Like so many post-MTV pop stars who elevate image cultivation to a discrete art form, Lana Del Rey is at her best in music videos. While her songwriting recipe hasnt changed much over the years (sad girls + Americana + string sections + quotes from other famous songs), her artistry has slowly revealed itself in a series of promo clips and short films that registered the evolution of what once appeared to be an absurdly thin persona. Were no closer to knowing the real Lizzy Grant than we were almost six years ago, when Video Games premiered, but the 25 videos she's released since achieving fame as Lana Del Rey have endowed her alter ego with more depth than once seemed possible.

Now, shes preparing to release her fourth album, Lust for Life, next month. Naturally, she's pushing her aesthetic forward with a few new videos, so it seemed time to have a look back at the LDR persona on film.

Most of us got our first glimpse of Lana Del Rey in this self-directed video, which juxtaposes pouty closeups of the singer with nostalgic shots of Hollywood landmarks, American flags, mid-century home movies, and black-and-white footage of skater boys. At first glance, Video Games seems shoddily constructed and a touch juvenile, like a Pinterest board collecting all the images Del Rey hoped to incorporate into her nascent persona. Even her smartest critics found her campy in an unintentional, trying-too-hard way at first.

But if you look closely enough at Video Games, youll see that Del Rey has always been cannier than she let on. Mixed in with all that Instagram-friendly imagery of pretty Lana and idyllic California is a clip of the deeply intoxicated actress Paz de la Huerta falling over in a beaded gown, as paparazzi halfheartedly mumble You OK? and keep snapping photos. Considering were looking at de la Huertaa minor actress whose drunken antics had already made her a cultural punchline by 2011rather than, say, Marilyn Monroe, this isnt a vision of glamorous dissipation. Like the lyric Its you, its you, its all for you repeated in a listless monotone, the de la Huerta nod suggests that even a pre-fame Lana Del Rey understood Hollywood to be just as cruel and humiliating as it is alluring.

Del Rey used to bill herself as a gangster Nancy Sinatra, a phrase that evoked some combination of big hair, vintage dresses, and the frisson of danger inherent in depictions of organized crime, from Scarface to American Gangster. She played that persona to the hilt in her first big-budget video, for the title track of her debut album, Born to Die. Shot at Frances Palace of Fontainebleau and directed by Yoann Lemoine (who recently made Harry Styles fly in Sign of the Times), it intersperses shots of Del Rey on a throne, flanked by tigers, with flashbacks to a date with a tattoo-covered boyfriend that turns deadly. Shes in the afterlife now, is the eventual implication, a martyr to romance in a flowing white dress and flower crown.

The two halves of the video reflect the two simplistic extremes of the Lana Del Rey archetype: the virginal Coachella queen and the sexy bad girl in denim cutoffs and Converse. Its narrative, meanwhile, captures everything that is romantic and clever and problematic about her at once. From a feminist perspective (which supposedly doesnt interest Lana much in comparison with, you know, SpaceX and Tesla), the story of an abused woman who is rewarded for her suffering with a place in heaven is noxious to the core. And yet, the affectlessness with which Del Rey plays her character, especially in those scenes from beyond the grave, can also read as an acknowledgment that the myth shes rehashing in Born to Die is essentially hollow.

The most heated arguments about Lana Del Rey tend to revolve around one question: Is she playing to male fantasies (and female fantasies shaped by patriarchal visions of ideal womanhood), or is she mirroring them in ways that are actually supposed to be disconcerting? She digs her heels into that thin line in the ten-minute short film for Ride, from her Paradise EP. Directed by the frequent Rihanna, Drake, and Taylor Swift collaborator Anthony Mandler and scripted by Del Rey, it pairs the songs lonely-drifter lyrics with classic symbols and characters of the American road: bikers, hookers, seedy motels, an unfortunate and perhaps intentionally outrage-baiting feathered headdress, convenience stores where you buy a 20 oz. of orange soda and drink it against a wall as you inhale gasoline fumes.

In the end credits, Del Rey labels her character in the film an artist. Its a bold title to bestow upon a woman who, as far as we can glean from both the visuals and the monologues that bookend the song, seems to have left a middling music career for life on the road as a prostitute and biker chick. It takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is, she intones before the music starts playing. Again, her relationship to fame is unhinged: How bleak is the entertainment industry when a transient life of rest stops and rough-looking johns is preferable? Judging by how sad Del Rey looks in the scenes where shes singing onstage, the difference between performing and turning tricks is that at least the latter makes you an active participant, rather than a pretty face to be worshipedor perhaps more aptly for LDR, criticizedfrom afar.

More than anything else, Lizzy Grants Lana Del Rey project is a long, slow meditation on the archetypes America holds dear. Some of the most prominent onescowboys, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Del Reys own Virgin Mary figureappear in the opening moments of her most ambitious video project, Tropico. From there, she and model/actor Shaun Ross play Eve and Adam, getting down in a pink-hued Garden of Eden. Set to Del Reys Whitman-quoting Body Electric, the first of three Paradise tracks that appear in the 27-minute film, its a sequence that subtly draws out the parallels between all of these gendered ideals.

