Lana Del Rey’s ‘White Mustang’ video is the trailer to a romantic miniseries I want to watch
Lana Del Rey’s “White Mustang” video is fantastic character development and I want to watch the miniseries.
Lana Del Rey’s “White Mustang” is about the seesawing of emotional impulses in relationships.
Though Del Rey can think of times and ways her partner overlooks her, the sight of an object she intimately links to him triggers a surge of exciting emotion. When she sees his white Mustang, she is at once reminded of both the attraction that brought them together and how far away from that they are now.
The visual marinates in this notion. It’s of a piece with Del Rey’s quality of stillness, her near stoicism. The video begins with Del Rey taking a statuesque pose, literally standing over, with one leg on his chest, her prone partner.
This sight of control is not dominance. It resembles the emotional push and pull of figuring out a healthy, lasting balance. The man’s hand is on her leg, calling to her. And she answers, but then she leaves.
The moody, slow burning song only plays about halfway through, up till the video shows Del Rey feeling annoyed with the man and telling him she’s leaving the house. She gets in her cool, vintage car. He follows in his vintage white Mustang (PS, this couple has to win for coolest cars).
She finally stops her car and the man stops his. They get out and begin dancing together, an interpretive dance in which the emotional push and pull manifests itself once again.
The second verse plays and then drowns out, replaced by a lilting single trumpet and little accompaniment. It’s quiet and measured. The song disappears, not to silence, but this little ditty, so subtle that you hardly notice it, like a perfect film score.
The scenes cut back and forth, from Del Rey in her car and her man following, the city lights cascading up their long faces. The camera lingers on her eyes.
We know the emotional stakes. We already listen to her music and the song. The point of the video is to dig deeper in the character development of the woman in this relationship. The quietness of the score and Del Rey’s fantastic ability in song and in her little performance here conveys her emotional depths and artful, sumptuous yet minimal display of big, exciting, often confusing relationship feelings.
After the set up of the song, the end really feels like the beginning of a small, intimate movie or drama miniseries about the lives of one relationship. You want to watch on because you really don’t know how it will turn out.
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That is the risk and excitement of a relationship, the kind of enveloping emotion that leaves physical symbols that remind us of the past and to think harder about our future with this person.