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Lana Del Rey is the Millennial Joan Didion

Liz Belsky
Jul 21, 2017 · 9 min read

In 2011, when I was 19, I moved from Southern California to New York, and shortly thereafter, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem became one of my favorite books. Didion’s first essay collection, an exploration of time spent with hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, captured a specific moment in time, written in a style that mimicked the laid-back style of hippie-speak in the 1960s, and followed an aimless host of lost souls, poseurs and wannabe rebels in search of drugs and God only knew what else. In 2012, Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die was released, a baroque pop record. Del Rey’s persona, a psychosexual fusing of Nabokov, Americana, and Brooklyn hipster, became the subject of countless critical thinkpieces: she was simultaneously everything wrong with white women, hipsters, millennials, people who misread Lolita, nepotism, and the music bookers at SNL. But in spite of the deluge of criticism, Lana Del Rey has staying power; her fifth studio album, Lust for Life, just dropped. So I’ll take this opportunity to say what I’ve been saying for years: Lana Del Rey is the millennial answer to Joan Didion.

The obsessively detailed dwelling on California, and LA specifically, in their work is the biggest similarity — but they’re both transplants at heart. So much of The Year of Magical Thinking is about the details of just existing in a tiny, thirty-block radius of New York — we had dinner here, Quintana got married here, John died here, we took this flight from this airport, and so on. These recurring details that frame a life lived in the most comfortable, nothing-out-of-the-comfort-zone transplant way. Contrast that with Paradise, an EP set within Beverly Hills and the West side of Los Angeles, and Ultraviolence, Del Rey’s first full-length California album, where she moves her eternally lovelorn self westward. The rebirth of Honeymoon, slower and more chilled-out than anything before it, with its evocatively Hollywood cover art:

“…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”

Baby, if you wanna leave
Come to California
Be a freak like me, too
Screw your anonymity
Loving me is all you need to feel
Like I do

The general feeling of anxiety and dread and mortality permeates so much of their work — Born to Die might well be an alternative title for Blue Nights. Their work gets darker as they both get older, and it never stops dwelling on death. Death is a preeminent theme in both Didion and Del Rey’s canons. Death and California. There is nothing in the world but death and California.

“I wish I was dead already,” Lana Del Rey told a Guardian interviewer in 2014.

“Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep,” Didion wrote in Blue Nights.

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Your soul is haunting me
And telling me
That everything is fine
But I wish I was dead
(dead like you)

There’s the question of their personas as well. “Joan Didion,” the myth, is not Joan Didion the person, and we all know this at this point. If you say “Joan Didion,” people think California. They think the house in Brentwood and the gardenias in the pool and the Corvette and the curtains and taking the Concord to Paris with John and the endless dinner parties with glamorous friends. They think of the pale green organza dress from her eighth grade graduation speech, the dress Quintana Roo wore when they had her adoption party at the Mexican restaurant in Malibu. If you’re a New Yorker in 2017, you think the Celine ads and the Lithub tote bags (and god, I still covet those tote bags). Joan Didion and Lana Del Rey are both names that come with an aesthetic attached, a conveyance of disaffected coolness. “Lana Del Rey” isn’t a real person, of course, and anyone who listens to these albums as anything other than very well-done narrative art is crazy — that’s true of all pop musicians, nobody out there is pouring their whole story into their 3-minute singles for radio, but it’s particularly transparent in this case. The Lana Del Rey canon exists on a “write what you know” plane of true, deeply-felt emotions and feelings, but otherwise it’s just good short-story writing that draws on 20th-century imagery and kinda dense intertextuality — from Nabokov and JFK and Sinatra and the 50s-60s in her early work, to Robert Altman and the 70s into David Lynch and the 80s, all the way to

