Jake Nava’s direction of music videos over the years has often favored a suburban milieu with a seedy underbelly. From Lindsay Lohan’s “Over” video to Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy” to Beyoncé’s “If I Were A Boy,” the common thread in his aesthetic is a suburban backdrop. That’s why, in June of 2014, when the video for Lana Del Rey’s “Shades of Cool” was released, it was not surprising to find that she had chosen Nava to direct. For Del Rey is nothing if not a Lynchian proponent of suburban settings offering a dark undertone. Though Los Angeles isn’t a suburb, per se, it is, as H. L. Mencken noted, “Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.” In this instance, we find ourselves in the suburb of what appears likely to be Silver Lake (though it has un certain Beverly Hills feel as well, a testament to the uniformity of the town thanks to all those palm trees). Del Rey seems, at times, to be a stalking neighbor waiting to make her move, walking the sidewalks in search of this silver fox and his blue Chevy. When she finally spots him, he gazes back at her before getting into the car and driving away. She feigns nonchalance but a scene immediately after of flowers superimposed by a gun with bullets raining down on both seems to indicate that one of them will be a goner in this relationship.
On September 13, 2009, the Mad Men episode, “The Fog,” aired. Betty Draper (January Jones), a character that could exist easily in the LDR song narrative universe, is about to have her third child with Don (Jon Hamm), despite recently having unearthed his penchant for extramarital affairs. The two’s previous reconciliation at a time when Betty is feeling vulnerable about her father Gene’s (Ryan Cutrona) deteriorating health becomes particularly ill-advised when it results in Betty getting pregnant. Still, despite initially trying to get it “taken care of,” she’s dissuaded by her doctor, who reminds her that a “woman of means”–particularly one of her age–has no reason to want something as tawdry as an abortion. So it is that she’s sent down the path of being made a mother a third time over. This makes her “twilight sleep” at the hospital inevitable. Induced by a mixture of scopolamine and morphine that would lead frequently to women in labor having hallucinations while still feeling the pain of creating existence (God probably passed this job off onto women precisely because he couldn’t go through it more than once), Betty has quite a few during her agonizing physical experience back in reality. As the serene “Me Voy A Morir De Tanto Amor” by Alberto Iglesias plays, Betty stares discomfitedly into the brightly shining light above her just before her hallucinated self walks through the hospital and out a door that leads back to her house, where her father is mopping the floor in a janitor’s uniform. Betty looks down to see that what he’s mopping is blood, turning to see her long ago deceased mother tell her, “You see what happens to people who speak up. Be happy with what you have.” Gene adds, “You’re a house cat: you’re very important and you have little to do.” Del Rey might feel slightly the same at her own “Daddy’s” house as she swims seductively for him in the pool and dances around wildly in his living room.
Mark Mahoney, who also plays Del Rey’s “old man” in the “West Coast” video, is the renowned celebrity tattoo artist (having obviously worked on Del Rey’s inked skin as well) that appears in “Shades of Cool” as an arcane force the chanteuse just can’t seem to reach. His steely blue eyes and impenetrable demeanor make him endlessly attractive to someone with both Daddy issues and a strong desire for validation. Something Betty Draper also knows all too well about. Singing of a man who sounds a lot like Don Draper himself, Del Rey laments, “But you are unfixable/I can’t break through your world/‘Cause you live in shades of cool/Your heart is unbreakable.” Betty has learned this the hard way (and will come to time and time again until things between her and Don ultimately come to a head) yet still can’t resist going back to him.
In her first hallucination, she is walking down a sidewalk all too similar to the backdrop Del Rey finds herself in as she stalks the prey that is her aloof lover. Except, instead of Betty encountering Don driving away from her (which would be much too overt of a metaphor for their dynamic), she looks up to see a caterpillar descend from the sky. Writhing in her hand, it does not look as though it will turn into a butterfly anytime soon (incidentally, Del Rey also has a song called “Happiness Is A Butterfly”). Nor, it would appear, will Betty. At least not so long as she remains Don’s little wife and the mother to his ever-expanding brood.
As for Del Rey’s tragic romance, she would rather delight in its doomed nature with as much sensuality as she can, biting into a strawberry here and swimming with that combination of allurement meets floating corpse technique (also present in the video for “Blue Jeans”) there. She doesn’t care when or how it ends, only that she gets as much mileage out of it while she still can. It would appear that, by the end of “The Fog,” Betty feels the same way, embracing her father’s harsh words about being a house cat. At least milking it for the time being until she finds a better out. For Del Rey, too, there’s always another escape in the form of a Daddy type on the horizon. One that looks, no doubt, just like Betty’s next husband, Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley). For a girl’s got to get her fulfillment of a father figure through various different men over the course of her life, none of which will ever live up to the original model, to be sure.
