Love is a sign of our badness

on loving lana del rey and on loving wildly

I wrote this essay a while ago and never knew what to do with it. It’s about US American mythologies, Tumblr, giving over to desire, wanting to be free but also wanting to be loved. Mainly though it’s about my favourite popstar: Lana del Rey. Happy Valentine’s day, and please: give over to love’s wildness whenever you can.

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1. You took my sadness out of context

The Mayflower Pilgrims were hysterical when they arrived at the edge of America at last. God sends his greatest challenges to test his favourite children, it’s true, and even the most devout are liable to succumb to doubt’s invasions. Doubt gets into the psyche just like the leaks that got into that other boat, the abandoned boat, The Speedwell, which had let in so much water before they’d even set sail that it gave up and half of the Pilgrims were sent back to the Netherlands while The Mayflower voyaged forward alone. ‘Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don’t know why’ sings Lana Del Rey in ‘Born to Die’, a song about living fast in the face of your own mortality. ‘You like your girls insane!’ She addresses a subject who could be a lover or who could be God. On the wild pilgrimage to a vaguely promised New World, it wasn’t uncommon for those early white settlers to go mad at sea. How could they not? It was preordained, to be expected. Just as it is with young women who mistake their lovers for God. Water and madness have always intertwined—by the time the Mayflower sailed in 1620, the ship of fools trope had been troubling the Western psyche for hundreds of years. From at least the medieval period, the mad were kept at sea: real ships carried fleets of lunatics from port to port without ever landing. This established what Michel Foucault would call ‘the madman’s liminal position.’ The threshold itself became the prison for those kept indefinitely in that state of flux, doomed to come and go and never arrive. Some pilgrims grew to love this strange threshold, where desperation evolves and movement itself becomes home. After sixty-five days and in sight of land at last, one Dorothy Bradford was quite hysterical: she jumped all the way overboard as the boat was anchored in Plymouth Harbour, and drowned in perfectly still, clear waters.

Who in the world emanates the high frequency of distilled hysteria quite like the white American woman? In a song called ‘Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it,’ Lana becomes a ‘24/7 Sylvia Plath’ who tears around in her nightgown and writes in blood on her walls. Googling the lyrics of this song brings up the suggestion, ‘did Sylvia Plath actually write in her own blood?’ Like most canonical Sad Girls who live on proverbial edges, both Lana and Plath love the seaside. ‘I’m mostly at the beach!’ Lana exclaimed in a 2019 interview, while her lyrics take us endlessly up and down the lengths of the American coasts. She misses Long Beach and she misses you, and when life becomes too much, all she wants to do is to get high by the beach. In Plath the sea is something primordial, sinister and luxurious and annihilating, but Lana’s Californian songs dwell on the seaside, that liminal space she adopts as a shorthand for being between worlds, a space representing freedom but also freedom’s shadow, which is loneliness. Both women are tantalised by the wildness the sea promises, and both know that to be free in the Lana way – which is to say, existentially – often comes with a price too high to bear. But like Simone Weil, another canonical Sad Girl once said: ‘The sea is not less beautiful because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.’

On the cover of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana’s on a boat too. At first glance it looks like a gleaming idyll, like one of the Slim Aarons photos she sometimes sings about. She leans in front of a billowing American flag and reaches with one arm toward the camera lens with the other wrapped around one of her many interchangeable hot guys. Look more closely and you’ll see, not unlike those first hysterical pilgrims, that she’s escaping too: the land behind her is completely engulfed by flames. ‘Hawaii just missed that fireball, L.A. is in flames, it's getting hot’ she sings on ‘The Greatest ', a song about missing the way things used to be. The Atlantic called this album her ‘obituary for America’, but by then she’d already been keening a dead America for years. ‘I believe in the country America used to be’, she said in 2012, in the breathy, spoken word introduction to ‘Ride.’ And: ‘I believe in the person I want to become.’ This is the essence of her project: a kaleidoscopic resurrection of an America that once was (that might have been), and the Frankenstein construction of a self built out of its embers. In the nine-minute video that accompanies ‘Ride,’ neon-lit shots of Lana leaning over a pinball machine and passing a cigarette back and forth between red acrylic nails as one of her many bandana-clad trucker daddies gyrates against her, intersperse with shots of her standing in golden hour light at the edge of a canyon wrapped in the American flag, which billows helplessly in the hot dust wind. She laments her predicament: ‘I drive fast, I am alone at midnight!’ Singing blues has been getting old and like so many of us, all she wants is a full-time daddy to whisk her away from the pavement forever. ‘Ride’ is peak-Lana world building—under neon she smokes in a gas station, forlorn and beautiful among the truckers, and then she’s all lit up in the lonely glimmer of blue stage lights looking like she might burst into tears, but her hair is long and perfect and her hoop earrings are big enough for one of her daddy-men to fit their fist right through. She shoots guns into the air from the back of a motorbike as a fire burns wildly behind her. She screams: ‘I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy!’

