Tag: Dirt Femme

When last we left Tove Lo’s jilted robot lover in the Alaska-directed video for Dirt Femme’s second single, “No One Dies From Love,” Annie 3000 had been cast aside in favor of a newer model (tale as old as time). Specifically, for a more “lifelike” robot named Eva. Annie, who just spent the entirety of the video making a plethora of memories with Tove as her servile robo-lover, never would have imagined she could be tossed out so easily for someone (or something) else. For, as it turns out, the key line in the chorus, “No one dies from love/Guess I’ll be the first” is ultimately from Annie’s perspective, not Tove’s. And, upon seeing her gush over how “real” Eva is, Annie feels the unspoken sting of not being “real enough” for Tove by ripping her “heart” (located at the center of her chest) out in response as the deluge of memories they shared plays back in a painful montage before Annie goes up in flames (foreshadowing for how things will also transpire in “Borderline,” set to appear on the deluxe edition of Dirt Femme).

The final scene of the video, however, assures us that it’s just as the song says, “No one dies from love.” Instead, one gets repurposed into another useful thing: being a crash test dummy. For this is Annie’s new fate in the aftermath of having her heart broken by Tove. Hence, the state we find her in (side note: her true robot identity isn’t revealed for certain until the last frame) throughout the sequel to “No One Dies From Love”: “Borderline” (always a brave title choice when considering Madonna’s 1983 single of the same name has the monopoly on that word, try as Ariana Grande, Tame Impala, and now, Tove Lo might to make it their own). Co-written with fellow pop powerhouse Dua Lipa around the time Future Nostalgia was being created, Tove was certain to mention that this “is a song about being on the edge of love. The drama you cause inside yourself and with another person if you feel insecure.” To be sure, Annie, by this point, is nothing if not insecure. Though still confident enough to know that she deserves her revenge (as Budd [Michael Madsen] says of Beatrix Kiddo [Uma Thurman] in Kill Bill). And how she gets it is very elaborate indeed.

This time directed by Nogari, the video starts at the finale, with a vehicle up in flames. To this end, it’s no coincidence that J. G. Ballard’s Crash has seeped into the cultural consciousness of late by way of mainstream pop culture. This includes, most notably, Charli XCX (a regular Tove Lo collaborator) naming her most recent album Crash and featuring herself on the cover all bloodied and perched on the hood of a car (in a bikini, of course) with a cracked windshield—presumably because she deliberately threw herself in front of it. You know, just to feel something and all that jazz in our climate of total dissociation and sociopathy. Which is why an obsession with all-consuming, passion-burning love remains at a premium, particularly in narrative depictions. And when we can’t get something like that from an actual human in the way that we want it, perhaps it’s bound to transfer to…objects. Especially technologically-oriented ones.

Enter technosexuality. But its precursor was, “naturally,” mechanophilia. For the car was the first major modern technological advancement of the post-Industrial age. Suddenly it was mother, father, sister, brother to so many. Offering shelter and comfort for any occasion: going to the movies, making out, having sex, sleeping, eating…maybe even going to the bathroom (a.k.a. pissing in a cup). Ballard’s tale of mechanosexuals-turned-symphorophiliacs (someone sexually aroused by accidents and disasters, e.g. car crashes) is a dark look at the effects the modern age has had on humankind, and its increasing inability to relate to its own flesh-and-blood ilk. Preferring instead the “no muss, no fuss” coldness of a machine. This, needless to say, also including robots. As Zadie Smith would assess of the novel in a 2014 article for The Guardian, “Crash is an existential book about how everybody uses everything. How everything uses everybody.” That reality has only amplified in the decade since the piece was initially published, not to mention the many decades since Crash was first released.

One might even say Annie has become the new “nightmare angel of the expressways” in lieu of Crash’s Dr. Robert Vaughan. This much is made clear as we watch her kidnap Tove Lo, who we see in the back of the trunk after Annie has gone through the ringer in terms of being constructed into the perfect crash test dummy that can withstand all manner of impacts (hear the lyrics: “I like to my feel my bones when they crash into my heart/I like the taste of blood when you’re tearin’ me apart)—except unrequited love-oriented ones. It doesn’t take long for Tove to come around to playing along with Annie’s idea of a Thelma and Louise-inspired road trip, possibly because she’s not fully aware it actually is Annie. Her openness to doing whatever only augments after Annie serves her a handy tab of acid that also looks very much like a computer chip (with this in mind, Tove ostensibly speaks from Annie’s viewpoint when she sings, “I like to push it to the edge/As long as you say you’re mine/Borderline”).

Cut to Tove Lo dancing sensually amid the wreckage of various vehicle parts as she trips blithely in the junkyard not just of “no longer useful” machinery, but also love itself. In another scene, Tove and Annie, in her crash test dummy guise, are backlit by a pair of headlights as Tove licks and kisses the non-person with the sort of tripped-out gusto that only LSD can incite. As Tove puts it in her lyrics, “Lost in the magic with you/A pretty disguise from the truth/Truth is ugly, don’t open your eyes/I can change, I can change with just one more lie.”

The next day, however, even without the drugs, the reinstated “lavender haze” still seems to be at play as Tove hangs out the window, lovingly caresses the crash test dummy’s face while the latter drives and enjoys a roadside meal with her ex-turned-current boo. But somehow, it all seems part of Annie’s elaborate revenge plan: make Tove fall back in love with her as a different human-shaped object and then crash them into a wall as they’re pursued by a police car (for no apparent reason other than, again, to come across like Thelma and Louise). Sure, maybe Tove thought it had to go down that way in order for them to be together, but what she failed to take into account about Annie’s machinations (no pun intended) is that she knew she was quite literally built to crash and survive. Which she’s now not only done in a harrowing relationship with Tove, but in this actual crash in which she finds herself burned, but still moving. A symphorophiliac in matters of love, thanks to Tove’s original callousness.

Because perhaps being a symphorophiliac stems, at first, from getting off on watching how easy it is for a relationship to crash and burn—as fragile and delicate (if not more so) as any person prone to a fatal wreck inside a vehicle.