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couple embodying exaggerated visions of contemporary masculinity and femininity-he’s a gangster and she’s a stripper (who, it must be acknowledged, is coded as Latina in a way that is just as uncomfortable as the headdress from “Ride”). Amid her readings of “I Sing the Body Electric” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” she and Ross reappear as a modern L.A. Set to Del Rey’s Whitman-quoting “Body Electric,” the first of three Paradise tracks that appear in the 27-minute film, it’s a sequence that subtly draws out the parallels between all of these gendered ideals.īut it’s the final two sections of the “Tropico” triptych, another Del Rey-Mandler collaboration, that really bring her worldview into focus.
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Some of the most prominent ones-cowboys, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Del Rey’s own Virgin Mary figure-appear in the opening moments of her most ambitious video project, “Tropico.” From there, she and model/actor Shaun Ross play Eve and Adam, getting down in a pink-hued Garden of Eden. More than anything else, Lizzy Grant’s Lana Del Rey project is a long, slow meditation on the archetypes America holds dear.
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Again, her relationship to fame is unhinged: How bleak is the entertainment industry when a transient life of rest stops and rough-looking johns is preferable? Judging by how sad Del Rey looks in the scenes where she’s singing onstage, the difference between performing and turning tricks is that at least the latter makes you an active participant, rather than a pretty face to be worshiped-or perhaps more aptly for LDR, criticized-from afar. “It takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is,” she intones before the music starts playing. In the end credits, Del Rey labels her character in the film an “artist.” It’s a bold title to bestow upon a woman who, as far as we can glean from both the visuals and the monologues that bookend the song, seems to have left a middling music career for life on the road as a prostitute and biker chick. of orange soda and drink it against a wall as you inhale gasoline fumes. Directed by the frequent Rihanna, Drake, and Taylor Swift collaborator Anthony Mandler and scripted by Del Rey, it pairs the song’s lonely-drifter lyrics with classic symbols and characters of the American road: bikers, hookers, seedy motels, an unfortunate and perhaps intentionally outrage-baiting feathered headdress, convenience stores where you buy a 20 oz. The most heated arguments about Lana Del Rey tend to revolve around one question: Is she playing to male fantasies (and female fantasies shaped by patriarchal visions of ideal womanhood), or is she mirroring them in ways that are actually supposed to be disconcerting? She digs her heels into that thin line in the ten-minute short film for “Ride,” from her Paradise EP.