2. This is what makes us girls

Lana came into my life shortly after The Bell Jar and just before Twin Peaks, and the medium through which they were channelled was my glittering, ever moving Tumblr feed. It was the summer of 2011 when she first appeared – captioned and frozen in sepia gifs – the summer I turned sixteen. The opening church bells of her first single ‘Video Games’ sounded a death knell for the scuzzy party aesthetic which bloomed under the harsh fluorescence of Terry Richardson’s studio lights, that we would retroactively come to call ‘indiesleaze.’ Lana, precariously balanced between nihilistic and naïve, was the discount-store psychopomp that carried us from the decadence of that party into the more melancholic kind of messiness that comes with waking up the morning after. Of course, Lana could only emerge in an America that was post-9/11, and post-2008 crash, but before Trump and the adult-content ban that killed Tumblr. But she was all wrong in the new moral posturing of the 2010s too, our weird collective piety that revelled in perpetual indignation. Following a decade of cruelty and excess, a shift had happened, and Lana never quite caught up. I loved her for getting it wrong. Her flower crown made a wilting halo: in the land of gods and monsters she was an angel, looking to get fucked hard.

We were sixteen and bored and too online and so when Lana dropped ‘Video Games’ we reposted its accompanying melancholy collage of light-dappled celluloid endlessly between stills from The Virgin Suicides and gifs of Audrey Horne dancing alone in the RR diner. From rainy Ireland I dreamed of being sad and blonde in America. ‘Video Games’ was perfect, it felt like the endless scroll of Tumblr itself. The frames of Lana up-close pouting into her webcam were uncomfortably intimate, just like our teenage blogs were. Do you remember those images? Landscape-oriented, front-facing camera, heavy on the winged eyeliner and light on resolution. Then there were flickering vintage shots of the Hollywood sign, boys on skateboards, and a drunken Paz de la Huerta stumbling through gold sequins and a flashing sea of paparazzi. Girls recklessly clung to men on motorbikes speeding through flickering sunlight, and an American flag fluttered slowly with great, unbearable sadness, just like the hopeless little flags waved by Little Edie Bouvier Beale as she danced proudly for the camera in Grey Gardens, through a house stuffed full of American rot. Much like the project of America itself, Lana’s work is an archive of myth, her medium a collage of endless quotation, and that most American invention – the pop song. Sometimes Lana is a magpie picking through America’s carcass, finding what gleams in its entrails. Similarly to the David Lynch movies she could have fallen right out of, a nation’s trash becomes her treasure. She moves between old money New York, to nameless motels and diners, to the hills of Hollywood and the lost counter-culture ghosts of California, metabolising every landscape as she goes. The narrative is the highway; the motel rooms, casinos, and her interchangeable lovers’ arms are the chapters along the way. Lana comes and goes, depending, as one of her favourite quotations goes, on the kindness of strangers.