But its the final two sections of the Tropico triptych, another Del Rey-Mandler collaboration, that really bring her worldview into focus. Amid her readings of I Sing the Body Electric and Allen Ginsbergs Howl, she and Ross reappear as a modern L.A. couple embodying exaggerated visions of contemporary masculinity and femininityhes a gangster and shes a stripper (who, it must be acknowledged, is coded as Latina in a way that is just as uncomfortable as the headdress from Ride). They regain the bliss they experienced in Eden by abandoning society and heading for the hills, where they dance in golden fields straight out of a Terrence Malick movie. The visuals are sappy, but they also seem like clues that Del Rey isnt really celebrating the characters she inhabits in Ride and Born to Die. They have to escape from the ancient archetypes that shaped and trapped them before they can be free.

Compared with the ambitious short films that accompanied Paradise, the music videos Del Rey made to accompany her second album, Ultraviolence, seem almost slight. By then shed had time to process her polarizing effect on music fans, so what makes Italian director Francesco Carrozzinis iPhone-shot clip for the records title track worth revisiting is the way it incorporates the audience.

Dressed as a bride, Del Rey wanders a garden path. Theres someone with her, but the only glimpse we get of him is a pair of male hands that feed her cake and stick their fingers in her mouth. The camera follows her, in a point-of-view shot, as she enters an empty church and proceeds to the altar. In the videos final seconds, she turns around to look nervously into the lens. This is a lonely, uneasy wedding, and it forces the viewer into the role of the unseen groom. While her early videos were about communicating Del Reys aesthetic and philosophy, Ultraviolence confronts us with the desires and prejudices that we project on herand on beautiful women in general.

The real Lizzy Grant was born and raised in New York, but Lana Del Rey is a California girl. While her debut riffed on 50s Hollywood glamour, her third album, Honeymoon, embraced the iconography (but not really the sound) of the Golden States psychedelic 60s counterculture. No matter what you think of Father John Misty, theres no denying that he and Del Rey make perfect co-cult leaders in Freak, which she also directed. The video surrounds the pair with a bevy of white-clad women as they take hits of acid and suck down Kool-Aid in a none-too-subtle nod to Jonestown.

Del Rey always has occupied a strange space between the musical mainstream and the indie worldshes less a classic crossover success than a pop artist who uses the signifiers of the underground to lure in savvier listeners (or, more cynically, to brand herself). In that sense, enlisting Misty and scattering her album with drug references might read as a predictable play for authenticity, but theres a bit more than that going on in Freak. Its not clear whether she, FJM, and their followers are tripping or dead in the second half of the 11-minute clip, as the soundtrack switches to Debussys Claire de Lune and they all float blissfully underwater. In true Lana style, the line between fantasy and tragedy isnt blurred so much as nonexistent.

Early in her career, many wondered whether Lana Del Rey was kidding. As became clear with the 2014 release of Ultraviolence cut Brooklyn Baby (sample lyrics: Well, my boyfriend's in the band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed/I've got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry), the better question wouldve been: Is Lana trolling? The rollout for her fourth album, Lust for Life, has felt especially mischievous, from a title lifted wholesale from Iggy Pops greatest solo record to Coachella Woodstock in My Minda single whose title is actually embarrassing to say out loud.

Although shes already released videos for the title track and Love, the most distinctive imagery associated with Lust for Life appears in the trailer. Del Rey has probably always been more self-aware than shes given credit for, but this preview, directed by Clark Jackson, finds her actually having fun with her odd, aloof starlet image. In a black-and-white clip embellished with eerie, sci-fi sound effects, shes a witchy figure living in a secret apartment inside the H of the Hollywood sign, delivering a sort of meta-monologue on her own creative process that makes elliptical reference to our sad current political reality: When Im in the middle of making a record, especially now, when the world is in the middle of such a tumultuous period, I find I really need to take the space for myself far away from real life, to consider what my contribution to the world should be in these dark times.

Theres a throughline of dark SoCal iconography connecting this Lana with the one we met in Video Games, who looked as if she were nervously auditioning to be an Urban Outfitters model. Regardless of whether that, too, was an act (and it probably was), now that shes established her aesthetic and fan base, the Lust for Life trailer doesnt do anything that could be construed as pandering. Instead of promoting the Lana Del Rey persona, it capitalizes on the humor inherent in this constructed identityand doesnt seem to mind losing anyone who doesnt get the joke. Whether you buy into it or not, Del Reys schtick is so simultaneously simple yet totally immersive that its always threatening to exhaust itself. Four albums into her career, going all-in on self-awareness may be the best choice she couldve possibly made to ensure her longevity.

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The Evolution of the Lana Del Rey Persona in 7 Videos - Pitchfork