Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for Girls Like Us

Anna Dorn explores her parasocial relationship with Lana Del Rey

Art by DJ Short

Just as my parents remember where they were when we landed on the moon, I remember where I was when I first saw the music video for Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Osama bin Laden had just been killed, my peers were Occupying Wall Street, and I was high as a kite in my Berkeley studio apartment, watching Lana sing “Heaven is a place on Earth with you” through artificially puffy lips.

I’ve always had trouble caring about the things I’m supposed to care about and had an easy time caring way too much about things considered trivial. I couldn’t get it up for Occupy, but something about archival footage of ‘70s California skaters and paparazzi clips of Paz de La Huerta falling down drunk paired with this Priscilla Presley lookalike cooing sublime melodies felt so earth-shatteringly important to me.

I can be a bit of a fair-weather fan. Throughout my [redacted]-year life, I have had short-lived but incredibly enthusiastic obsessions with Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, The Postal Service, Uffie, Sleigh Bells, A$AP Rocky, and many more. I recently had a brief fixation on Billie Eilish after becoming enthralled by her vocals on the Barbie soundtrack, peaking when she made a very lesbian album and told Rolling Stone she wanted her “face in a vagina,” and deflating entirely when she got a boyfriend shortly thereafter. But my Lana fandom has outlasted them all; in 13 years, she’s never disappointed me once. Not when she sang “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” (it’s homage), not when she dated a cop (he was hot), not when she called feminism “not an interesting concept” (it’s really not the way people are talking about it…). Not for wearing a COVID mask made of crystals (chic!), not for posting a mirror selfie of herself with a gun (hot), not for all the missed album deadlines (I can wait for greatness), not for marrying an alligator wrangler (perfectly on brand for her). And not even when she leaked a diss track about my queen Ethel Cain (I would be so flattered if Lana wrote a diss track about me).

Early in my parasocial relationship with Lana, I played the “National Anthem” video—in which Lana reimagines JFK’s assassination and casts herself as both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O—at a party to a chorus of “what the fuck is this?” My tastes and opinions are often out of step with the zeitgeist, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to feel so moved by this music video that made everyone around me visibly ornery. But I had trouble wrapping my head around the particular distaste for Lana at the time, and still do. I will frequently rewatch her much-maligned 2012 SNL performance and think: why did people hate this so much? I agreed with Lana when she told Rolling Stone she thought she “looked beautiful and sang fine.”

The main criticism flung Lana’s way early in her career was that she was “fake,” I suppose because she had a fake name and Juvéderm-plumped lips. But Lady Gaga, who was hugely popular at the time and actually named Stefani Germanotta, was literally wearing prosthetics on her face and arriving at award shows inside an egg. When I look back at that notorious SNL performance, I don’t see fake; I see someone who is terrified. I suspect it was her vulnerability that made people uncomfortable. We tend to expect our female pop stars to be fierce, tough, swaggering (see, e.g., Beyoncé’s nearly 30-year performance of girlbossery, Taylor Swift’s obsession with revenge). But Lana’s not a girlboss, nor is she vengeful. She’s delicate, she’s shy, she still loves her man even after he treats her like shit (“My old man is a bad man but I can’t deny the way he holds my hand”). The way Taylor and Beyoncé play for 95,000-person audiences without showing an iota of nerves? Impressive, but a little alien. I often think of an early YouTube video where a fan asks Lana how she prepares for a show. “I freak the fuck out,” she says. Is there a simpler, more relatable way to express the sheer horror involved in sharing your art with an audience?

Just as my parents remember where they were when Pope John Paul II visited America, I remember where I was when Lana became a religious figure to me. It was New Year’s Day, 2015. The same-sex marriage cases were on their way to the Supreme Court, they still couldn’t find that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean, and I was hungover in my studio apartment in Oakland, California, a city where I had very few friends. I felt so profoundly alone. On the plus side, I loved my haunted Tudor building that still allowed smoking. The last person who’d lived in my studio had died in it, and I felt her presence all the time. I lived on the 7th floor and every day I’d watch the sun set over Downtown Oakland. That day, the sunset was especially dramatic, filling my room with neon purples and pinks. I was wearing a nightgown, I was very sad, and Ultraviolence played from my Bluetooth speakers. As the sky became that electric navy blue it gets just before turning black, and “Shades of Cool” was playing for probably the 15th time that evening, I felt my sadness morph into something more tolerable. I was still lonely, but it felt less pathetic. Suddenly the dark feelings I’d been plagued by my entire life felt glamorous, transcendent, holy.

