The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write About Lana Del Rey
So it’s kind of weird that people are now quoting me about hating Lana Del Rey. I don’t actually hate her, although I know a lot of people who do. Actually, I can count the number of people I hate on one hand—and none of them are pop stars.
The piece that I wrote about Lana Del Rey many months ago was about us more than it was about her. It was about our willingness to devour a vision of a woman who continually asks us, “What should I be?” instead of saying, “This is what I am.” What I was saying is that this represents an enormous problem in our culture—the fact that we want women to be ciphers, screens for the projection of fantasy, and the passive receptacles of our desire.
Does Lizzy Grant have agency, power, and desire of her own? Of course. The problem is that when it comes to women, we seem to want a character and not the truth. We want Lana Del Rey, not Lizzy Grant. That idea is what I am going to discuss in this essay—and this essay will be the very last thing I’ll write about Lana Del Rey.
There is an emptiness about Lana that reminds us of what we think about femininity. By femininity, I am not talking about what women are, but rather about all that we expect women to be. The debate over Lana Del Rey’s authenticity is interesting to me because it speaks to the lack of authenticity inherent in the definition of the feminine. I think it is worth exploring the fact that so many people were so genuinely pissed off when Lana did not sing very well on Saturday Night Live, and also the fact that we so badly wanted her to be “real” (i.e. indie, self-made, un-plastic-surgified) to begin with.
Recently, the author Sara Marcus told me something surprising: Femininity’s dictionary definition is nothing more than “having qualities traditionally ascribed to women, effeminate, and womanish.” I looked it up to confirm, and it turned out that she was right. In other words, femininity, when you look it up in the dictionary, is entirely vacant of meaning—nothing more than a signifier for itself. Isn’t it strange that no part of “the feminine” says anything about what women really are? It strikes me as significant that the word “femininity” is a mirror of itself, endlessly reflecting our own beliefs.
In her analysis of Lana’s album, the music critic Judy Berman makes note of the singer’s tendency to ask the hypothetical audience to define her: “Is my body sweet like sugar?” Lana asks. “Am I glamorous?” “Do you think we’ll be in love forever?” Berman argues that Lana lacks “a fixed meaning or character.” According to Berman, Lana seems like “a copy of a copy.” I read this piece and found that I agreed.
I will argue that Lana Del Rey confronts us with the dictionary definition of the feminine. The backlash against her may be read as a kind of widespread cultural shock at what she’s forced us to admit: That women have the power to dissemble precisely because we have no idea who women really are.
As Berman has done, I will begin by discussing Lana Del Rey’s album in terms of its parallels to film. Lana’s album is not only filmic because its sweeping strings recall movie scores. Her image is not only filmic because her stage name recalls Lana Turner. What Lana has in common with film is a constant appeal to a viewer—an appeal so powerful that it makes Berman feel uncomfortable, as if she’s “eavesdropping on phone sex.” Berman points out that Lana frequently references her clothing as if it is a costume: “Got my red dress on tonight,” “Hair up real big beauty queen style.” “White bikini off with my nail polish.” Half of Lana’s album seems to be about Lana asking us to see her. Yet, in an inverse of the modernist theory of perspective, there is absolutely no suggestion here that watching Lana will change her. Rather, there is the suggestion that watching Lana is what defines her—what makes her real.
Similarly, the nature of her celebrity, which is internet-based, and dependent on buzz, serves as another reminder that without an audience, the character of Lana Del Rey would not exist. Her “Video Games” video is so compelling not only because the song is good, but also because it is about the way in which the very definition of a woman insists upon a viewer. “I’m in his favorite sundress, watching me get undressed,” she croons, situating the listener not as the “you” she loves, but rather as the voyeur to the relationship she’s in. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,” she tells us, not him.
