Videology is a bi-weekly column by Kyle Turner where we look at music videos, music in film, and the relationship between the two.
Like other smart pop stars before her, Lana Del Rey is obsessed with identity, particularly its paradoxical nature as something both incredibly malleable as well as the rigidity of the norms that society around us/her set. She’s interested in iconography: it’s not just a fancy word for fame, but iconography as a form of recognition that transcends genre, time, and space. Her latest video, “High on the Beach”, which was released two weeks ago, takes the same general subject as Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. And though she shoots this video, and in a broader sense her entire persona, through the lens of the disparate relationship between time and fame (1960s Americana juxtaposed 2010 realities), there’s always the nagging feeling that the artifice she’s constructed is just that. This is most evident in her short film Tropico, directed by Anthony Mandler, a hodgepodge of intoxicating visuals and scenes that skim the surface of greater, more interesting ideas.
As in most cases, the skeletal story to Lana Del Rey’s Tropico isn’t very interesting: the young vocalist plays Eve against albino African-American model Shaun Ross’s Adam (trust me, that part is important). The lush and exotic Garden of Eden is populated by John Wayne as God, Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. Ms. Del Rey also plays the Virgin Mary.
Piercing with light and bleeding neon colors, that the aforementioned celebrities should habitate in Ms. Del Rey’s version of the Garden of Eden makes sense: Lana Del Rey is, intentionally, a manufactured product that is, ostensibly, created to subvert and comment on the ideals of the era her vocals evoke: the 1950s pin-up era, where femininity and masculinity are basically bound to roles without much flexibility. And so you have John Wayne, the epitome of masculinity in Hollywood; Marilyn Monroe, equally epitomizing femininity in the same era; and Elvis, a sex symbol in his own right. This vision of the Garden Eden has a darkness that seeps through, even in the first song, “Body Electric”. Though an ethereal quality is to be expected, it’s haunting, sexy, and erotic. There’s an ironic aspect to it, where Lana Del Rey’s position is straddle the line between old fashioned eroticism and new school sexuality, blended here as she plays Eve and the Virgin Mary. It’s an intentional move, as we sit there, watching as Adam and Eve gyrate seductively.
Self-described as “gangsta Nancy Sinatra”, the deployment of those icons has kiddie pool depth. They’re beacons of American cultural identity, but there’s an inexplicable tenuousness to the way Del Rey wants to utilize them. They should fit cohesively within the world and ideas Del Rey would like to present and prod, but it’s at once too easy to make the connection and facile in terms of what that means in the context of the film.
Lana Del Rey has pulled from Terrence Malick before, but, as with other copycats, it’s usually in a tangential way. Her use of this Malickian voice over seems far more astute as one moves into the second chapter and song, “Gods and Monsters”, reading Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” (from which she pulled for her first song of the short). She runs through wheat fields, the sun blazing into the eye of the camera. Money cascades over her body and onto the floor of the dingy strip club she works at. All the while, a dreamy voice permeates the air. It’s an artificial poeticism that’s more the groundwork for atmosphere than necessarily anything more meaningful.
There’s something curious about the racial politics of the short film. As aforementioned, Mr. Ross is an African-American albino, which very literally places him in an in between ground, oscillating between two worlds. While it’s not explicitly articulated in the gang sequences in the films, there are hints at this kind of indecisiveness in fate. It also serves as interesting given that a majority of the depictions of Adam are seen as white men, and to have a black albino in that rule toes the line of transgression.
However, there are issues. First, the accidental biracial nature of the actor and character slips into this long standing trope of “the Tragic Mulatto”, which seems to exploit this idea of being lost between two worlds, and ostracized by both. While it’s not clear that Adam is ostracized, there is nonetheless this question of authority within the short. He takes the wheel, certainly, but there’s a questioning look from his peers. It seems even more inflammatory, contextually at least, that a bunch of rich, white men should be robbed and duped by someone like Adam.
The second issue deals with a comment that a friend mentioned to me. Lana Del Rey has a proclivity towards black men, unfortunately to a slightly fetishistic nature. What black men represent to Lana Del Rey’s persona is rebellion. It ties into what her persona exactly is and what it stands for: this image of dirty purity, Madonna and whore as one.
As an attack on a white patriarchal capitalist society that condemns sexuality, punishes economic innovators, and perpetuates the fear and ostracizing of the marginalized, Tropico is too interested in its own pseudo-art house aesthetic, super narrow aspect ratio and all, to say something meaningful. The points are often there, but drowned, buried in lurid self-seriousness. Tropico’s attempt at cultural commentary is less a study of the artifice or reality of persona, and more just a piece of artificiality in and of itself.