MARINA has long been on that very short list of pop stars in the room who “shouldn’t be here.” At least from the perspective of “conventional wisdom.” Or “Hollywood wisdom,” if you will. Which is something of an oxymoron. And something MARINA herself has admittedly fallen prey to time and again, as we all have. For how can anyone evade the temptation of such a pervasive, all-encompassing machine? There at every corner of every day to infect us with its “ideals.”
It started with the movies, of course. Hollywood’s power only grew from the moment a film colony was established, and MARINA pays homage to the slow dismantling of that system of power leading up to 2017 by wearing a shirt featuring one of her “Purge the Poison” lyrics, “Harvey Weinstein Gone to Jail.” Well, that’s a start. Because even now, Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with its “woke” period. A prime example being MARINA’s realness continually trying to be “packaged” in some more palatable way. Hence, a website like Pop Crave calling “Venus Fly Trap” a “campy music video.” It’s not camp. It’s a sardonic tribute, a sendup of male-created pop culture (complete with a certain Quentin Tarantino aesthetic that he himself ripped off from 70s cinema). But as usual, the rapier wit of someone from the island of England doesn’t always translate in America.
Not everyone will immediately pick up on another one of MARINA’s nods either. Specifically to her typically most beloved era, Electra Heart, whom she says appears as “Adult Electra” via a short blonde wig (that kind of makes her look like Jean Harlow meets St. Vincent in her Daddy’s Home incarnation). The purpose being, perhaps, that if even Electra Heart has realized it’s time to shed her housewife’s frock and topple the patriarchy without being so lovelorn about cads anymore, one knows real progress has been made.
Before Electra Heart, however, it was from the time of MARINA’s first album (back when she was Marina and the Diamonds), The Family Jewels, that she knew the unhealthy fixation with Hollywood might very well do her in, alter ego or not. And if it could do that to her, then surely it must be having the same effect on everyone else—famous or not. Thus, she illustriously declared on a song called, what else, “Hollywood,” “Hollywood infected your brain/You wanted kissing in the rain/Oh, oh/Living in a movie scene/Puking American dreams.” She seems to parodying just that as she plays a 60s-era film actress in the video for “Venus Fly Trap,” complete with a Venus fly trap-looking monster in the spirit of Alien or Creature from the Black Lagoon.
This monster is undoubtedly a metaphor for the absurd yet terrifying beast that’s chased her throughout her career: the expectation to fit a pop star’s mold. Sex it up, and don’t be too thought-provoking. But as MARINA points out in the song, “I never quite fit in to that Hollywood thing/I didn’t play that game for the money or the fame,” adding, “I know that money ain’t important/And it don’t mean you’re the best” (please tell that to Jeff Bezos). It’s in more than somewhat direct contrast to what MARINA’s peer, Lana Del Rey said on “God Knows I Tried” (from her own Hollywood-centric album, Honeymoon), with, “I’ve got nothing much to live for ever since I found my fame.” But for MARINA, fame was the launching point for her determination to make a social change in this world. For the only thing more powerful than film to do just that is music. So long as it is music made on MARINA’s terms, not the suits’ or the label’s. As she phrased it on “Oh No!,” “Don’t need money, don’t need fame/I just wanna make a change.”
Another newly-minted iconic line from MARINA’s song catalogue is the intro to “Purge the Poison”: “All my friends witches and we live in Hollywood.” But MARINA wants to live in the Hollywood of her and her fellow witches’ own making. One not ruled by toxic masculinity (clearly still the case, if the recent release of Wrath of Man is any indication) and misogyny, which would have them burned at the stake, but a peaceful New World Order (as she also said: “It’s a New World Order, everything just falls away”). A resolution that clearly can’t come about without blowing up the ultimate emblem of one of the most impacting and brainwashing patriarchal systems of all-time: Hollywood, or rather, its famed sign.
So naturally, she rigs the sign to go kabluey, watching the flames blaze from the comfort of her car (a convertible, naturally) down below. She smiles serenely as the end of a septic era reflects back in her sunglasses. And yes, if anyone can make this dream real, it’s MARINA, who has remained indefatigably true to herself throughout her career, in an industry that prides itself on eradicating most women’s identities for the sake of their “look.” But why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus fly tap? And no, it’s not a coincidence that MARINA is using the symbol of the vagina dentata myth to get her message across to anyone still desperately clinging to this male-dominated industry (and world).
If that makes men have “castration anxiety,” then maybe they need to re-learn what it is to “be a man.” Otherwise, we’ll never fully move forward as a society.