Perhaps this is why women are so powerful as performers. It’s because they ask us to put what we want on stage. We define women by seeing them—and sadly, often leave little space for women to define themselves. Consider the relationship between the feminine and the idea of being seen: Often, it is the constant pressure to appear to be something to others that makes women feel self-conscious. Indeed, the idea of appearance itself is central to the qualities we heap upon the cipher of the feminine. Femininity is beautiful, pleasing, and appealing to the senses of the other. Femininity inheres in the way the hands and wrists move, in the grace of the limbs, in the lips, and in the external as opposed to the internal world.
Although both the feminine and the masculine represent social constructions, detached from the realities of who people are, it is important to realize that we attach to femininity a series of external, and therefore performable, qualities, while we attach to masculinity more qualities that are internal, native to the self. Try to make a list of the qualities we associate with men: Strength, intelligence, conviction, opinion, reason, declarations, freedom, anger, violence, forcefulness. Then try to list what you read as feminine: Good hair, good makeup, vacillation of opinion, caring for others, and gentleness, perhaps. The first thing you’ll notice is that feminine qualities are more superficial and less descriptive of identity. The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s harder to make a list of internal feminine qualities because we in fact don’t really talk about what women really are, below the surface of what appeals to us.
Above all, the feminine is empathic. It is that which asks, “What do you want?” and then says, “I understand.” It asks to be seen, but not to be read too deeply. This is why we often define femininity as the absence of that which is positive and masculine—as weakness as opposed to strength. What we call femininity is really a gap that exists beneath a quality we know how to define. We even call it feminine when a voice goes up at the end of the sentence, asking you, “Am I really saying this?”
Therefore, it is ironic that Lana has generated a debate over her own authenticity. I think we all realize that the feminine ideal is a facade. The more perfect the makeup, the more perfect the plastic surgery, the more perfect the illusion, and the more perfect the woman is. We just don’t like to admit that this is true. This is why Lana’s oh-so transparent inauthenticity rubs us the wrong way. We all like to gossip about women, and to reduce them to things we can easily speak about. We have so many labels for women—“slut,” “virgin,” “bitch,”—etc. and so many stereotypes. We all like to believe that we know who women are, when in fact we know no such thing. So why do we care so much about Lana being “real?” Here is what I think: If we admit that we are continually deceived by the feminine, then we have to admit that we do not know who or what a real woman really is.
I believe that the backlash against Lana has to do with fear—the fear of recognizing ourselves as the ones who prop up gender, the ones who have put all of our faith, as a culture, in some kind of social construction of the feminine, a vision who has had more to do with Photoshop, with Airbrushing, and with our own fantasies than with who women actually are.
In music, we constantly assume that women don’t write their own songs, that a male svengali pulls the strings, and that women’s talents pale in significance to the talents of men. When the world decided that Lana totally bombed on Saturday Night Life, we could see Lana telling us nothing other than what we already tell ourselves about women in music. We already assume that the feminine is inauthentic. So, I mean, why does everyone care so much if she has had plastic surgery, or if her management company created an image for her? What’s the big deal with being deceived? Some of our most respected musical icons (Bob Dylan, anyone?) used music to continually invent and re-invent possible selves. Today, endlessly changing images and postmodern unreality are qualities that we already associate not only with Lady Gaga, but also with nearly every pop star in the business. Lana’s only different in that we want so badly for her perfect, retrograde, form of gender to be real.
I am saddened by the backlash against Lana Del Rey. I am sick of this kind of horror at a woman laid bare—and sick of the fear and disgust that arises when we discover a woman is less than perfect. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. There’s a famous poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, in which the satirist Jonathan Swift describes sneaking into a woman’s inner chamber to watch her undress and take off her makeup. He’s shocked by what he finds: Beneath her “Lace, Brocades, and Tissues,” lie “oyl,” “wrinkles,” “sweat,” “ear-wax,” and “hair.” The whole poem reads as strip tease meets a horror story. At the end, the woman takes a shit, and the voyeur nearly passes out. It’s a hilarious—and also very disturbing poem—and in some ways, it’s a metaphor for what everyone wants to do with Lana these days—that is, peel back the layers and pick her apart in order to uncover the fact that she’s pretending.
