Lana Del Rey & Shawshank Redemption
I didn’t want to write about LDR, because I feel like I know her better than I know my own dad. Which is what Rainn Wilson said about Paulie Gualtieri, only he didn’t seem to mind.
But fuck it. Like Jack Lemmon as Shelley Levene, I feel a responsibility.
For some reason nobody’s talking about Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth, neé Margarita Cansino, was a chubby ninth-grade dropout with a brutally low hairline that took two years of electrolysis to alter. She married a man twenty years older than she was. He installed a literal electric train set for her to play with when she got bored. That’s how they made a movie star in the forties.
In City Of Nets, Otto Friedrich wrote that “middle-aged men were always trying to take care of Margarita Cansino.” They knew they had to turn her into something, so they turned her into Andy Dufresne’s vision of love.
America needs to get back to manufacturing, and that includes decent pop stars. I don’t know if LDR’s makeover is more or less reprehensible because she did it to herself, if that frees her from sexist manipulation or if that’s just a trick of the light. I don’t know if everyone who’s been at bloggerheads over her since last fall has forgotten who Rita Hayworth was. But I know Lana Del Rey hasn’t, and if she wants to get gussied up and sing some sad songs in more or less character, you want to leave her alone maybe? Unless you agree not to watch Gilda or The Lady From Shanghai ever again. In which case, metonymically kill yourself.
