DunnRaw

Video Games

This was written in response to a Village Voice article by Maura Johnston. She doesn’t like the music, which is her prerogative, but also claims it is devoid of content, which is misguided. The contention here is that the video games to which the song refers range far beyond Grand Theft Auto. 

The video opens to a silent apocalyptic video game stormscape. This will be the only actual video game reference. Next comes Ms. Lana Del Rey herself, sitting on the floor, fidgeting. She looks to be plunked in front of an open laptop, which is filming her. She’s arranged herself to fit in the frame but her gaze is averted, her demeanor restless as if waiting for a video chat to begin, preparing to pose with faux spontaneity. We see a video clip of a contemporary couple riding a moped, smiling, laughing, leaning into the wind. The woman wears a red floral shirt & clutches the man tightly. A bell tolls. A row of boys smiles & laughs as they jump & flip into a pool in sequence. They’re wearing 70s era bathing suits. A flag waves.

The song begins, accompanied by a quick-cut series of clips suggesting a title sequence, including “DEL REY” in chrome on the back of a classic car. Del Rey from the shoulders up at a 3/4 angle stands backed against a wall. She’s posed, alluring, but has an expression of disappointment on her face & melancholy in her voice as she sings: ”Swinging in the backyard/Pull up in your fast car/Whistling my name.” A rose quickly blooms but the time-lapse halts right before its inevitable decay. We see a palm-lined street, very Sunset Blvd. Back to Del Rey on the floor, her gaze interior. She glances up at the camera & her eyes connect with ours for a brief moment before there’s a quick cut to a swingset in action. The footage is black & white, grainy, the swingset the sort that’s since been sued out of existence. 

Del Rey faces the camera this time, looking lovely & doleful. She sings, ”Open up a beer/You say get over here/& play a video game,” with a reproachful glance, then looks down, disappointed. ”I’m in his favorite sundress.” Paz de la Huerta, in a beaded evening gown, stumbles mumbling out of a Hollywood nightclub, supported by a suited man. She’s been kicked out. Later in the video she’ll fall to the ground & be told “I can’t let you in” by another suited man. She’s plastered.

“Watching me get undressed/Take that body downtown.” Vintage footage of densely crowded paparazzi, eyes & cameras all focused on us. The intentness of their multiplied gaze is alarming & induces a start of self-consciousness, even on a screen & in passing. It’s a relief to cut to another paparazzi mass, this time in profile. They’re not looking at us. We see a Sunset Blvd billboard (for an iPod). There’s a park. & some skateboarders. ”I say you the bestest/Lean in for a big kiss/Put his favorite perfume on.” We’re back to the happy couple from the moped, recognizable due to the woman’s red floral shirt. They’re kissing rapturously. ”Go play a video game,” sings Del Rey again, her back against the wall. The music swells.

“It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you/Everything I do/Tell you all the time.” Our happy couple lolls on a picnic cloth, looking at something together. Hollywood sign. A skateboard stops short. Its rider keeps going with a slight lurch. Palm trees, spinning. A pool packed with laughing heads. ”Heaven is a place on earth with you.” The woman from the happy couple spins deliriously, the camera in the place of her paramour. Old Glory waves in the wind. Del Rey’s against the wall, distinctly uncomfortable: “Tell me all the things you want to do.” The woman from the happy couple laughs with a female friend. ”I heard that you like the bad girls.” Del Rey smiles & winks as she moves her fist towards the screen in a flirtatious punch. She’s wearing a jeweled knuckle duster. This will be the only place she smiles. ”Honey.” A sparkle of flashbulbs, first from a crowd of cameras, next from a single man who smiles & talks while raising his camera to his eye, directing the shot. We see the sidewalk stars of Hollywood Blvd. Del Rey in closeup tries out her sexyface. ”Is that true?”

