Lana Del Rey has released a new video for her new single ‘Carmen’ over the weekend, and it is everything she has used us to. It is very much in the style of her previous clip for ‘Video Games’, a collage of false and true vintage footage, starlets of the 50s, pole dancers, a motorcyclist, drugs, sentimentalism and violins, nostalgic views of Manhattan, old cartoons and Lana posing with Nancy Sinatra’s hairdo or roses in her hair.
She is sexy and hot but she seems to be aware of it a little bit too much if you see what I mean, she overuses her sex-appeal, she simpers, and at the end, all this becomes a cliché of the bad beautiful dolled-up-girl wasting her life.
As we are looking at old clips of the life of some star who hasn’t existed (yet), a made-up nostalgia for a dream rather than anything else, the question of authenticity arises, as it is usually the case for Lana Del Rey.
She is describing the video as a ‘Bio Pic’ in the YouTube description, and sure it is well done, but you can’t keep thinking about this curious impression to be… fooled? Sure you know there is nothing true in all this, as there is obviously very little (if anything) of her real life, but she is selling it as a biopic, assuming we know it is fake… and her little habit to play with reality and fiction becomes mindfucking.
And I guess she added this out-of-the-blue Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie No.1’ ending to increase the artsy side of the video, but may be she is trying a little too hard then.