Gym Class Heroes - Cookie Jar

The music video for Gym Class Heroes 2008 single Cookie Jar opens with a shot of bottles of spirits shadowed by objectified women, this immediately opens the audience to interpretations that the video will be illustrating the lyrics of the song, which presents front-man ‘Travis McCoy’ love for women and his lack of self-control he has during a relationship. The opening scene shows blurred women, which connote how they are there but are un-available to him, the seductive woman using the 'feminine touch' in a seductive manner shows us as an audience why the men find it hard to resist. The close ups and lighting on the frontman 'Travis McCoy' makes the audience aware of who the narratives protagonist is. This particular band mixes both mainstream music with the rock genre and so the video also incorporates what ‘Andrew Goodwin’ calls performance-based shots as well as the narrative aspects which include the club scenes, counselling scenes and the relationship scenes. The audience is aware of the relationship narrative through scenes including where the partner of Travis is shown throwing multiple pairs of womens underwear out of the bed.

Using ‘Laura Mulveys’ theory of mysoginism and the male-gaze we can recognise that in this video the females are positioned in very misogynistic shots so that the audience can recognise why Travis finds himself lacking in self control when he is surrounded by such beautiful women, and therefore the audience is positioned as the male-gazer and thus objectifying the women’s bodies. A perfect example of this is when 'Travis' goes from one undressed woman to the next, likening them to different sorts of cookie's. The band shots also create a meta-narrative for the band and makes us believe that music brings them all together with all sorts of people, as we see conventional gangsters (characters shown with baseball caps and gold chains) and rockers (white males with tattoos from neck to fingers) within the crowd of friends. The shots of Travis in a straight jacket connote and represent how he feels restrained when he cannot be with multiple women.

The lyrics of the song explain how the narrator cannot keep away from more than one woman at a time and that he cannot do anything about it and the quote 'can't keep my hands out the cookie jar' quite literally means Travis cannot keep his hands off women. A metaphor runs throughout the song where the narrator likens women to cookies, confessing that he cant get enough of them, the scene where he has labelled several different girls with different cookie names makes this visually evident to the audience. The final verse of the song denotes the fact that the narrator has been beaten with the quote ‘it is what it is’ finalising his battle. The word ‘freak’ is also echoed at the end of the song which connotes a detatchment to the majority of males.