It’s hard to know what to make of the new music video for “White Mustang,” the fifth track from Lana Del Rey’s recent Lust for Life. The song itself, already hazy in classic Lana fashion, has been attached to a series of images that convey a mood more than a story. The post-breakup song with automotive themes and no small degree of indefinite longing (to the past or future, it’s impossible to say) has received a suitably lush treatment: The singer is filmed caressing and disengaging from a tattooed, bearded, and mustached musician with pale skin and long red hair flowing over his shoulders. The easiest way to describe him: He looks like the child of Ed Sheeran and Lana Del Rey.
Anyway, Lana is also filmed driving a car by herself through a cityscape with vague sci-fi tendencies. A rocket fires toward the sky above her at one point, and there’s an impossibly tall building in the background in the scene where she meets the guitarist. The whole thing is, as per Lana Del Rey’s usual music-video standard, rendered in luscious colors and vivid contrast; as per Lana Del Rey’s usual standard of beauty, Lana Del Rey’s so beautiful that time seems to slow around her. She’s wearing a botanically themed dress slit on the left up to the middle of her thigh. The entire tableau seems suffused with a sense of luxurious, disoriented doom. (Given Lana’s statements of concern regarding the ongoing Korean crisis, it’s not impossible that that rocket is actually a missile of some sort.) The video isn’t bad, but it is incredibly alienating. The song cuts out midway for a dance to Mexican music (overlaid near the end with an unidentified Lana track). It’s worth a watch. Come for the Lana, stay for the end of the world.
