America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton

The new Lana Del Rey album is out this week, like the dark ebb of the Stygian tide, and with it "controversy" so perfectly-pitch that Del Rey and her salivate-on-cue detractors must be in on some cosmic PR joke. Take it from one who didn't, from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned hipster who missed all his chances, it is cool to die young, whatever Frances Bean may say. The only freedom from irrelevance lies in the obsidian wind that whistles up through gratings along that other sewer's shore. In death, in dreams, comes the realization--coveted by all damaged artists--one has really 'made it.' Once past life, one's art is past time, and a great pastime art the movies. There is no difference between living through the movies and living through death. If you're writing for the edification of your future selves rest assured, in peace, they will pretend to have read it. But first, your death is needed. Lana Del Rey knows. When the artist pursues fame only after he or she's dead, one is free from the need for validation. Surrender is the only true courage, which does not mean being a pussy about it.

And from Lana Del Rey's perfectly framed early 60s car crashes we can stagger down an off-road shortcut through the fifties, and all the way to the WW2 graveyard of Val Lewton.

It was no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started around yesterday-ish while simultaneously TCM played Val Lewton's acclaimed low-key masterwork THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943) as part of an apparent devil day, shoe-"horned" between THE DEVIL'S BRIDE (AK THE DEVIL RIDES OUT 1968) and TO THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942), which I mention only to tie in WWII, as Val Lewton's best work was made in 1942-43, suffused with a deep paranoia about being left back in the States, so far from the action no bombs could reach him, and so needing to dredge the war back up from the ground like collective unconscious crude, like a modern art exhibit after the public has drifted home and the main lights are off and a half-blind janitor slowly mops up, pausing at strange noises, the crumpled up invites and provenance lists rustling like stage tumbleweeds.

from top: "Summertime Sadness," I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, "Tropico"

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both understand the ebb tide of abandonment and death, and how when it washes through the land, the crap's washed away and all that remains are the immovable immortal icons are revealed: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus, all loom on Lana's heavenly plane like death coaches (in her video "Tropico," the Wayne impersonator babbles on with banal advice). On Val Lewton's plane, there's no need for living pop culture icons --instead all that remains after the death tide are immortal archetype statuses from Greek and Egyptian myth: statues of Cerberus, Set, and San Sebastian (above): heaven, hell, and the dark doorway between them motionless and waiting in crevices of the stone stairways abd rustling canefields and even in a calypso song. His idols are literally etched from rock; all-seeing through blank eyes, demons that are only vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat. Until they materialize into a sudden stray light.

So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy of Del Rey's I say hey, man, be grateful her death drive is there, in your sights, because all she has to do is pout, turn slowly away, and take a backwards slow mo dive off the Hollywood sign and through Diane Selwyn's pale blue skylight and it's YOU who die, not her. Once you can't see her you'll know she's behind you, with a gun or sharp sword. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium, or Visa Platinum. You can follow her around like Boris Karloff obsessing over the hottie Greek peasant maybe-vampire in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945), you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs reigning down torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on her; you can drip a whole nation of self-appointed sanity over her sun roof... it does not slow your rush to death one hourglass grain. And it's probably just what she wants.

Del Rey knows, like the Shadow, and she knows that memories and film are the same thing and that every home movie of happier times must speed up as you approach the black hole realizations that love has flown and death is rushing forward in its absence. She even casts herself as the bad guy most of the time, as in "Summertime Sadness" --driving her lesbian ex-lover to jump off a bridge ("kiss me once before you go" - don't mean she's gettin' on a plane, sister) while she pouts in fog machine student films and home movies that repeat faster around certain points as the weeping lover falls, finally impressing Lana Del Rey enough to fall after her, the doubling inherent in an L.A. lesbian affair fully embraced- - drowning in each other's reflections in each other's eyes, their lashes a thousand penitent memories striping inescapable facts onto Hollywood's naked back; they come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece MULHOLLAND DR. (below); hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942); Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring/sacrifice deferral in LEOPARD MAN (1943) and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

It's fate, baby. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool: there's a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal, ever so briefly. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize), she wears a fur coat that when she changes tightens in around her and, if you look close at her body lying on the ground outside the panther cage, she looks like a bearskin rug with a teddy bear's head sewn to the side, but we only see it from far off, in the shadows. In ISLE OF THE DEAD we can see, if we look very close, the way the undead Mrs. Aubyn seems to materialize out of the moonlit reflections on a stone wall, like she's only semi-corporeal but never in that common special effects way that would make it obvious.

Lewton has a Russian's love of great literature that extends deeper down than the average bourgeois tenure track, deeper even than the blood (his real name is Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon), deeper than the cauldron from which are dredged all our hopes and fears, and our tomorrows are like a thousand yesterdays. And great literature is always about death. It's where we go to prepare, to remember that a vast elevator full of blood is always a skinsuit away, and the only freedom comes in whether to ignore it out of fear, or embrace it out of courage, love, and rock and roll who-gives-a-fuck-it. This is where she's coming from with her comments about being a feminist and thinking it's cool to die young. Would you get mad at David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Hemingway for saying those things?

