Like fellow Brit, Charli XCX with “1999,” Dua Lipa seems well-aware of the continued cultural relevance of the Titanic. That said, the video for her new song, “We’re Good” (from a reissue of Future Nostalgia called The Moonlight Edition), takes place on said boat, with Lipa in the role of “nightly entertainment.” In other words, she sings for the guests in the fine dining room every evening.
Among said “guests” are the lobsters in the tank, watching and waiting to be snapped up by the chef as they have absolutely no control over their fate (so, yes, they’re a mirror of the people on the ship who are about to have no control over their own, either). Opening on a shot of Noël-Nicolas Coypel’s “The Abduction of Europa,” the painting depicts the watery chaos that ensues when Zeus abducts, you guessed it, Europa. It’s an appropriate visual, for the passengers on the Titanic are about to look very similar to all the frantic ones in the water of Coypel’s painting.
Singing with a sultry calm, Lipa sardonically references her being called out for constantly traveling throughout the pandemic with the lyric, “I’m on an island.” She then adds, “Even when you’re close.” We see her performing from the lobster’s POV in the tank, his claws bound together with red ribbons tied in a bow that lend an added sadness. That the lobster keeps looking on in horror as he sees what destiny has in store for his fellow “tank mates” doesn’t make it any more pleasant to watch. And, in many respects, our empathy is far more invested in the captive crustaceans than with the people on board who we know are doomed to sink.
The symbol of the Titanic is another relevant one for Lipa to choose as the backdrop of this song, for not only is life itself a sinking ship right now, but so is the construct of trying to make a relationship stay afloat when it’s simply hit one too many icebergs along the way.
During “intermission,” which offers a pause by cutting back to the painting, Lipa serves up another gown–and another lobster plucked from the tank (though the third time we see her change, we have to wonder if it’s a bit overkill for a single night’s “show”). The idea that lobsters “mate for life” (or rather, are serial monogamists committed for two weeks at a time) is additionally a tongue-in-cheek symbol for the theme of this track, which provides the breakup resolution, “I think it’s pretty plain and simple, we gave it all we could/It’s time I wave goodbye from the window/Let’s end this like we should and say we’re good.” The “waving goodbye from the window” element also speaks to the lobster’s perch inside his own “window”–the glass tank.
Directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, the video’s narrative reaches its inevitable denouement, with water bursting forth through every crevice of the boat. And just in time to make the pipe malfunction on the stove so that the lobster gets tossed back into the tank in a frenzy (before he ends up being “fully freed” into the ocean). This is an added metaphor for being “thrown back into the sea” with all the other “fish,” just like Lipa is about to be in terms of getting into a life raft. Whereupon both will search for a new mate to start the whole process over again. One in which Lipa might again find herself saying, “We’re Good,” and move onto the next. ‘Cause this is one girl who don’t stick around on sinking ships.