And they’re cool. They both have “cool” as an affect down pat, and they’ve both always been COOL, rather than being preoccupied with being taken seriously as cerebral, feminist artists despite having their heyday in twin eras, the ’70s and the ’10s, when feminism (or “feminism”) as a branding choice was at its most lucrative. I’m fascinated by it, everything about this. Lana’s current retrofuturism-meets-Silicon Valley vibe: “You’re part of the past, but now you’re the future” — “I’m more interested in SpaceX and space exploration and our intergalactic possibilities” than in talking about whether Taylor Swift’s a feminist. Neatly sidestepping the idea that a woman’s creative work must either be“fake” and “a persona” or “solipsistic” and “confessional.” Why can’t our creative output be somewhere in the middle? I realize that for the ladybloggers of the oughts, confessional solipsism has become the professional standard — that women writers are expected as a class to rip out the blood and guts of their personal traumas and lay them out, neatly and bare, for the internet’s casual consumption and criticism. I understand why it might bother people that women whose professional fronts are clearly not in line with that standard continue to thrive. But at the same time— isn’t that the point? Or at least the midpoint? Of what we want feminism to accomplish? That women can have personas and not have to engage in this constant Guts-Exposing For Greater Feminism? The right to talk about your traumas from a distance and not for maximum audience catharsis.

And, sure, let’s get into the feminist thing. Because this is what draws me to both of them, even as someone who identifies as a feminist — their casual dismissal of feminism as a branding tool. I get it, I respect it, and I’m drawn to it. This is where I get REALLY interested in the similarities they both share — neither is outwardly anti-feminist. Neither is of the insufferable Tomi Lahren-esque, “Checkmate, snowflakes, I did just fine without feminism!!!” mold. Which is deeply obnoxious, so thank god. Rather, neither of them wants to be viewed primarily through the lens of “this person identifies as a feminist, so their work must either be Feminist or Not Feminist Enough,” and thus they both have chosen to neatly sidestep the entire issue.

Joan Didion and Lana Del Rey both write about weak women. Not because women are inherently weak, but because people have weaknesses and they write from an inherently feminine point of view, a POV that is obsessed with the particular ennui and dread that comes with being a woman in America. (A white woman, of course. But a woman still. A white man couldn’t write Ultraviolence, or Play It As It Lays.) And their work is about white womanhood, but not white feminism. This is what Didion and Del Rey have both chosen to communicate: their work is not representative of all women. Their work isn’t “feminist.” They are the beneficiaries of feminism, certainly, as are we all, but their work comes from a place that never claims to tell All Women’s Stories. It’s a specific POV that tells one specific story. And for that, they get called “antifeminist.” It’s not antifeminist to acknowledge that women are people and people have weaknesses. It’s not antifeminist to use the aesthetics of the past as a tool to tell a story about the future.

“More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of women who did not really understand the movement’s ideolog ical base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists had struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish‐fulfillment, self‐loathing and bitter fancies. To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely.”

“For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested.”

Because — this is where it’s brilliant. The minute you say “I’m a feminist” as a female creator, you aren’t allowed to be a flawed human being anymore. You’re just a cipher for the identity politics of the viewer, listener, or reader, and someone who must constantly execute perfect ideologically pure politics while still somehow being an artist who tells stories with conflicts and flawed characters and arcs about human imperfections. You can’t say “I’m a feminist creator, but my work doesn’t necessarily have to be feminist.” As soon as you lay claim to feminism as an artist, you lose the right to a subjective experience — you must represent all women, everywhere, or else you will be chewed up and spat out by Big Thinkpiece and the Economy of Clicks.

I think about this a lot. I think about how much I want to disavow the idea of “being feminist” in this culture that is so obsessed with performing politics rather than living them, and simply exist, exist as a person who holds strong beliefs about equity and opportunity and the power of women — all women — but who doesn’t have to represent women as a demographic every time I open my mouth and say something that might be stupid, or crass, or unthinking, or deeply, irrevocably privileged. I think about how Lana and Joan have both always dodged the question of being “feminist artists” to simply be artists who are women, who make their things without ever being forced to answer for all women, and I respect the hell out of it. Certainly, I respect it more than I respect the craven co-opting of “girl power” (is it still the 90s?) and pop feminism by PR shops and managers and celebrities.

But this isn’t about what the internet has wrought on feminist discourse — it’s about Lana and Joan, right? Anyway, point is — there’s just so much there. The inherent feminine sadness of existence that does not necessarily have to do with the politics of being a woman, the highs and lows of an all-encompassing, all-consuming love. The beauty of California, of New York, of being eternally sad and lovestruck in the right places. The beauty of the place you’re from and the place you love and the person you love and all the little scene-setting details that make up the place that you are, the things that you are, the things you feel from moment to moment.

Lana and Joan are the sad girl’s patron saints, cultural touchstones for the melancholy and introspective.

Liz Belsky

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Pop culture, politics, etc.

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