As the more approachable “twin” to Link Wray’s cherished 1958 hit single “Rumble,” the record’s B-side, “The Swag” is fittingly used to set the sonic tone of Gucci’s latest retro-inspired ad campaign for Gucci Guilty, with Lana Del Rey and Jared Leto championing fragrances both pour homme and pour femme. With a promotion that began in May of 2018 on the evening of the surprisingly non-scandalizingly themed Met Gala, Del Rey and Leto appeared with the current creative director of Gucci, Alessandro Michele, to tease the aesthetic wet dream of their forthcoming collaboration. And it’s one that definitely harkens back to the Yoann Lemoine-directed “Born to Die” video that launched Del Rey’s baroque glory into public consciousness in late 2011.
In certain respects, it’s almost as though Leto has stepped in to fulfill the Bradley Soileau (whatever happened to him, anyway?) role–had his love with Del Rey in the “Born to Die” narrative not been so fated for tragedy. Thusly we have: Animals! Grocery shopping (with an ostrich)! Dancing in a laundromat! All the whimsy that might have occurred had Del Rey taken a less Romeo and Juliet tack with Soileau.
The Del Rey aesthetic is all over the commercial, in fact, especially with the somewhat grim featuring of Courtney Love as her and Leto’s aging and presumably curmudgeonly diner waitress. Perhaps, “servin’ up God in a burnt coffee pot for the triad“? And wondering what she did wrong in life to not end up sitting next to a hot guy while eating greasy diner food in couture like her present customer.
Del Rey’s love of the late 50s/early 60s pastiche is in something of a contrast to the egalitarian nature of promoting a fragrance for both genders, and yet, it would seem that only she, this strange anti-feminist, could get away with such a thing in the twenty-first century–it is, after all, presented with such Wes Anderson kitsch. When else have the domestic duties of washing dirty underwear and driving a car home from the store seemed so cinematic and glamorous? And, naturally, to accentuate this alternate “Born to Die” reality, there is a tiger throughout; but rather than a languid and surrendering presence–like the two flanking Del Rey next to her “Born to Die” throne–this one seems to be a casual yet dynamic talisman of the exotic and glittering (a.k.a. what your life could be if you plunked down on some Gucci Guilty). The tiger’s projection onto the window of a generic “shitty hotel room” as Del Rey and Leto sit on the bed applying their parfums also provides the requisite dichotomy of LDR’s drenched in drama backdrops and lo-fi glossiness lifestyle. Or at least that of her alter ego, the one that folds laundry while wearing diamonds and Gucci. The one that went on to exist in a picturesque relationship that wasn’t “Born to Die” doomed. That didn’t result in a figurative and literal car wreck with Del Rey being held in bloody pietà pose. No, this Jared Leto fellow is her new chance at romance done right–the kind not sullied by hot, violent sexual chemistry and the girlish youth that takes abuse in stride.
Directed by Glen Luchford and Alessandro Michele himself, it seems highly likely that he was very open to Del Rey’s collaborative suggestions as her penchant for animal-oriented symbolism (there’s also a snake–as though this isn’t a reference to her Tropico video, in turn referencing, obviously, the bible) and Courtney Love surely could not have been masterminded by either of the men in her Met Gala Holy Trinity. As though to give a little wink at this fact, the presence of an owl, connoting wisdom and femininity (not to mention mystery and arcane knowledge–Del Rey’s witchy bread and butter) is paraded in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery as Jared Leto closes his eyes and appears to have no awareness of where he is or who he is (again, kind of like Bradley Soileau in “Born to Die”).
Noticeably in “BTD,” it is Soileau driving the car with a sadistic expression on his face as Del Rey sits in the front seat looking uncertain, the open road in front of them signifying the same. At the end of the Gucci Guilty commercial, conversely, Del Rey is the one driving the car home. Because, (in contrast to the visuals for “Burning Desire,” which also features a tiger in the form of stock footage), as the video for “White Mustang” taught us, Del Rey must always take the reins in the end. Which she clearly has for this commercial.