Mark Fisher never wrote about Lana, but I’m convinced Lana has read him, even more so since she exited her recent Coachella set (on the back of some guy’s motorbike, of course) to the sound of The Caretaker, one of the artists Fisher used to exemplarise the condition of disillusioned belatedness in the contemporary music he called hauntological. Identifiable by a tendency toward the ghostly sounds of analogue recording methods and a pervasive sense of melancholy about the broken promise of future that never materialised, Fisher diagnosed this ‘slow cancellation of the future’ as the feeling of being caught between ‘the no longer and the not yet’, of having arrived after the Gold Rush. Lana knows all about this— in her world there is no looking ahead, only back. Instead, she wistfully assembles imagined pasts, where other people’s song lyrics are spliced in on top of her own as she loops endless archival videos of cars driving into the sunset, never really getting anywhere at all, singing ‘we go so fast we don’t move.’ This results in a kind of woozy, cyclical unreality, where the landscapes of her songs feel as mythical a cartography to me as, say, the landscapes of Ancient Greece. Like all good poets, Lana understands a tradition of resurrecting and retelling the stories of your forefathers. Lyrics like ‘take a walk on the wild side’; ‘girls just want to have fun’; ‘dancing in the dark’ and ‘like a rolling stone’ are scattered into her songs like pieces of folklore, where the American girl’s Odyssey is a drive through the desert on the back of a motorbike, into the cigar smoke night of a Las Vegas casino. Sometimes she’s the woman in hot-pink mohair in the booth at the end of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas – another regular reference of hers – while elsewhere she’s Barbara Loden’s Wanda waking up next to some nameless gangster in another wrote-off motel room. She’s Lolita in heart-shaped sunglasses waiting on the lawn, she’s Anna Nicole Smith’s wedding photos, she’s Daisy Buchanan glittering in the twilight of Gatsby’s blue gardens, as much as she is also Gatsby himself, yearning and alone at the end of every party. She is both the dreamer and the dream. Instead of a green light, Lana’s symbolic redemption is the flickering neon sign of a roadside dive bar, where she can lean over a slot machine in Levi 501 cut-offs and sing, that cherry coke you serve is fine.

3. You’re beautiful and I’m insane

Lana is a poet in the classical sense and so her subjects are love and death. She gets in hot water with feminists because, as she keeps telling us, she’ll do anything for love, which often seems as much a fated doom as death and yet also the reason to live. She looks directly into the camera, positioning her face at an angle – her best angle, we assume – looks at us through full Priscilla Presley eye make-up, and sings, ‘it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you’ to a hopeless lover she just can’t quit. Just like Charles Bukowski, another one of Tumblr’s most oft-reblogged poets advised, Lana’s out to find what she loves and let it kill her.

Like Lana, America wants what it’s most afraid of. America has been telling me what to want my whole life: Poe with his poetical dead women. Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic. The death of a beautiful (white) woman, the most terrible thing in the world, most desirable thing in the world. Lana’s songs push this eroticisation of worst fear to its hysterical extreme; ‘if he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that could happen to a girl who’s already hurt?’ She asks, and elsewhere sings ‘sweet serial killer … I love you just a little too much.’ The women who populated our Tumblrs – Sylvia Plath, Laura Palmer, the Lisbon sisters of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides– all had something in common, aside from being white and blonde and beautifully dead, they were all women who did not help themselves. Women who skirted danger, darkness and the deepest wells of melancholy, but who couldn’t, either out of inability or refusal, do anything to save themselves. At the time, Audrey Woolen’s Sad Girl Theory told us this sadness was a form of political refusal in itself, and we felt so seen; we nodded along in exultant melancholy. It’s nothing new to suggest that the collective desires of Western Culture have been largely founded upon eternal fairy tales about beautiful women waiting to be rescued. These women all venture into a territory beyond the familiar happy endings – they don’t rescue themselves, but they don’t let anyone else do the rescuing either. In this world, like the Jenny Holzer sculpture that also lived forever on our Tumblrs warned us: MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE. In the world these women inhabit the greatest threat to women’s lives is men. They each approach romantic, heterosexual love as the great pharmakon, the great redemption that might save us from our suffering, and yet each in turn demonstrate its spectacular failure to do so.

