Lana Del Rey has suggestively teased that this song is the key to the puzzle. “CARMEN” she tweeted: “Explains everything.” This song is yet another indication of dissociative identity disorder.The split personality is explored here - two characters of Lana's creation take part in the song.
The first is a flirtatious sweet, piggy tailed eye-turner ... a Coney Island Queen. The second is a sparkling, gracefully nonchalant ‘Maria Vargas’ type character ... a magnate’s plaything.
The instagramy montage-based video fugue-trip takes us into a graining biopic past that could never have actually happened. Carmen, she says, is just seventeen. And Elizabeth Grant is twenty-six. Yet Sinatra’s graceful Sugar Town world - beautifully evoked in this video- is circa 1966. It is a world that neither Carmen nor Lana could ever have experienced... besides embracing the film footage and images of the period.
The video begins with a rose in bloom. A rose that will die on the shank. Yet it is stunningly beautiful for the day. “She says you don’t wanna get this way ... I’m dying”. And the story unfolds. The song is a difficult study of a teenage girl trapped inside a world that only cares if she provides services and products to the dangerous people that surround her. In return, she become an addict. Distortion, loss of subjective time and traumatic flashbacks add a sense of danger and loss.
Painfully shy at times, at other times brassy and fully matured - Lana’s voice is used to explore the twin personalities revealed. Perhaps all 21st century girls are expected to be a two-in-one. And at times this burden becomes too much. Deadly and “ Tiring, tiring.”
Mérimée’s operatic character ‘Carmen’ also represented ‘dirty love’... perhaps the character was a further inspiration to Del Rey. This Carmen was also a temptress and mischief-maker. She too felt that she was a fatalistic spirit stifled within in a body that men worshiped and hungrily desired. She just wanted to be loved. But life is never as simple as that.
The music of Lana’s ‘Carmen’ gives us a sense of dry paint flaking from once noble picket fences and of past-life chromium bumpers left corroding in the salty air. It feels like loss and it’s all about loss. This is tarnished splendor. A time passing away that never actually made you happy in the first place.
The vivid piano piece at the end is like raindrops crawling down the greasy windows of a downtown diner. And thus it all ends with an empty heart in a cold and lonely room.
© Neil_Mach April 2012
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6K8Uq88BEQ&w=560&h=315]