Del Rey in front of the laptop closes her mouth & looks down sadly, Sharon Tate hair cascading down her back. Gulls wing over some waves. The red-shirted woman & her friend hold hands spinning. Another palm-lined LA street; this time it looks like Wilshire. Black & white footage of smiling teenaged boys horsing around on a city sidewalk. The happy red-shirted woman spins deliriously in closeup, golden sunlight so low & bright the image is blown out to the the point it’s almost all yellow. Hollywood sign. Two people building in the sand on a sunset-backlit beach. Whiteout of over-exposure, flash of burnt film. The end of the reel? A classic American gas guzzler cruises the road, windows down.

“They say that the world was built for two/Only worth living if somebody is loving you/Baby, now you do.” Del Rey’s against the wall, gaze direct & deadpan. She shrugs hopelessly & looks down with a sneer. They say a lot of things. 

Time’s tight so the full dissertation might have to wait until after the holidays, but here in the opening frames over the first verse we have the set-up for the entire piece. Del Rey has introduced five types of video clips, each imbedded deeply in contemporary American culture:

1) Video games, infamous for fixating mostly male adolescents (of all ages) for the last three decades, those same video games the narrator’s boyfriend is staring at instead of at her. 

2) Video phone, a form of communication that makes it impossible not to pose no matter whom you’re talking to. (Recently Skyped for the first time with my parents. Each time my eye brushed my image in the corner I caught myself sitting up straighter.) But if you’re chatting with someone in a romantic setting, forget about it. To one degree or another, you’re posing.

3) Home movies, from Super 8 to flip cam, videos of happy times that replace our memories, aiding & exacerbating nostalgia’s revisionist history. Everyone films opening Christmas presents; few film Billy’s bullying or Grandpa’s racist rants.  The clips here of pools, swings, skateboards & picnicking couples evoke an end of summer atmosphere reinforced by the late afternoon haze of the sound itself. As collected & presented they are steeped in a consciousness of coming loss, of imminent endings: the end of summer, the end of adolescence, the end of innocence, the end of a love affair, the end of a dream, the end of an empire.    

4) TMZ footage, the sleazy pinnacle of our nation’s favorite pastime, celebrity worship/destruction. Hollywood is our major cultural export. Hollywood stars have the ultimate aspirational lifestyles. We venerate them monumentally sized on glowing screens then barrage them with disdainful scrutiny until they go mad or die or move to Montana. Or France. We put them up just to pull them down. We love them, we hate them, we’re obsessed. We’ve infected the world with celebrity culture & TMZ is the lousiest disseminator of the virus.

5) Stock footage, that great archive of visual archetypes that infiltrates filmic narrative from classic cinema to Fox news & is only successful if unseen. There’s a lot we take for granted regarding the language of film. We’re so immersed that if the editing is tight we read it without even noticing our fluency. Pay attention to establishing shots. They’re almost always stock footage. The waving flag, the Hollywood sign, the LA streets, these are all establishing shots. They tell you where you are. 

So we’ve got five types of video & five types of games. There are also, of course, the video games played by Ms. Del Rey herself in creating the very video we’re watching, the video games she played surfing YouTube, culling clips, editing them into a flow that fit her song. & uploading the video to the ether, dreaming of an audience, waiting for a response.

Then there’s the original video game, the gaze. “Video” in Latin means “to be seen; to seem, appear, be thought.” It’s in the passive voice. Are you familiar with the notion of the male gaze? (If not, John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” is a nice primer.) “Gaze” is a psychoanalytic term that describes the anxiety of realizing that one can be seen. Theories of the male gaze posit an asymmetrical relationship between male & female modes of looking. The male looks while the female is looked at. The term was coined by feminist filmmaker & critic Laura Mulvey who contended that all film was a concrete manifestation of the male gaze. In accordance with the Uncertainty Principle, that the observer affects the observed, women subject to the male gaze lose any autonomous sense of self. Internalizing the male gaze means constantly comparing how one wishes one looked to how one imagines one looks to others, eradicating any possible satisfaction with how one is.

