Lana Del Rey's New Way of Seeing

Lana Del Rey always makes me think about John Berger, the writer and critic who died this past January, at the age of ninety. In "Ways of Seeing," Berger wrote that a woman is "almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself." Since she entered the pop ecosystem, in 2011, Del Rey's career has been defined by extravagant self-consciousness, rendered through a narrow set of intertwined cultural tropes. In "Blue Jeans" and "Video Games," the D.I.Y. music videos that made her famous, Del Rey intercut Webcam clips of herself with archival footage of American iconography: palm trees, Vegas neon, roses blooming, police, paparazzi, the Stars and Stripes. (These days, on Instagram, she often murmurs her music into the front-facing camera of her phone.) She pouted as she sang, wearing lace and gold and crosses, looking like a self-composed collage. She was a moll, a starlet, a Stepford wife—a "gangster Nancy Sinatra," as she herself put it. She seemed so aware of the image she was creating that, to many, she inevitably seemed fake.

But artifice is not the same thing as dishonesty. Forty years before social media would lend a new dimension to his thesis, Berger wrote that a woman's "own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another"—namely, by a male viewer. Women, Berger argued, live in a state of self-consciousness that is at once artificial and authentic to the world we live in. He offers two images for comparison: the 1814 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting "La Grande Odalisque" and a photo from a nineteen-sixties girlie magazine. "Is not the expression remarkably similar in each case?" he asks. "It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her—although she doesn't know him." It is an expression that Del Rey wears as she stares at the camera in those early videos. She controlled the process, unlike the women in those images; but, like them, she was "offering up her femininity as the surveyed," as Berger put it. As tends to happen, she was both rewarded and punished for doing so.

My favorite Del Rey song is the demo version of "National Anthem," a song that appeared on her début album, "Born to Die," from 2012. The album cut is a sweeping, kitschy, string-section fantasia; its opening sounds like the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony." The demo is rougher, with a crunchy, grinding beat and a Joan Jett bass line. In the D.I.Y. video that accompanies it, Del Rey dances in a dress that looks like a cupcake, singing for the camera between clips of Elvis, fireworks, and Air Force One. She's isolated—she has the look of someone who's locked herself in a hotel room—and she wears that expression again, luxuriating in the pleasure of her own image as viewed by an as-yet-imaginary audience. "He will do very well / I can tell, I can tell / Keep me safe, in his bell tower, hotel," she sings. She has fully allied her performance with the idea that, as Berger wrote, women are "born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men."

That video was leaked in June, 2012, shortly before the release of the official video—a seven-minute production in which Del Rey plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy to A$AP Rocky's J.F.K. It is a hyper-specific distillation of American romance: golden late afternoon on Chappaquiddick; champagne and diamonds; blue hydrangeas, red dresses, endless green lawns. Visually and lyrically, the imagery is simple: rich men and beautiful women; freedom through submission—"wind in my hair / hand on the back of my neck." Del Rey's two governing aesthetics, love and country, collapse into each other completely. "Tell me I'm your national anthem," she pleads on the chorus, repeating the line as the chords shift to sudden, unnerving euphoria. If Del Rey's entire project is an experiment in all-encompassing narrative obedience, this song is proof of concept to me. The national anthem is as good a metaphor as any for the blind, binding pledges of romantic love.