I know my love for Lana is, quote-unquote, problematic. I can’t tell if it’s my distance or proximity to her that means I can’t look away. It tugs at a contradiction in my being: on one hand, I remain suspicious and critical of a mass-culture industry perpetuated by and in the interest of shady billionaires, on the other; I so helplessly stan a diva. She’s a pop star who is in some ways like me, but who is in every other way an unfathomable impossibility. I have never been to California, and I’m not quite white enough to comfortably occupy her world-building. My personal mythos contains no diners, no motels, no biker gangs, and fewer still casinos. It does have Sylvia Plath, the occasional transactional affair with older men when I was young and open to persuasion, a love of David Lynch movies, years of singing sad songs for money, an over-reliance on the open-road as a means of self-actualisation, an escapist preoccupation with my own manifestation of freedom, and a deep summertime melancholy that returns every year around my birthday, which happens to be very close to Lana’s, both of us ruled by the moon, born under the sign of Cancer. Lana constantly sings about July, the Fourth of July fireworks a continual shorthand for her own ecstatic forms of self-ignition. The closest I get to Lana I think, is the realisation, now that I am perilously close to the end of my twenties, that it’s true—every decision of my life has been spurred on by the possibility of love. When I collapse upon this realisation it feels as much like admitting defeat as it does like coming home. For all my education, all my big dreams, every move was influenced in some unspoken way by the conditions laid down by whichever man I had pinned my hopes on at the time. I didn’t want anything else; only love consumed it all.

However, as Lana warned us in 2012 – sometimes love is not enough. Before Lana deleted her Twitter account, her bio was a quote from Whitman: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’ The popularity of Twitter and its uniform brevity rose as the messy patchworks of Tumblr began to decline. It embodied a culture that prized the virtuous coherent self as that which could be expressed in a single sentence and, crucially, in public. To contain multitudes then, was to demonstrate an unforgivable instability of character. People were constantly being ‘outed’ for inconsistencies, probed for some hidden badness to unearth, to further destabilise. But Lana, a poet of the psychoanalytic, revels in this very destabilisation. Her lyrics trip over themselves like Freudian slips (while she sings in a slip of the polyester kind) her inch-long acrylics gripping that eternal phallus, the microphone.

4. Baby, can you see through the tears?

Lately I’ve been watching the same movie again and again. The details differ but the movie is essentially the same. Someone, a waitress perhaps, or a housewife, or a singer with big dreams, yearns to break from the endlessness of life’s everyday tedium and finds the only way to do this is through an act of violence. She is suddenly free, but that freedom is shadowed by the approaching spectre of consequence. Inevitably her actions will soon catch up with her, but to turn back now would be impossible. She continues to live in sin, and one aberration of the social code leads tantalisingly into another. Does she turn herself in or does she keep going as far as she can, into and over the horizon? The further she goes the less likely it seems she will ever be able to return. So she drives off a cliff. She gives herself up. She succumbs to the gunshot she could have avoided but only for so long. Freedom, these movies tell me, is something that burns up and destroys. This is what happens to women who want too much. The heroines of Lana’s songs all seem to exist in this liminal space post-aberration, pre-death. All these stories are set in America. Everyone drives a Cadillac and looks so beautiful under golden evening light. Everybody has a gun. The two driving forces of Lana’s songs are freedom and true love. I get it: they push and pull with each other, and trying to experience both at once has been the great existential challenge of my being. Freedom always felt shadowed by its own inevitable revoking. For so long I lived like I was on the run. I never had a gun, I never learned to drive. I drank red wine in the departures lounge and made eye contact with strangers. I slept in rooms I’d never occupy for more than one night. I pushed myself deeper into solitude so that any loneliness would always feel intentional and dignified. Like a gun, it gave me the illusion of control. Of course, to sing about freedom is also and always to sing about death.

5. He loves me, with every beat of his cocaine heart

About two years before ‘#MeToo’ happened, I was nineteen and working in a coffee shop in east London singing along to a Spotify playlist of 1960s girl group songs when I met my first music manager but not the first music industry man who tried to mould me into a popstar, before dropping me when he decided I didn’t want it enough. It was also where I met the first semi-famous and inappropriately older man who solicited sexual favours in exchange for nebulously promised music industry advancement. He invited me over to record my demos in his home studio after work, he was always topping up my wine glass. I sang backing vocals on one of his records, and he moved his hand casually further up the inside of my thigh. He gave me ‘industry advice’ and introduced me to other music guys and always addressed my body when he spoke. I found our dynamic kind of funny, I almost couldn’t believe a man could be that unselfconsciously sleazy, that blandly predictable. How far could I push it? I was, looking back, very lonely. Ultimately, he wasn’t really successful enough to be useful to me in any way (I couldn’t, in Lana’s words, fuck my way to the top even if I wanted to) but who’s to say what I would have done, had he been someone more famous, more connected, more useful. I was always getting groped or cat called or threatened or solicited then, almost every time I left the house. I think I thought it was resourceful to try and use a situation in which I felt largely powerless to my advantage.