Now, if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. That would be different. But my dad was killed by doctors (he died, after all, in the hospital). At home with an ocean of bourbon and ginger ale he was immortal. He kept death close; it couldn't sneak up on him. But that hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirit. It opened the door right up and coasted him through while his back was turned. When we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only those for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us the only cure-all is music, literature and films. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood because she embraces the theatrical aspects of emotional anguish, with her not as the sufferer but the object of the longing; her faux-period home movies painstaking in their iconic recreations, like the accident fetishists in CRASH, and she's the car.

From top: CRASH, LEOPARD MAN

I love Lana because of her pro-death chanteuse-rock fuckitness and have no problem with it all being a persona put on by a failed pop star named Lizzy Grant. If it didn't resonate we wouldn't be talking about her, and if her story is really a confession, then so is mine, though not, apparently, Rolling Stone's and Jezebel's -- who were both once edgy in their ways, I hear. Now they're both 'institutions' successful enough to feel they have something to lose, or even kill to protect (see CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice). Lana Del Rey is a persona that has nothing whatsoever to protect, so can engage in a kind of high wire free-form self-immolation theater. Animas with respectable DSM-IV counts are plentiful but then they have kids; the persona is replaced, even grown out of --but is it really growing or just doubling and diluting? How many great sexy young actresses have we lost to their children? Even when these starlets come back to us they're not the same: their dangerous heart--that thrilling gleam in their eye--now exists off camera, transferred to vessels still into the mewling and puking into nurse's arms stage.

It shoulda been me, puking. I had to quit her, my whiskey... sweet whiskey. My sober life, that's my cross to bear, my LSD Albert Hoffman problem child, the thing that robbed me of the gleam. My lost Lenore. But I'm not a star. No one even notices.

But I notice, and I still haven't forgiven Angelina Jolie, or Liz Phair. Ladies, you broke my heart!

Never stop smoking, or drinking - even knowing both are poisons,
for you've spilled more than secrets (bottom: SEVENTH VICTIM)

Now you love your children the way you used to love the camera.
Now your love is funneled to some off-camera cradle.
Which makes you worthless to the camera! Love the camera, o favored image!
We love you back through it.
But we can't love you through your kids' eyes,
for we are not John Cusak in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.
Then again, what else would you do with yourself once we eventually moved on?
You'd have to leap off the edge.
Like Lana Del Rey does, but she does it in advance of your gaze, and so
you will never move on
from her.
-----
In a semi-deserted Bijou n 1943
a nervous young assembly line worker uses her sick day,
watches SEVENTH VICTIM or THE LEOPARD MAN
and the shadows around her, where a boyfriend or husband would be,
 onscreen in the shadows she sees him, beckoning...

Lana Del Rey is the eyes that discern changing shapes in that darkness, and the darkness.
On digital nothing escapes notice, even the void hidden within the void.

This is the girls

That's why Val Letwon's morbid preoccupation with death is so relevant. Using deep black shadows he reveals that the thing wartime America most fears isn't death but loneliness, abandonment, being entombed --all of which is brilliantly realized by the cheap B-movie sets where even the sky seems indoors (and is)--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country with only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the bookending oceans.

And then... Frank Sinatra's voice like a phantom echo; his mastery of mic technique giving his programs an almost unworldly amniotic sound markedly different from the rest, welcoming you to join him in the pulsing warm fog between two shores: "if our romance should break up / I hope I never wake up /if you are but a dream." You are. Hardly even born yet. There in the unrealized amniotic slumber of the Stygian crossing, as Sinatra's songs coast overhead in ceaseless tachyons towards the past, you can hear your father's conception, buried in the sunken space between the words. 

The way Lana keeps her expression blank --she does it for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes --they accept our shadow's projection, just as the country as a whole during the war years became, in some smaller areas, a ghost town ripe for metaphor: the younger healthier men all drained away by old Europe's vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left are German expat directors (and actors to play Nazis) and, as stars in the B's are the tenderfoots, the old men, the crippled, the meek, the short and reedy. And everywhere, in the air wafting from Europe, the smell of death --the inevitability of it--in ways we can't imagine with our current wars and their paltry kill levels (we might lose a few dozen thousand but nothing close to Europe and Asia's combined sixty million in World War Two). Only a full scale nuclear war would even put a dent in us now. There could be a dozen earthquakes hundred of million dead, and that would still only be the same % as we lost in WW2, a spit in the bucket. Half of us could die and we'd only be where we were in the seventies, when we first started to worry about overpopulation. It's not death that dooms our planet, but life. Our blind clinging to health like panicked survivors swamping the lifeboat. If we could all just die like gentlemen, like the great Solomon Guggenheim, if Lana Del Rey can lead us by power of bad example, and if we leave right now, we just might make it.

We won't. In the words of young John Connor, "we're not gonna make it...are we?"

