It's been an especially fatiguing few weeks of rape narratives in popular culture, with the latest entry—leaked clips of an unexplained project from director Eli Roth, featuring Lana Del Rey portraying scenes of sexual violence—being the rotten cherry on top of it all. Roth's work lists towards horror and the grotesque, though these deeply disturbing clips—which have since been pulled down—have shades of Hollywood "torture porn". While it's hard to judge these clips outside of their full, filmic context, given Roth's track record, it is hard to imagine that these scenes are part of say, an empowered rape-avenger film a la Dogville, Ms. 45 or Teeth.
Further complicating the footage is the easy conflation of Del Rey's artistic image with what sort of heinousness is portrayed here. While Lana Del Rey is an accomplished singer, her most masterful work is her own image, one that has a complex and knowing relationship with the male gaze and male fantasy. She has regularly tangled herself up in big, old, American ideals of what women are supposed to be, shown allegiance to feminine perfection and glamour, contrasted helplessness with control, curdled familiar versions of bad girl and good girl narrative. She has a profound understanding of how women are viewed in America, and layers her work with a vulnerability that reflects the lack of control women often have of their own lives and choices; her songs are weighted by it.
So what to make of Lana Del Rey, our pop priestess of feminine tradition, playacting rape and suffering in footage that sexualizes both? It's hard to parse whether perhaps in taking this on, she is acknowledging the everyday threat of violence that women live with. It might be easier to speculate that, just maybe, this was shelved because someone had second thoughts about releasing a project that depicts an artist (who is an icon to millions of young women) being sexually brutalized. Maybe Del Rey is trying to break into acting and felt like this was the project for her (neither she nor Roth have commented on it yet). Perhaps the next string of scenes that leaks shows Del Rey returning to mortally menace her attackers. We could only hope.
It's certainly easier, as a fan, when our pop heroines signal their intent clearly, and without ambiguity—say, when they flash the word "FEMINIST" on a giant LED screen behind them—rather than forcing us to speculate and unpack scenes of simulated abuse. But, right now, all we have is this too-typical, stomach-turning, triggerbait clip that serves as further reminder of how often the nature of sexual assault is misunderstood and sexualized in mainstream media, how often we see and hear representation of women's suffering through a man's lens.