Female Gaze: Lana Del Rey, I Love Dick, And The Love Witch

curious message appeared on Lana Del Rey’s Twitter near the end of February, the same week she debuted her single “Love.” “At the stroke of midnight,” it announced, listing dates during each of the next four waning crescent moons. “Ingredients can b found online.” No further explanation; only a cryptic portrait of Del Rey, silhouetted plainly in black on saturated Technicolor red, left hand uncurled into a signal somewhere between “El Diablo” and the Girl Scout Promise.
Within minutes, stans were debriefing one another in Del Rey’s mentions. These were instructions, they said, for a large-scale binding spell that had already begun to go viral, intended to obstruct Donald Trump from harm-doing until the ultimate goal of impeachment. The aforementioned ingredients included a small orange candle stub, an unflattering Trump photo, and a single tarot card, The Tower — pictorially speaking, an unambiguously horrifying card, with two figures plummeting headfirst from a fiery turret senselessly balanced atop a cliff. Even if tarot readers assure you that The Tower is technically more about change than destruction, the implication is chaos.
 
https://twitter.com/LanaDelRey/status/834964849264205825/photo/1 
By coincidence, the night before Del Rey’s tweet, I’d finally checked out a movie called The Love Witch, originally released last November, three days after the election. Shot in glorious 35mm, The Love Witch was written and directed by Anna Biller, a born-and-bred Los Angeles filmmaker whose singular vision and religious commitment to detail completely rationalize the seven-year DIY odyssey of the film’s creation. We meet Elaine, the Love Witch herself, headed north on Highway 101, as ominously elegant as Tippi Hedren cruising to Bodega Bay in The Birds. Played by Samantha Robinson, with a mannered theatricality that tugs against the film’s current-day setting, Elaine is painstakingly styled in lush Technicolor reds and frilly My Fair Lady pinks and glam turquoise cat-eyes, the kind of unequivocal beauty you admire so as not to resent. She is escaping Berkeley and the specter of her late ex-husband, whom we see collapse in a flashback, poisoned goblet clattering to the floor alongside him. (“Poor Jerry!” Elaine narrates. “I had a nervous breakdown after he left me!”) She grazes a card slipping out of her purse, the upright Three of Swords — the most transparent card in the tarot deck, at least on an iconographic level. No demystification is required for a bright red heart pierced by three swords.
Attempting a life reset, Elaine settles in a rented Victorian gothic mansion, each room richly decorated in homage to the Thoth tarot deck. She busies herself with her DIY Wiccan apothecary practice, or by painting medieval princess fantasies descended into bloodlust, or at whimsical high tea with interior decorator Trish, to whom she describes finding herself through witchcraft after her marriage’s tragic demise. Flashbacks gesture toward a lifetime of abuse and abjection at the hands of men she adored, from her father to “poor Jerry.” Elaine performs private rituals, brewing offerings to her goddess and laying spread-eagle on her pentagram rug, a red candle positioned between her legs: “Love me … love me,” she pleads, near tears.

Swept up in her obsessive quest for love, Elaine makes a mission of seducing every man she meets, which isn’t hard; her comically literal interpretation of a man’s feminine ideal is entrancing. (Immediately after sex with Wayne, a college professor who giddily invites her to his cabin within minutes of meeting, he whines to Elaine about the insufferableness of “other women”: either attractive but dim or bright but homely, with the nerve to demand things from him on top of it. “That seems like quite a problem!” Elaine coos with the caricatured sympathy of consoling a toddler who’s spilled his juice.) With each prospective lover comes a moment of bitter realization — that his defective capacity for love is far outweighed by his slobbering desire to see her naked — which Elaine remedies with fatal potions or good old-fashioned stabbing. By the end, Elaine is nowhere nearer to her dream of true love. In fact, the small town has turned against her, shouting “Burn the witch!” as she flees the Lynchian local cabaret — leaving her lost in a reverie of princesses and white horses, covered in her last lover’s blood.
It isn’t that The Love Witch has been poorly received; in fact, most reviews I’ve read have been fairly glowing, enchanted above all with the exquisite production design, the vast majority of which was sewed, constructed, or otherwise handcrafted by Biller herself (from Elaine’s occult fairy tale paintings to the wool pentagram rug that Biller has described taking six months to hook). But in many of even the most enthusiastic reviews, there is a pervasive off-ness — a compulsive focus on how the film looks, at the expense of any meaningful exploration of its ideas. Well-meaning critics chuckle at Biller’s “retro camp,” describing it as an artsy pastiche of midcentury kitsch with subversively flipped gender roles, and often comparing it to sexploitation auteurs like Russ Meyer or Radley Metzger. James Franco even blessed us with a review in his IndieWire column “James & Semaj” (wherein James discusses movies with his “reverse self,” Semaj, because arts journalism is in a really good place right now). He sees The Love Witch as a proto-feminist throwback about a witch who “likes to bone” and likens the acting to Napoleon Dynamite. He also notes Elaine’s uncanny similarity to Lana Del Rey, imagining the latter lingering in some California coven, “hanging out with Father John Misty and weird older dudes.”