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 perfect in its nonissue pitch that Lana Del Rey and her salivate-on-cue detractors; it is cool to die young, take it from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned hipster who missed all his chances. The only freedom from irrelevance whistles in the obsidian wind that whistles up through gratings along that other sewer's shore, because in death comes the realization that one's own art has lived forever: 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 and writing for the future selves of yourself.

All death markers in the cane field point to Val Lewton.

It was no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started around yesterday-ish, as if the first shot of a starting gate, 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 WW2, as Val Lewton's best work was made in 1942-43, suffused with a deep paranoia about being left back in the States, away from the action, so far from the action no bombs will ever fall there, so needing to dredge death back up from the ground like crude oil; like a modern art exhibit after the public has drifted home and the main lights are off and only a half-deaf and blind janitor slowly mops up, pausing at strange noises, the crumpled up invites and provenance lists rustling like stage tumbleweeds.

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both understand the ebb tide of death, and how when it washes the land clean the timeless immortals are revealed. Heaven in Lana land is just her, Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus, all looming on the Max Parish heavenly plane like death coaches. For Val Lewton death is already here, motionless and waiting in crevices of the ancient statues and in the rustling canefields and even in a calypso song. His idols are literally etched in stone, all-seeing through blank eyes, and his demons are all vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat.

"Tropico"

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.


So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy I say hey, be grateful it's 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. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium, or platinum cards, or church. You can follow her around all you want, like Boris Karloff obsessing over the hottie Greek peasant maybe-vampire in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD, you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs, reigning down on you torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on Lana Del Rey, a whole nation of self-appointed sanity... it does not slow your rush to death one hourglass grain.


Del Rey knows, 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. 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") 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, connecting to the inescapable fact that no Hollywood lesbian couple is ever superfluous - they come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece; hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in WALKED, Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring in LEOPARD MAN and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE.

It's fate, baby. The difference is in the fate. Kiss me once before you go, into the deep shadows. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool, Lewton and Tourneur have snuck a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize it the way Paul Schrader's remake did), 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; it infuses everything, it extends deeper down than the average bourgeois respect or tenure tracks, 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. Born to die. Die to live. Forever in Blue Jane the Lion Lana Del Rey. When death is inevitable, as it always is, a vast sea of your blood always a skinsuit away, 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. Hell yeah if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. 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. That hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirit. It opened the door right up and coasted him through. When we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only the cowards for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us the only cure-all is music and films. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood, her faux-period home movies painstaking in their iconic recreations, like the accident fetishists in CRASH.

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).

The Seventh Victim

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 they 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 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.

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, the dreamy sense of being entombed only b-movie sets provide. America's overriding fear is of somehow losing itself inside a cheap hotel room set--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country so remote and far from the action not even a single enemy bomb can find it, only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the mist of 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 for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes - accept our shadow's projection, just 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 vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left to star 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.

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

Lana Del Rey sees the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema; but she's all alone, like any phantom lost in the whirling echo of death. 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 "Maisie" and "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 your DNA.  




Lana Del Rey, herself, her videos, most of them (not "Tropico"), her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage, is to return Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, down Route 66; to make music for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dea--but without Morissey-moping or emo posture--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. And to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's SEVENTH VICTIM, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway.

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 but Lana Del Rey avoids the trap by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, of the death wish Baby New Year. She is her own exploiter, the manager of her singular vision --where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles. Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave. They are the ones who never try to hide the skull in the ice cubes because when the death wish is externalized for posterity it loses its power and so one achieves, in the constant airplay of a =funeral, the true immortality, the living ghost retina burn outline. 




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)--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! 



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. Those people are named 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 that the unafraid to die must enact rituals of death and transfiguration --for these rituals endure like Zapruder. 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.