The consequences of objectification in personal relationships are dire. I hope you’ve never been there, but many women have - the slow death realization that you’re dating a misogynist, that for all his professions of love & all its promises that he sees you, really sees YOU, in fact all he cares about is how you look on his arm or his dick. Which is exactly what the lyric describes. The narrator has worn what he wants her to wear over what he refers to explicitly as an object as he demands a blow job (“take that body downtown”). She does what he wants her to do, says what he wants her to say (“you the bestest” followed by a big kiss has a ritual feel) how he wants her to say it (babytalk), even smells how he wants her to smell. & he ignores her.

The opening stanza sets up the scenario of an idealized American romance, though there’s already an aura of imbalance. He has a fast car. He goes places while she waits; her swing moves but goes nowhere. In the second stanza, things get quickly darker. The clipped lines encourage multiple readings. The swallowed pronouns give an air of imperative (“open up a beer”) even where one isn’t explicit (“you say get over here”). He gives her orders, neglecting to engage her except to watch her get undressed. This is the true video game that he plays.

Between the verse & chorus there is a tone shift, emphasized by the music’s swell. On one level the chorus evokes her fantasy of what her romance should be, according to everything pop culture’s told her about love, versus the reality described the verse. On another it subverts the very pop tropes of perfect love it verbalizes. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you, everything I do” in her tone of anguish becomes an accusation. “They say that the world was built for two/ Only worth living if somebody is loving you/ Baby, now you do” as delivered is an outright condemnation of romance.  More than anything it is an expression of profound disappointment. She did everything she was supposed to do & it didn’t work. She performed femininity perfectly & it failed her.

There’s more here, about the construct of “bad girl,” a tie between the thwarted romantic relationship & thwarted ambition, comparing elusive love to elusive fame. But the most repeated theme is video, the state of being conscious of being seen, a state of seeming. This is the state you’re in as you hike your skirt down (or up) when you catch someone looking at your legs on the subway. Or as you glance at your reflection in a passing window out of the corner of your eye, checking involuntarily whether how you look is how you want to be seen. Or as you Skype a significant other from a studied three quarter angle, lips carefully pooched. We all find ourselves playing these kinds of video games, consciously or not. We’re all complicit. & this is what Lana Del Rey gives voice to, that moment of stilted dread when you catch yourself posing.

She voices what happens AFTER what a recent Jezebel article describes as “that thing we talk about that happens to our young women. That thing that we, as grown-ups, write about and research incessantly and condemn broadly, but don’t remember so vividly.” Lana Del Rey is the world-weary voice of a has-been beauty queen, an over-the-hill starlet, an ex-model. She’s the voice of Britney Spears, doomed pop queen of cognitive dissonance (who unlike Del Rey was in fact a corporate construction, introduced to the world without her own knowledge or understanding as the ultimate embodiment of the virgin/whore), as she stares at herself in the mirror before stripping her head bare of its potent symbol of sexuality, murmuring she’s tired of people touching her. Lana Del Rey gives voice to the ghosts of Anna Nicole Smith, JonBenet Ramsey & Norma Jean Baker. She’s the voice of Lolita, not the soft-core pedo fantasy that’s all that’s leaked into popular culture via the onesheets for Kubrick’s film, but the actual character in Nabakov’s actual novel, hardened by a lifetime of objectification & abuse, who when she finally calls out Humbert at the end of the story devastates him with the stark consequences of his desire-warped delusions.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” has always irked me. Keats waxes lyrical about all the wonderful things the urn would say & sing if it could speak but then decides because it’s pretty he’d rather just look at it in any case. Anything it did say would ruin his fantasy of what it could have said & his imaginings are undoubtedly infinitely more interesting than any possible observations of this hypothetical witness of actual history.

Lana Del Rey is the voice of the Grecian Urn.