In early November, Eminem and the signees to his Shady Records imprint released “Shady CXVPHER,” an 18-minute long video of freestyles meant to promote the label’s upcoming Shady XV compilation record. It’s a fairly typical technical exercise in multisyllabic rhyme schemes that wouldn’t be notable except for a throwaway line from Eminem himself in which he threatens to “punch Lana Del Rey in the face twice, like Ray Rice.” And then only a few weeks later, footage for a scrapped Marilyn Manson video directed by Eli Roth surfaced in which Roth sexually assaults Del Rey in graphic detail.
For Eminem this is par for the course, albeit a bit pathetic. For as long as Marshall Mathers has been in the public eye, he’s made sport of tastelessly rapping about inflicting violence on women and, specifically, female pop stars. It’s unlikely that Mathers gave the choice of Del Rey as his most recent target much thought outside of her being a rising star whose name happened to rhyme with Rice’s. It’s a predictable move from Eminem who, despite being a festival headliner and household name, hasn’t had anything new to say in over a decade and has lacked critical esteem for just as long.
Marilyn Manson has been running on fumes for even longer. The days when he was pulling double duty as the religious right’s go-to scapegoat and a legitimate pop star are so far gone that it’s hard to remember they even happened. After the start of the millennium, Eminem quickly usurped Manson’s position as America’s collective boogeyman (though there was a slight overlap, hence Manson’s remix of “The Way I Am”). It didn’t help matters that after finishing his ambitious Triptych on the concept of celebrity culture (Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals, and Holy Wood) Manson found himself creatively rudderless and wrapped up in a litany of personal complications. By the time 2012’s Born Villain was released, he was clearly going through the motions, delivering everything his detractors would expect from his work, with none of the flair or songwriting chops that had made him such a visible figure in the ’90s.
This isn’t to paint the diminishing of Marilyn Manson’s career as a tragedy. Even at the peak of his powers and fame, Manson’s work was inconsistent at best, and woefully misguided at worst. No matter how insightful the man could be about issues like America’s fascination with violence and the need to sanctify its cultural icons, he was also a white dude screaming racial slurs over lowbrow rock riffs. Manson was right to fight against the oppressive and self-righteous sides of conservative culture, but his resistance was always couched in a particular straight white male experience, and thus was prone to making the same mistakes as the society he criticized.
Although he has claimed to have zero involvement with the leaked footage, the idea of enlisting Eli Roth and Lana Del Rey for a video hinged on a rape fantasy feels like something Manson would do. Not only have the last three Marilyn Manson records traded heavily on his abusive relationships with women but it also seems likely that Manson saw these two figures as kindred spirits. As a director of outrageously violent horror films, Roth is an easy fit. But seeing the connective tissue between Manson and Del Rey takes a slightly deeper read. Yes, the two share a fascination with JFK, the use of drugs and sex as masochistic escapism, and both make liberal use of some pretty gross Lolita homages. Keep digging, though, and the more common threads between them start appearing.
Lana Del Rey is interested in many of the same subjects as Manson was during his creative peak — namely, the way in which images of idealized American culture can be used as placeholders and masks for a violent and corrupt reality. But while Manson, from the name down, was attempting to throw the disparity between these two images in his audience’s face, Lana Del Rey lounges smack dab in the middle, cocktail in hand. There’s little, if any, ambiguity in the Marilyn Manson experience; despite operating in the realm of pop music, his art is ceaselessly critical of mainstream culture and conservative values.
With Del Rey, the degree to which she is critiquing and celebrating the images she uses in her work is much less clear. On Ultraviolence, the syrupy reverb and languidly paced arrangements used give the record a romantic air, but also a sense of mournful distance. It pushes a song like “Sad Girl” into levels of self-pity that border on parody, yet never give the audience the benefit of a wink to camera. Similarly, the throwback ’50s string sections and doowop guitar give off a kind of Lynchian irony (Del Rey’s made that connection by covering “Blue Velvet”) but also seem to be a rather cynical attempt to harness the commercial appeal of that same aesthetic (for an H&M ad). This isn’t the result of creative negligence — every part of her presentation plays fast and loose with ideas of sincerity and authenticity.
The way in which Del Rey toys with these concepts is intrinsically more complicated. Because of the male gaze present in the critical eye cast towards her work, and in the media that represents it, Dey Rey’s intentions and realness are subject to heavy scrutiny. Manson’s status as a construct has never come under as much fire. Despite his openness about the theatricality involved, he gets the same pass always given out to white dudes who reference Jodorowsky and Marquis de Sade in interviews.
But instead of trying to appease these critiques and accusations, Lana Del Rey plays the assumptions made about her to the hilt. Del Rey is increasingly open in her music about her awareness of her status as an object and her lack of agency, while simultaneously embracing those expectations and limitations as a means of gaining power over men. She’s expected to be publically examined and dissected, but Del Rey has made that examination part of her art. After two years of the internet trying to expose her as the construction of label boardrooms and accusing her of having plastic surgery in order to “look the part,” she writes a song like “Fucked My Way Up To The Top” which stokes the fires of those accusations while also throwing them back in the faces of her critics. Lana Del Rey takes the pop provocateur model to a level of ambiguity and extremity that Manson could never achieve.
That said, and despite Del Rey’s direct involvement, there is little ambiguity to be found in Roth’s footage. Like Eminem, Manson is recycling his well-worn shock rock shtick because, by this point, it is all he knows how to do. In an interview with Larry King in 2013, Roth said that the footage was “so sick, it’s been locked in a vault for over a year,” suggesting that someone involved, be it Roth, Manson, or Del Rey (who has thus far remained silent about it), thought better of making a video centered around horrific sexual violence. This is definitely for the best. We don’t need another rape fantasy presented as art. And we certainly don’t need Manson trying to explore these themes from the same tired male perspective when Lana Del Rey is approaching them in a far more complex and compelling way on her own.