Now it just makes me sad and vaguely embarrassed that I ever thought I could make a dynamic like that work in my favour, or that I accepted being groped as just an unfortunate aspect of being a girl on the stage. The fantasy that the character of Lana del Rey projects is that this line of thinking can actually get us somewhere, but it is just that: a fantasy. As Lana herself said, ‘I’ve slept with a lot of guys in the industry but none of them helped me get my record deals. Which is annoying.’ Still, the gatekeepers are men, and insecure nineteen year old girls who want things are so often pushed so far beyond their means to get them, operating under naïve facades of sexual agency. Whether or not young women willingly consent to the gatekeeper-men is only part of the question. Why submitting to sexual favours with older, more powerful men seems to so many young women an option, or indeed, the only option for gaining some kind of power in such a skewed industry gets closer to the kernel of the imbalances at play. A few years after the coffee shop, I sat in the boardroom of a major record label while three older men in suits laid out the details of the contract I was being offered. ‘Is this really what you want?’ One of them asked, so earnestly I cringed, ‘we need to know you are willing to do whatever it takes.’ I felt embarrassed for all of us, and said, laughing, ‘sure, if you want me to take my top off, I will.’ They all stared back at me blankly, not laughing. I wanted to scream. I didn’t sign the contract and didn’t ever go back. I guess I just didn’t want it enough. Which is annoying.

Where once Lana was perplexed, naïve even, now she’s just tired. On recent song ‘A&W’ she asks, ‘if I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn't ask for it?’ Oh well, she sings, ‘this is the experience of being an American whore.’

5. Fuck me to death, love me until I love myself

The title track of Lana’s ninth and most recent album, ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under ocean blvd?’ begins with the slow exhale of someone trying to stave off a panic attack. In one of her best lines, she tells us: ‘I can’t help but feel like my body marred my soul.’ The song unfurls into a weirdly earnest gospel choir, repeating the anxious refrain – Don’t forget me – like a mantra into the void. Later on the album, ‘Judah Smith Interlude’ is an almost five-minute-long field recording of Lana’s megachurch pastor preaching about the perils of ‘a life dominated by lust for too long.’ The heroine of Lana’s songs has always been the girl pushed just beyond her means, but Lana’s older now and second guessing her resources: she turns her focus to God. Lana has always been writing at apocalyptic frequencies, whether it’s about Californian wildfires or the apocalypses of the heart that play out in lonely motel rooms or the passenger seat of your boyfriend’s car. Now she’s worried for her soul. The ‘handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls’ describes a real tunnel: the Jergins Trust pedestrian tunnel that was built in the 1920s and sealed off and abandoned in 1967. It’s typical Lana metaphor: the forgotten tunnel under Ocean Blvd is the suppressed and seedy Jungian-shadow to LA’s white beaches and gleaming highways. Like all good Americans, Lana knows that the horror encroaches from above and below. Lana, who has always been so acutely attuned to the tropes of Americana, knows that paranoia is her country’s fundamental condition. With her ‘chemtrails over the country club’ and her abandoned hidden undergrounds she evokes that all-American fear of forces from outside that threaten spaces both real and imagined. Terrorists, aliens, communists, chemtrails—America’s neurotic imagination has existed since those first puritan settlers imbued the encroaching wilderness of the unknown land with a terrifying resonance of supernatural proportions, resulting in captivity narratives so impassioned with terror they almost read as erotic.

At Lana’s darkest, at her most ‘real’, she subverts a cultural paranoia to reveal an anxiety underneath: the inner world is just as corruptible as what’s outside. What if the badness, the danger was already inside us all along? The suppressed inevitably irrupts and gives way to chaos: ‘I’m not unhinged, or unhappy, I’m just wild!’ What would it mean to give in? To relinquish control is terrifying but it is also to be free. In Lana’s world this yearning to surrender becomes eroticised, in the form of submission to the dominant masculine, which could interchangeably be the biker guy pinning her wrists to the slot machine, or God. Most recently this impulse was demonstrated by her sudden marriage to Jeremy Dufrene, the alligator wrangler and swamp tour guide who she met when she took one of his tours on a trip to the Bayou. The internet erupted in thinly-veiled classist dismay – what was a millionaire popstar doing with this divorced blue collar alligator man? To the rest of us, it was classic Lana – as twitter user @moonandmouth posted; ‘lana's choice is deeply jungian. an alligator wrangler being the masculine, reasonable hero who triumphs over the feminine chaos historically represented by a reptile (the sometimes female-coded serpent in eden, tiamet of babylonian creation myths, st. george and the dragon, etc)’.

