Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans

With stark sunbathing and alligators in swimming pool, Lana Del Rey’s new video for her song Bue Jeans is dripping with the same things that made this magazine (and many, many others) sit up and pay attention: post Empire symbolism, genuinely uncomfortable imagery and artful pop.

First thoughts? There’s obvious touches of Helmut Newton and, in that it’s about the way the American dream interacts tragically with personal relations and bad things in LA swimming pools, Sunset BLVD going on. Both things that are big ticks, but mostly, it’s about Lana Del Rey herself, a film shot inside her life-story. Lizzie Grant has already said that Lana Del Rey is an art-project, and while Video Games and the original vid for Blue Jeans were both films of Lana Del Rey, this is one that Lana Del Rey would dig. It is also one that stars the same person who plays Lana Del Rey. In other words, it’s unbearably metafictional and perfectly sad, sexy and blank. Does that make sense?