Echo of my undead soldier (from top) Del Rey, DEATHDREAM

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton know, too, we're not going to make it, and they see the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema, echoing like a ghost to let us know that even after our future death, the movies shall survive. Del Rey makes music for our ghost to haunt the wasteland with, but she's all alone, like any phantom. As Pitchfork notes she's "an utterly distinctive figure in popular music, not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely." There are a few artists over the years who have explored similar ghost transmissions: Miles Davis' trumpet echoing through the primordial pre-ears-to-hear-it howling of an uncooled earth in Agharta; Kubrick's "Midnight, the Stars and You"; Lynch's Roy Orbison songs and Julee Cruise... but none live and breathe within that ghost transmission - none play on the idea that even if you weren't alive to hear them sing, the sound is encoded in  the crystal receivers at the core of your DNA.  

Lana Del Rey--her "self" as persona, her videos, her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage--returns Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, down Route 66. Her music is ideal for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, long drives with tearful anorexic cutters who you love but cannot save, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dean. Without Morissey-moping but rather with hair done up and radio playing Elvis with JFK convertible top down, smoking, hovering over Marilyn's lifeless body like a wraith, hiring an actor to dress like Elvis and sneer while rubbing against the microphone stand in front of the John Wayne's rawhide coffin before falling backwards off the Hollywood sign in slow motion, falling, but never landing, to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's SEVENTH VICTIM, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway. And death + death = life.

"National Anthem" - note vivid attention to period detail and home movie posing 

while at the same time revising JFK into a contemporary-ish sexy rapper, and 

gaggle of cute biracial children. It's got nothing to do with the video narrative, which 

like so many of her best stuffkind of recalls the big final 'bells' montage 

moments of DON'T LOOK NOW, or the last seconds of 

THE BLACK SWAN spread to five minutes. 

What Del Rey has done is to embrace the sacrificial phoenix icon of the damaged hottie in ways Lindsay Lohan (who instead let Oprah set her chronically bouncing back from relevance) never understood well enough to capitalize on. When it comes right down to it, Lohan is sharp, talented, and ballsy, but not smart, one of those people mystified why they always land in jail. Lana Del Rey avoids the trap of co-dependence or prison or rehab by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, the Baby New Year of New Death Drive. She is her own exploiter, the manager of her singular vision --where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers by promising to get help, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles, but it's an act, man. She acts it so she doesn't have to be it, whereas Lindsay be's it but can't figure out that she should act it (rather than vainly trying to act "normal." If you get angry at Del Rey and think she's fake, or are worried it's real, well - all your rants and raves will do is boost her hit count --as the boost in album sales she got after her hostilely-received 2012 performance on SNL (see "Kiss Me Del Rey"). 

The Leopard Man

Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave - so he doesn't have to go for real. He has to prove himself somehow, feeling the terrible guilt reported by so many stay-at-home men during World War Two. The best you can do if you're Lewton is try to capture death's lightning spirit in a statue watching over lost souls, understanding in this the entire primal purpose behind art, a totemic sacrifice to the elder gods, a proxy, a giant burning man made of straw. And so the true artist never hides the skull in the ice cubes because when the death wish is externalized for posterity one achieves immortality, Death is pleased that you've honored him and so spares you for another year, the living ghost retina burn outline of his long ago flown-free Firebird cohering from the flames.

"Summertime Sadness" 

Del Rey trusts we're not going to kill ourselves just because she says it would a sweet gesture, would show her we really care, that we've played her lyrics backwards and prepared our pyres. That's her whole secret. How many films other than Lewton's and Lana's with this level of guts? I mean aside from THE BLACK SWAN? I sympathize with Kurt's daughter but really, Rolling Stone, it's you should be ashamed soliciting angry responses from a girl who never got to know her father any better than we did --to me that doesn't reflect badly on LDR's statement, or FBC's retort, only on your journalistic 'ethics,' RS. You who were a once mighty countercultural institution (even smart enough to be aware of the paradox in that phrase) but are now reduced to running back and forth passing gossip like some tattletale angling to be ground zero of a viral thread, leaping down the throat of anyone speaking out against the principles of bland nanny state life-for-life's-sake-PG-tedium, of rock as sanitized of genuine rebellion. Maybe you should go run another cover piece about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together again! Like all the other fallen giants, you've let 'trending' become the new version of stock market panics, all genuine rebellion trampled underfoot. Well let me tell you about another bunch of tramplers, and the shit they've come to trample is the flimsy wool over your own eyes! 

"National Anthem," ISLE OF THE DEAD

Most filmmakers and artists and musicians think largely of themselves, of their fortune and fame or lack thereof. But some of us know well that every film, post, or album we make will survive our own death, and therefore we know black magic's promise of eternal youth, of the ghost in the machine, the threading projector beam light measuring death out in still image ribbons that give the projected the only immortality there is, the phantom echo, the Sinatra ghost broadcasts still flying out into space. Compared to this eventual unearthing, any reward of fame in this lifetime is paltry. Some of us know we're dead already, some like Val Lewton and Lana Del Rey. They will not pretend that what the camera records was ever alive. They will not pretend life is just death at 24 frames per second. They know it's also the reverse, that the unafraid to die must enact rituals of death and transfiguration --for these rituals endure like the Zapruder footage will endure any memory of a living JFK. Watch THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN and a few Lana Del Rey videos in the same night (preferably the older ones--"National Anthem," "Video Games," "Born to Die," and "Summertime Sadness") and before you die, you shall see the America of ghosts.