This impulse to submit to a higher power is the locus of Lana’s writing, where to submit sexually is to mimic the ultimate submission, which is falling in love. Here sexual masochism appears as an almost self-conscious mimicry of the loss of control that love brings, as a way to trick ourselves into believing it could be the same. It’s an escape clause, where controlled acts of masochism can feel safer than the chaos of love; confined to the bedroom, it becomes a microdose of the self-annihilation that comes with falling in love —or, as the mystics would have it, making space for God. Like the mystics, Lana knows that to be whole is to recognise the inherent wound in being, that there is no wholeness without the void. Lacan would tell us we don’t want our desires to be met, not really. What we want is the experience of desire itself – which also sounds like the American dream. In Lana’s songs, yearning is the most luxurious state, where to desire is to recognise the self, which is to recognise the wound, which is to enact a self-becoming, a self in the world, desirously remedied. ‘Goddamn man-child’ she sings in the opening line of ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’; ‘you fucked me so good that I almost said I love you.’

When I listen to Lana now I want to paint my fingernails coke-can red, light a menthol cigarette and gaze absently, just like a Sofia Coppola girl, out of a window bathed in celluloid light. I know that I have lost myself in love. Like Lana, I have no desire to cease this complicity in my own ruination. This is the success of Lana’s songs: her Whitmanian capacity to make space for multitudes. She resists the frustrating, puritanical impulse to sanitise our every desire, which is so commonplace in a culture at large that claims to promote empowerment while at the same time always claiming the position of wronged victim. How sophisticated it would be to admit that our desires are not always good for us, without reducing everything to an attempt to wrest a moral outcome, or to glean a hard-earned lesson from every wrong decision. It’s more complex to acknowledge that what fucked us up was also something we had once so terribly wanted, to find a language that doesn’t excuse the people who harmed us, and yet also resists framing ourselves as helpless victims. It’s more difficult to dwell in that grey space, that liminal coast, where it feels almost shameful to admit something more akin to truth: ‘you’re not good for me, but baby I want you!’ – yes, I had a hand in my own corrosion! And God; sometimes I had so much fun doing it!

All the early Sad Girl theorising of Lana fails to recognise this: she is having so much fun. Sure she sings of daddy issues, disillusionment and despair, but there is something post-sad, or even hyper-sad in her work that feels like it could be analysed more acutely by, if you will, a hypothetical Bad Girl Theory. My hypothetical Bad Girl Theory might align Lana more closely alongside the razor-quick vignettes of eternal Chateaux Marmont party-girl Eve Babitz, or Thelma & Louise robbing a gas station, or the vagabond stories of Cookie Mueller who once wrote; ‘why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.’ The bad heroines of Lana’s songs are always stumbling into wildness, but as she declares at the end of her ‘Ride’ monologue: ‘live fast, die young, be wild, have fun!’ The Bad Girl is resourceful, existing precariously on that axis between loneliness and freedom. She pursues pleasure, knowledge and all modes of spiritual excess; what the novelist Ann Quin described as ‘EXPERIENCE in caps period.’ Bad Girls are too much; looking for ecstasies both carnal and divine. ‘Keep making me laugh, let’s go get high!’ Lana knows what she’s doing—she once sold merch that was a set of rosary beads ending with a cocaine spoon instead of a crucifix, lest we forget, yet there’s a longing here that’s almost theological in nature — the hope that such badness necessarily precipitates salvation. Another age-old mysticism suggests that sin brings us close to the divine, in that necessarily precipitates a godly intervention. As Simone Weil once wrote, ‘love is a sign of our badness.’ This paradox brings us into the light. In ‘Video Games’, Lana looks directly into the camera and somehow, impossibly, perfectly, through so much lip-filler she sings and pouts at once: ‘I heard that you like the bad girls, honey.’