MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Described as an alluring but vacuous accumulation of nostalgia, mimicry, and sex appeal, Lana Del Rey has been the target of harsh professional criticism since her album Born to Die was released in 2012. According to many onlookers, the singer embodies Fredric Jameson’s critique of art in a postmodern consumer society, devoid of innovation and capitalizing on the “imitation of dead styles” while both romanticizing sadness and self-professedly fucking her way to the top. While the romanticization of depression, addiction, and alienation is evident in many contemporary art forms, this paper will argue that the work of Lana Del Rey cannot be properly classified as vacuous pastiche. Rather, Lana’s project, by inverting affective and aesthetic orientations to patriarchal ideals, embraces a double movement of feminist protest – adopting a sad girl aesthetic which both legitimizes the pains of female embodiment in the contemporary American context and parodies the very centers of romantic vacuity strewn across the digital landscape. I highlight three of Lana Del Rey’s music videos - Ultraviolence, High on the Beach, and Video Games - and put them in conversation with the theoretical works of Sara Ahmed, Nigel Thrift, Fredric Jameson, and Linda Hutcheon. I argue that Lana’s uses of nostalgia, melancholy, and sexuality constitute a trans-contextualization that opens up space for “conversation points”, or affective and aesthetic disruptions that re-interpret the contemporary fields of culture, politics, gender, and sexuality. Unlike the vacuous pastiche represented on Tumblr blogs and idealizations of the “manic pixie dream girl,” Lana’s performances deliberately play with and arguably subvert postmodern, capitalist obsessions with nostalgia, passivity, and the sad female subject - restoring a sense of agency and protest to embodied melancholia and sadness.