Marcel Winatschek

Thirty Minutes in Eden

Lana Del Rey made a thirty-minute film. It’s called Tropico. She wrote it herself, she plays Eve, and it opens in the Garden of Eden before moving the whole apparatus into contemporary Los Angeles. Because obviously it does.

The film is structured in three chapters and positions itself as the final part of a triptych that started with the "Born To Die" video and ran through Born To Die—The Paradise Edition. Three songs from that record appear throughout—"Body Electric," "Gods and Monsters," "Bel Air"—and the underlying theme is sin and redemption played completely straight. Which is either genuine artistic commitment or Lana being constitutionally incapable of doing anything small. Given her track record, probably both.

My reaction watching it was a sustained, not entirely unpleasant WTF. Not dismissal—she’s doing the whole thing, fully committed, biblical iconography and all—but a kind of awe at the sheer scale of the ambition. You have to respect someone who looks at a thirty-minute film about Eve in a strip club in modern LA and thinks: yes, this is exactly what needs to exist.