This poem, and the backlash against Lana, definitely represent forms of misogyny. Yet, significantly, this poem astrikes me not only as critique of the way in which women dissemble us, but also as a critique of our own anxiety around that fact. The more the speaker in the poem catalogues the various parts of the woman’s body, the more the list serves as a reminder of what is missing from the poem: the interiority beneath them. The speaker can dissect the woman he observes as much as he wants; he still fails to tell us anything authentic about her. The poem reads as as a list of fetishistic objects, by Freud’s definition of the term, meaning that the speaker refers to the parts of the woman’s body as a substitute for the woman herself, who remains altogether unknowable and far beyond the realm of understanding. A woman who can dissemble us is more powerful than we are—and this is why we hate women when we realize they’ve deceived us.
Right now, I am reading a book by Anais Nin called A Spy in the House of Love. The book describes a woman who deceives everyone—taking many different lovers, and all the while acting the part of a devoted wife. It’s a feeling of emptiness in her core that motivates her to try on so many personae. What she wants is the ability to extinguish once and for all her constantly burning, all-consuming desire—and yet, she cannot define the site of meaning from whence her desire emanates. It is a classic feminine dilemma—to ask “How can I exist?” before existing.
To explain to her husband why she has to leave him so much, the character in the novel pretends to be an actress acting in many different plays, and she is an actress—in an existential sense. Her desire fixes itself on external objects—i.e. men—when in fact, her only desire is to find a fixed identity of her own. Anais Nin is a compelling writer because she speaks about female self-definition in a way that is severely lacking from our culture, even today. The sad truth is that, because of hundreds of years of limits on women’s self-expression, we have fewer stories told from a women’s perspective. When women do tell stories, they’re often not read, or trusted, as much. As a result, we know less about who women are.
New York Magazine reported this week that we don’t trust women’s voices in political ads. When there’s a female narrator, people rate the content as less credible than when a man says the same thing. But when a woman speaks, the voice seems more empathic, more attuned to what we want. To me, Lana Del Rey is the second of these—the voice we trust because it agrees with what we want. Yet she’s also totally, transparently, an actress. She’s like the spy in the house of love. She makes us uncomfortable because she is not entirely successful at acting. As the New York Times has pointed out, with every pained smile, she very clearly says, “This is not who I am.” Her voice is monotonous, high or low, even when she sings about emotional extremes. Whether it’s “Kiss you so hard” or “I’m nothing if I can’t have you,” her platitudes and cliches are transparently such, which is why she sounds insincere. Her insincerity makes us wonder, “Who is she really?” The answer is that we don’t know.
I think now is a good time to admit that I spent a whole morning wandering around my apartment in my bathrobe and singing Video Games at the top of my lungs. I even sang it in front of the mirror to work on perfecting my look of utter disaffection. Whether you’re a Lana fan or not, you have to admit that the song’s ridiculously catchy. The live versions aren’t any good, but I really like the way her voice sounds ironic and totally detached on that recording. Back then, singing it, believe or not, made me feel powerful, like a woman who was pretending to be what other people wanted, but whose interiority remained a deep well of mystery—even to herself.
Although I’m as Mad Men obsessed as the next person, I would like to see less retro-sexism in popular culture, less veneration of outdated gender roles, and more willingness to accept that which is nostalgia’s opposite: i.e. art that takes you where you have never been before, and yes, I would also like to see more women who are willing to take you to that relatively unknown land where you may feel a little uncomfortable and confused, because that land belongs to them.
Exploring “what a woman should be” is boring and cliche in the 21st century, and perhaps that is why Lana Del Rey seems to many to be so bored and sad on stage. So let’s take Lana Del Rey for what she is—a pop star playing a role, a woman whose real life we know nothing about—and learn from what she’s taught us about our own insufferable addiction to a vapid version of femininity. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll accept more female artists who are interested in mining the depths of who they really are.
These days, I am less interested in femininity as it exists today and a lot more interested in expanding the definition of what a woman can be. To me, the second represents the far more important project.
