Just when you thought Honeymoon as an album was buried in honor of Lana Del Rey’s imminent next project/casually unspoken world tour, footage for the complete “Honeymoon” video–formerly just a teaser for the song–goes and gets released. And while the pacing of the video is a standard sort of slow in the vein of “High by the Beach,” there is no buildup to anything other than occasionally interspersed stock footage scenes of a tiger.
Opening with a standardly serene Del Rey lying on her stomach on a hill overlooking a freeway, the tone is infused with an immediately sinister vibe. As she rises, a paused tour bus in the middle of the road abruptly turns, leaving a slightly spooked Del Rey to contemplate if perhaps she was being made a spectacle of. The screen then cuts to static, previously being the only segment of the video we had seen.
But after, Del Rey mimics the vibe of the “Ultraviolence” video, prepping for what could be her wedding or her honeymoon as she makes herself up with foundation, eyeshadow, the gamut. In fact, this is essentially the extent of the video’s premise, harkening back to the home movie, cobbled together style that made her illustrious with “Video Games.”
There is no love interest present, however–it’s just Del Rey meandering around a California property absently mouthing the lyrics to “Honeymoon.” After about two and a half minutes of her putting makeup on, we get more stock footage–this time of a police car and a “Ray of Light”-esque speed up of the streets of Old Hollywood.
The intimation that a tiger is prowling around her isolated property as she wanders by the pool alone is the sole element of the storyline that lends it any excitement and, ultimately, merely serves to accent the point that the themes of Del Rey’s work always expose loneliness, compounded by a fear of letting outsiders in. And whether or not Del Rey is subtly trying to suggest that her entire life is one long honeymoon with herself is at your discretion. But not many women find time to read The Road to Paradise Island while enjoying what should be a non-stop sexual safari.
In this way, there is poetry to the video, highlighting how often we’re really just alone in relationships. Primping and preparing for a man who will never seem to arrive, Del Rey throws a curveball toward the end by offering another stock image of a couple’s feet intertwined in the throes of passion. By the end, however, she’s returned to her perch on the picnic blanket overlooking the freeway, content to laze among the flowers like Alice. Or maybe she just got so bored by getting through the video without more scenes of the tiger that she had to take a nap.
