a treatise on Lana Del Rey

a love letter

‘I was born to be the other woman, who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone’ — so laments Lana Del Rey in her opening monologue for Ride, the seminal ten-minute video epic which accompanied her first single off the Paradise reissue. This music video was released on my 13th birthday. It contextualised my entire first year of high school, as I came home every evening to watch this pointlessly beautiful compilation of glamour shots and Americana, and even though I had never experienced a single thing that she was talking about, I felt profoundly sure that I had. Her gift of self-mythology was so potent that it had captured me, and her fabrications of this tragic, glamorous life felt so real that it became our backstory. I too desperately wanted to be a singer, not a very popular one, finding home in the beds of strange older men because I had no home of my own, wearing beautiful clothes and dancing idly as I chased my darkest and realest fantasies. I wanted to escape the dreaded mundanity of the life I saw in front of me, and to follow Lana into this realm of freedom she promised, where one could live as beautifully as she seemed to.

When Lana refers to herself as the ‘other woman’ (a recurring motif in many of her works), it is an astounding case of self-branding. It is entirely irrelevant whether she has actually been anybody’s mistress. Rather, the point is to see her as a mistress: a woman who exists as the tantalising alternative to the mundane wife, wild and untamed, self-possessing of her sexuality and irresistible to her paramour. The cultural archetype of the ‘other woman’ is never of a woman who has a fixed, discernible identity. She only exists as temptation to the wayward man, only corporealises in the brief moments he steals away from his wife, and he is only ever able to perceive her as a fantasy. She is denied her humanity for the sake of becoming an idea. 

As such, When Lana self-identifies as the other woman, she is not simply talking about her relational identity to men, but to her audience itself: she belongs to no one because she is not a real person to be understood, and she belongs to everyone because she is a vessel for their projections. She fascinates us because she is a pure creature of fantasy, freezing herself in these moments of utter glamour and self-romanticisation. We take these images she presents us, like melancholically smoking a cigarette in a red dress, or romanticising the abuse she suffers at the hands of her partner, or being a seductress to older married men, and we attempt to distill them into our own lives. We all desire to become the other woman, to become glamorous fantasy instead of devastatingly monotonous.

Lana Del Rey builds the narrative of her character in a decidedly queer fashion. There is something inherently queer to her construction of fantasy, because it is premised on the romanticisation of her own tragedy—she takes something like heartbreak or abuse or troubled family ties and makes it sexy. Being the girl who cries alone in one’s bedroom about the great losses of her life is now about the performance of the sadness itself, instead of its actual substance. The dramatisation of our personal traumas allows us to make sense of senseless pain, and it is a coping mechanism that feels distinctly queer; to unearth romance in the inherent suffering of a non-normative living, and to make art out of that decay. Lana lives like a faggot. She rejects the same traditions of the nuclear family that we have been denied membership to, and she is content to fashion herself a life on societal outskirts, be it as The Other Woman or a pill-popping, disgraced Hollywood starlet or as the Queen of the Trailer Park. She is an ever-evolving cast of characters, and each one is designed as a fantasy that allows her to idealise her own loneliness. This capacity for self-invention is at the heart of her relationship with queer fandom. Like recognises like; we both prize the gift of our agency, we are driven by our fantasies, and we desire to build our lives and identities in complete freedom.

Lana is by no means the first artist to create a ‘character’, nor is she the first to build her own artistic world, but I do wonder if she is perhaps the most successful at achieving it. Every single person I know had a formative Lana Del Rey phase in their youth, and this typically communicates something far deeper than what music they liked. I can tell they were probably terminally online, had difficult personal lives and enjoyed wallowing in sadness, had inappropriate relationships with older men, picked up a smoking habit too young, so on, so forth. I am not saying any of this is a good thing, but I do have to admit it is incredibly impressive that we are unified by such similar experiences, and they are soundtracked by the likes of Born To Die or Ultraviolence. It was never just about liking Lana’s music. It was about becoming a part of her world. She sang to the core of a uniquely queer and feminine teenage angst, and allowed our melancholic bed-rotting and anxieties about love and closetedness to feel artful and compelling. 

Her self-awareness of her own product was sheer calculating genius; every lyric so depressingly melodramatic, every music video so visually glamorous, every performance accompanied by a cigarette and her disenchanted, haunting half-singing. She was cementing herself as this perfectly mysterious spectre of a woman, equal parts beautiful and fragile, and her enigma just made her all the more enthralling. She didn’t just make you listen to her music. She made you want to become her. 

In many ways, being a fan of Lana Del Rey is its own tortured experience. She is somehow as oblivious as she is self-aware; be it her refusal to identify as a feminist because she’s a pretentious contrarian, or her self-admission as an apolitical moderate who only cared about politics after Trump’s election (and attempting to impeach him through witchcraft, which is its own brand of humiliating), or that skin-crawling ‘Question for the Culture’ where she responds to her critics by randomly bashing her Black female peers. It is often the case with artists who build their careers through the marketing of mystery that the longer they are in the public eye, the more they reveal about themselves, and the more the audience has to accept that they are embarrassingly normal. Lana is the epitome of a White woman, and this has always been plainly evident in her obsession with ‘60s Americana, but it is an entirely different beast to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It confirms one thing: the fantasy that she has always been selling is inextricable from her Whiteness, as is that particular brand of glamour and freedom. Of course she can choose escapism, because she has the privilege to abdicate responsibility and duty. She is not confined by the same set of sociopolitical structures that keep us so rigidly set in our positions, and so she is free to romanticise a freedom that many can never have access to. 

The limitations of her perspective are infuriating, but also deeply fascinating; it does not make me like her music less, but it provides fascinating context to her mind as an artist. The character of Lana Del Rey is an ethnic chameleon. She has, at various times, cosplayed as Latina or Italian or Native American; she has tried to attain cultural legitimacy through associations with hip-hop and self-identification as a ‘gangster Nancy Sinatra’; and she is, above all, perfectly and delicately White, positing herself as this waifish, fragile little girl who is a victim of her circumstances. Racial identities are just as much characters to her as anything else, and she utilises them to express her various fantasies while still retaining her overarching Whiteness as its focal point. 

Still, with her soft girlish voice and her frail delicate beauty and her innocent Lolita-ness, how could Lana ever be the oppressor? When I remark that her Whiteness is intrinsic to her success, I am not just reflecting on her political and socioeconomic privileges. Rather, her phenomenal constructions of fantasy are directly informed by her experiences as a White woman, and this is what she is compelling us to participate in; we want to desire for the power of her purity, her coquettish innocence, her uninhibited freedoms. We must all need to access her White femininity, and if we cannot attain it, we can at least envy and obsess over it. 

The complexity and contradictions of Lana Del Rey are crucial to her magic, and as her recent output has coincided with a realer style of lyricism and interaction with her audience, we are now privy to a demasking of the character. We are left with insight into a fascinatingly flawed woman who sits beneath. Just as the elegantly contrived Lana Del Rey of the past was fundamental to our youth, this matured, more honest Lana of the past few years is becoming integral to our adulthood. It is like we are growing up in tandem: emerging out of our pasts of promiscuity and substance abuse and romantic tragedy, and worrying instead about what real purpose and love and fulfillment look like. What has become plainly evident to me now is that my love for Lana is eternal; she is the artist of a generation, the sort of songbird who directs the movements and growth of our lives and who will last into immortality. For all her faults and foibles, I must admit—the lady can really tell a story.