In her review of Lust for Life, Meaghan Garvey said Lana’s depiction of American isolation evoked the paintings of Edward Hopper. Depicting solitary figures inside glowing diners, bedrooms, gas stations, Hopper captured the ennui of an increasingly urbanized nation set against the totems of Americana. While Hopper documented an America reshaped by highways and automobiles, where people were suddenly alone in their cars or suburban homes, Lana’s music seemed to capture the isolation born of the rise of smartphones, streaming media, and rideshare apps—inventions that made life easier in many ways but also left us suspended in our private worlds. Thinking back to that first day of 2015, the walls of my haunted studio apartment painted neon from the sunset as I stared out the windows, I see myself framed inside a Hopper painting. Lana morphs that visual into sound: glowing shapes, a mood you want to stare at, loneliness vibrating in space. It is perhaps why her music feels perfectly tailored for the small glowing rectangles in our hands, why it shaped a new generation of lonely teenagers on TikTok.

There are still days when I find myself listening to Lana for five hours at a time, often while looking at photos of her on Tumblr, usually in a nightgown, always alone in a bedroom with soft, moody lighting. Like me and most of her 57.5 million listeners on Spotify, Lana is often plagued by dark feelings. As she recently told W when describing the paparazzi’s fixation with her alligator wrangler husband: “my emotions were more overwhelming than usual, and my usual emotions can be quite overwhelming!” But Lana has an incredible gift of transmuting said overwhelm into something airy and light. She distilled this thesis on Blue Banisters, which I see as an older sister to my cherished Ultraviolence: “Let me show you how sadness can turn into happiness / I can turn blue into something beautiful.”

As with most of my opinions that are initially shunned, my Lana fandom was vindicated by time. By the release of Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019, critics who once called Lana an industry plant were now hailing her as the poet laureate of American malaise. In 2021, Pitchfork reappraised its review of Born to Die—originally dismissed as “limp and pointless,” its lyrics “cliché,” its persona an “ice-cream licking object of male desire”—and declared it a prescient album capturing “the fulcrum point where the fear and pain of sexualization start to work as leverage.”

Just as my parents remember where they were when the Challenger exploded, I remember where I was when I decided to write a novel starring a pop star loosely based on Lana Del Rey. It was December 2023. The Ring of Fire eclipse had just swept the nation, global temperatures breached 2°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time ever, and I was at Universal CityWalk watching the Beyoncé Renaissance documentary on IMAX. Seeing that pop vision come to life on a massive screen gave me a strong urge to conjure a similar euphoria on the page. I’ve always wanted to be a pop star, but unfortunately, I have no musical talents, get panic attacks on stage, and have trouble leaving the house after 8 pm. My skill set and temperament have forced me into being a writer. (Joan Didion famously wanted to be an actress, and I have likewise been condemned to this less glamorous path.) While I’d prefer my art to be more accessible (reading is hard; listening to music is easy), I still feel lucky I have it. Naturally, Lana wants to be a poet.

The novel that was born from that transcendent moment at Universal CityWalk is called American Spirits, named for both the cigarettes the main character smokes constantly and the ghosts of American culture she channels. It stars a niche legend named Blue Velour (Lana’s always had a love affair with the color blue, which appears in 43 of her released songs). Over the course of the novel, Blue goes from being a nihilistic provocateur to someone more sincere and optimistic, from someone willing to die for her art to someone who wants to live for it. Lana’s career has taken a similar trajectory. Over ten studio albums, her music has gone from cheeky and satirical—“my pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola”—to more earnest and autobiographical—“My pastor told me when you leave, all you take is your memory, and I’m gonna take mine of you with me.”

The shifting cinematic universe Lana has built, I imagine, hasn’t been just for fun; I assume it’s a matter of survival. In her music, Lana’s gone from pushing people away with her cleverness to letting her audience in on her most vulnerable struggles. On NFR!, Lana sings: “If you can hold me without hurting me, you’ll be the first who ever did.” I have a sense now that Lana can be held without being hurt. It’s easy for me to see how making music has made room for this to happen because creating art has saved me, too. Writing has gotten me through some of the darkest periods of my life. It’s given me a friend when I’ve had none. It’s made the constant noise inside my brain tolerable. It’s calmed me down, it’s cheered me up. It’s introduced me to people I never normally would have met and taken me places I never normally would have gone. It has also left scars.

There’s a period in my novel where Blue goes into a manic state while making an album, echoing a hypomanic state I had writing American Spirits. Of course, that magic feeling that accompanies creation is always ephemeral. Putting art into the marketplace is a terrifying experience. It produces constant, crushing self-doubt. It unveils the ugliest parts of yourself you didn’t even know were there and exposes them to public annotation. It at times makes you feel like a cornered animal, to the point where you can completely understand Lana’s compulsion to post a bizarre series of “questions for the culture” on Instagram at 4 a.m. But it also makes life rich and layered and meaningful. And if you’re really lucky, it turns something blue into something beautiful.