The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors: Lana Del Rey at the Paris Olympia

Onto a stage flanked by elaborate candelabra and an imposing statue of a lion, all the trappings of that peculiar LA gothic of The Black Dahlia and Sunset Boulevard, she enters. Sauntering on past the tattered stars and stripes which hangs limp over the guitarist's Marshall stack amplifier, she is dressed equal parts prom queen and runaway bride. She could be Duchamp's mechanical bride – or more pertinently McLuhan's mechanical bride; aloof form the maelstrom, channeling the swirl of hypermedia.

The stage is a film set, but within this soundstage vast screens are embedded, portals into other film sets, somehow more real – or at least with more pronounced reality effects – than the reality before our eyes. And the films are not confined to the cinema-size screens within the screen-like world of the stage. They cannot be contained, spilling out onto every available surface, patinating the vast corinthian columns on either side. We see images of Elvis, Jackie O, old Coke ads, super8 footage of people taking super8 footage. It is a nostalgia for nostalgia itself. Endless self-reference.

Off-stage the screens multiply further. A thousand hands proffer smart phones which she plays up to in the way pop stars once played to the roving cameras on Top of the Pops. Within this strange mystic gulf between screens which project out of the audience and screens upon which are projected, that her performance plays out. Only within the frames-within-frames of this splintered panopticon does Lana Del Rey exist.

Part of what is fascinating about her is that the music is so clearly the least important element of this spectacle. It is not that it is bad – in many ways it is quite good – but it is irrelevant. Or at most, it plays a supporting role. The music is the soundtrack to the show, reversing the usual hierarchies of live performance. At one point, she leaves the stage and an actual film plays on the screen, taking her place. Like Max Steiner's syrupy scores of old, her string section play on in accompaniment to this short feature, equal parts Terrence Malick and Levis ad, about a girl who runs away from home to hang with the bikers, breathlessly narrated by the breathless voice of the singer herself, star of the mini-movie. Nobody, of course, believes that this is true autobiography, but it is a myth that she is allowed to participate in.

For a long time, the marketing of a singers has required narrative, but rarely has it been so self-consciously fictionalised. Even her body is fictionalised, as has been relentlessly publicised. Like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the audience are invited not so much a glimpse into the private feelings and fantasies of the star but rather an opportunity to leap through the screen and into the fictive space of the movie. Even better – with camera phones, instagram, hipstamatic; to direct the movie, edit it to their whims. “Dancing in the dark in the pale moonlight … telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare.”

[all images pilfered from social networks via google image search]

Panem et Circenses: Boyle's Bicycles

I remember the first time I heard that old joke - you know the one - about the guy smuggling bicycles. Typical of almost every subsequent retelling of this gag that I have been privy to, it was not in a joke book or the live set of some stand-up comic; it was not tittered over in a school playground or shared and liked on Facebook. 

It must have ben about ten years ago. I was still an undergraduate at Goldsmiths College. And Todd Gitlin, former Students for a Democratic Society president turned public intellectual and media theorist, was giving a free talk in the Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre on the college's New Cross campus. 

How is it, Gitlin pondered, that right wing television networks like Fox and CBS will show liberal / left-leaning programming like The Simpsons and The Mary Tyler Moore Show? The answer, he assured us, could be found in an old joke about a border guard. 

Everyday the same guy crosses the border on his bicycle. The guard is convinced the guy is smuggling something. But each time he searches him from head to foot and finds nothing. 

Years later, the cyclist and the border guard meet again under changed circumstances. Tell me, says the now ex-border guard, you were smuggling something, weren't you?

Of course, replies the cyclist, I was smuggling bicycles.

Gitlin's contention - with its obvious debt to Marshall McLuhan - was that the networks were, so to speak, smuggling bicycles. The apparently liberal content of their shows was irrelevant, what was important was to smuggle into the viewers' daily lives the very form of TV itself. 

I can't remember whether Gitlin brought up Raymond Williams's notion of TV programming as "flow", that is, as a structured attempt to hold an audience's attention over a whole night's broadcasting. In fact, I don't think he did. But it seems relevant to bring it up in this context. Nobody - or at least, hardly anyone - turns on the telly at a specific time for a particular show, watches a single programme and then switches the thing off (actually, in an age of Tivo and iPlayer and so forth this is probably not so much the case anymore, but then it is arguably true that television, as traditionally understood, does not really exist anymore).

I was reminded of this lecture the other day whilst idly browsing friends' responses to Danny Boyle's Olympic Games opening ceremony. And I came to the conclusion that, as someone who lives in a different country, doesn't own a TV aerial, and made no attempt to watch the ceremony online, I am therefore ideally placed to comment and pass judgement on the spectacle that everybody else watched and I didn't.

Because what I had noticed was a sharp and sudden sea change in opinion. Left-leaning friends (and , y'know, people I follow on Twitter but don't actually know) who had displayed nothing but contempt and cynicism towards the games, its brand-policing, heavy-handed security, and anachronistic jingoism, up to this point, had abruptly switched to declaring how proud they were to be British and how they fed up they were of other people's cynicism and contempt for the games and everything it stood for. Yes, the very same cynicism and contempt that they had themselves been expressing just a few hours earlier. 

Suddenly, everyone was all: anyone who criticises this will be unfollowed and struck off my Christmas card list (evidently a large bounty of Christmas cards has never been my highest priority in life - either that or I'm relying on the reduced memory spans of habitual internet users). Boyle's ceremony had, in short, achieved everything that the London Olympic Games Organising Committee could have hoped for. More, even. It had won over some of its staunchest critics - even as their friends were being arrested and imprisoned for having the temerity to go on a bike ride through London on the same day as the ceremony.

Which is why I can't help but think that for all its Sex-Pistols-and-dancing-nurses-and-Dizzee-Rascal-and-skydiving-Her-Majesties, the actual content of the opening ceremony remains irrelevant. Olympics enthusiasm had been smuggled into the viewers minds - even as the bicycles were being held under Section 12 of the Public Order Act.