses on the band for the first two verses and first chorus. The band scenes’ black and white photography (not damaged and grainy like the dinner shots) evoke Every Breath You Take in its careful portraiture and framing. Shots of the marimba intercut with facial close-ups of the lead singer staring intensely into the camera as he lip synchs the song. The editing is slow and leisurely compared to most videos, but will accelerate in later verses. The band’s clothing and hair styles are understated; they look more like “regular people” than rock stars. They play with energy, bounce, and a hint of menace. The Violent Femmes were unique in the way they combined punk energy with acoustic spareness.
During the second chorus, the video returns to the dinner scene. An adolescent girl squishes her fork into the gross-looking food on her plate that is undoubtedly getting colder by the minute. The video intercuts between the singer and dinner scene: he is filmed in pristine black and white, which draws attention to the damaged film stock of the dinner scene. The idea of the filmmakers deliberately damaging the film to create this neglected, abused quality only makes the whole concept more funny. As the singer cries out “gone daddy gone, the love is gone” over and over, the camera zooms slowly towards the mother sitting at the head of the table, the world’s weight crushing her spirit as she glumly sips coffee and smokes a cigarette, not eating. Her mouth is forlorn and crooked. The male child looks at her blankly, then we see the girl picking at her food again. No one talks, no one eats, they just pick at their food silently and miserably.
The camera crawls spiderlike across the table, highlighting the messy crumbs, mismatched silverware, and cheap plastic glasses. The camera lingers on a Wonder Bread package just before showing an empty chair with the full plate of food in front of it. It’s Daddy’s chair, but like the song says, Daddy’s gone, gone away. As we stare at his empty chair, we are immersed into the scene’s claustrophobic despair.
Where’s Daddy? He’s at a sleazy bar a few blocks away called “Sammy’s Fireside, Lunch Dinner and Cocktails.” It’s not a place where respectable people spend time, certainly not family men with responsibilities. Daddy sits by himself at a small round table, playing with the ring on his finger. The table is littered with empty beer bottles and other glasses. Clearly he’s been there awhile, getting drunk in the daytime, neglecting his family and job. He looks like a decent, respectable white-collar man worker (I think it’s the band’s drummer). Nearby him sit a table of “sophisticated” people consisting of a handsome young man (the singer) wearing a ridiculous Hefneresque smoking jacket with two bunny-like women at each side. They watch a performance of some kind, smiling in amusement.
Then we see what they are watching: a young, thin woman in aggressively striped clothing performing a flailing, ridiculous burlesque tease, madly shaking her shoulders and hips while pursing and cooing her lips like a complete tramp. A strobe light effect makes her dance seem overstated and ritualistic, perfectly complementing the scene’s tacky sleaziness. Daddy stares intently at her, sweating and fidgeting. The video intercuts between Daddy and the dancer, zooming slowly towards their faces as they each stare directly at the camera (us, each other). Daddy wets his lips excitedly—finally, some real excitement in his life, some real action, he seems to think. He grins eagerly, but also sheepishly. Her stare is blank and robotic.
The editing accelerates. Things get wilder. The bass player, dressed like a sailor on shore leave, dances provocatively with the woman, almost like he’s dry humping her. Daddy looks like he’s about to pass out as he grimaces with lust and creeping nausea. She stares back at him with the same dead stare. These recurring slow zooms, each lasting about four beats, add to the comical absurdity by bringing us further and further into this pathetic scene. The two women kiss their sugar daddy on the cheek while the sailor sharply turns his neck revealing lip stick. Daddy slowly lowers his head onto the table.
The song’s conclusion brings us back to the sad dinner at home. We see a tight close up of the haggard mother biting her thumb, cigarette in hand, staring off into space, her eyes dark and barely open. More shots of uneaten food. The final shots show the mother aggressively scraping the food off the plate into a garbage can, scowling miserably, while daddy lies passed out surrounded by empty bottles. The video ends with a shot of the band.
It’s a short, tight video that highlights the band’s performance style while offering one possible visual interpretation of the lyrics. It’s less a story than a moment in time. There are characters and a bare plot, but it’s more like a snapshot of a family falling apart than a narrative. The video’s humor is hard to explain given the dreary visuals and subject material. Part of it’s the editing and sense of exaggeration, but the historical context is the key element. The video’s humor derives from how drastically this depiction of family life contrasted with the standard Reagan era pop culture depictions of family life circulating when this video was made, whether it be the Cosby Show or Family Ties or the Morning in America commercial. On those shows, families are affluent, mutually supportive; nothing bad happened that couldn’t be solved in 30 minutes. Reagan’s political rhetoric upheld the era’s conservative vision of families as the fundamental bedrock of society, emboldening anti-gay and anti-feminist rhetoric. The 1970s had been all about divorce and single mothers, and now it was time to return to “normal” (and embrace the very idea of “normality”). Gone Daddy Gone is a middle finger to the era’s emphasis on “family values”. The idealized 50s/80s vision of family is replaced by a grim vision of family life as broken, corrupt, and failed. It’s so overstated—and so true—that it’s funny. Families are fucked up, the video says. Here’s what a real family look like, Mr. Reagan. Drunk, passed out Daddy and depressing dinners with Wonder Bread and empty chairs. Here are your 1980s family values. Go fuck yourself.
The video’s black and white photography only heightens the connections between the 1980s vision of family values and all those old black and white shows from the 1950s. The video is not meant to look specifically like the 1950s, though it could be, just as easily as it could be the 1980s. The Wonder Bread, the bar’s neon sign all point to the 1950s, though the video avoids any obvious, clichéd 1950s references (like leather jackets or ducktail haircuts). The dinner scene’s scratchiness almost makes it look like 1950s home movie footage. The song’s use of the word “Daddy” also echoes stereotyped 1950s beatnik slang. Here’s the genius of the video, showing the seedy underbelly of family life in the 1950s and 1980s simultaneously. In both eras, the family values rhetoric is bullshit.
This video was about as authentically punk as MTV was capable of being in the 1980s. The video masterfully blends a sneering defiant punk attitude with a slick and sophisticated visual references. It’s either the funniest or most depressing video ever, depending on your mood and perspective. From: https://videoclosetblog.wordpress.com/violent-femmes-gone-daddy-gone/
