As the incestuously intertwined relationship between Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey and the former’s new wife, Margaret Qualley, intensifies, perhaps it’s to be expected that the trio would appear in a music video together. This one being for Bleachers’ latest single, “Alma Mater,” a generic-sounding number that reeks of the early 2010s tones and trends during which Bleachers first came to prominence (as did Antonoff’s other band, fun., for that matter). In fact, Antonoff’s mind has clearly been on that “era” based on the production he offered up for Taylor Swift’s Midnights as well.
With “Alma Mater,” he finally decided to spare some of that sound for himself, with the help of Del Rey contributing on vocals. The video, directed by Alex Lockett (who also directed the cringeworthy video for Bleachers’ “Modern Girl”), seems to want to make the song more interesting than it is (much as Taylor Swift’s video for “Look What You Made Me Do” wanted to for the song of the same name). So it is that Antonoff takes a different tack from the visual banality of “Modern Girl,” the first single from Bleachers’ forthcoming self-titled album. Thus, the “Lynchian flair” (or rather, wannabe Lynchian flair) of “Alma Mater,” which has a much slower, downbeat tempo than the plucky, overly exuberant “Modern Girl.” And, since David Lynch movies are, in the end, all about the filth and disgustingness beneath the surface of “squeaky clean” Americana, his “vibe” has often been compared to Del Rey’s, who, in her own way, speaks to the moral decay of American society. Antonoff, not so much.
Nonetheless, it is he who is featured driving around the streets of New Jersey in his convertible at night as we see bright signs for Rutgers Business School, Checkers and McDonald’s (Wawa, too, will eventually cameo, what with being name-checked in the song). In the next scene, he encounters two “twin-like” (in that they’re wearing the same suit) men carrying a full glass of red wine each. As Antonoff passes them in his vehicle, they raise their glasses in a surreal moment that smacks less of two drunkards and more of a New Jersey version of the Grady twins in The Shining. Either that, or zombies trying to approach Antonoff so that they can pair their wine with his flesh.
Less “sinister” (in quotes because none of it is actually sinister at all, only tries to be) scenes show up as Antonoff also encounters a man carrying his dog like a baby and a woman holding a plant at a bus stop as she faintly sways back and forth as though in a trance. That’s what it is to live in the bowels of America, after all. If you don’t impose the mental blackout upon yourself, it will be imposed upon you anyway. For there’s not much in the way of mental stimulation, with the entire structure and design of the United States ostensibly built to mind-numb. In another moment, Antonoff sees a dog sitting alone at the corner of the sidewalk before it runs away, almost in slow-motion, after being bathed in the car’s headlight for too long.
Elsewhere, Antonoff’s fellow bandmates appear as construction workers bursting into saxophone solos. We’re then given a brief instant of the car being shot from behind as it barrels through the darkness of an empty highway, also harkening us back to, what else, Lynch’s Lost Highway. And yet, there’s another movie inspiration one might not immediately think of at play throughout “Alma Mater”: Valley Girl. Specifically, that scene where Nicolas Cage as Randy drives through the boulevards of Hollywood with Julie (Deborah Foreman) in tow and sees similar sights/people, many of whom he shouts out to directly in acknowledgement of knowing them…or at least viewing them as a kindred spirit.
As for Del Rey, her own appearance is as muted as it is in the song. Though she has plenty of “New Jersey cred” after spending some time living in a trailer park there before her rise to fame at the end of 2011. Even if, in 2012, she told a French interviewer she had never seen a David Lynch movie…something that has since been corrected, but still, it was rather affronting at the time. Antonoff, meanwhile, continues on his surreal drive, now seeing a gray-haired man making out with a red-haired woman in the bright spotlight of a street lamp above them, cutting through the darkness.
For Antonoff’s “ultimate” moment of surreality, he sees his wife, Qualley (who Del Rey wrote a song about on Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd), crossing the road at Freedom Drive. Dressed in cream/beige-colored, flowy clothing, she looks more like a Hamptons dweller/pottery glazer than someone you might see roaming the streets of New Jersey at night. But one supposes that only adds to the “bizarreness” intended by the video.
Upon seeing this “vision of love,” Antonoff at last parks his car on the side of the road, as though he finally found what he was looking for on this long, gas-wasting, needlessly fossil fuel-emitting journey. And that “thing” was Margaret, who smiles sweetly in the final frame while looking like her face was replicated from Billie Eilish’s. A detail that’s less Lynchian than it is further proof of the “we’re living in a simulation” theory. Not to mention the idea that everything (and everyone) is a copy of a copy of a copy. Including this video that fancies itself much “weirder” than it is.
Genna Rivieccio
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