White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter video

Being that Lana Del Rey is hardly a stranger to making “no frills” videos interspersed with “found footage,” her visual accompaniment for “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” shouldn’t be that jarring. And yet, it comes across as perhaps even more unsettling than the song itself. The first distinct shot, blurrily displayed before the camera “whip pans” over to the entirety of Del Rey’s (presumably bayou-adjacent) backyard, is of a stove. The emblem of domesticity (therefore, “femininity”) that Del Rey has taken a shine to for her tenth album, named after said major kitchen appliance. But as Del Rey has often been one for “perverting” things, the presence of the stove is more sinister than it is “homey.”

Shot in a sepia tone—at least during the first half—Del Rey posted an additional video to her Instagram account casually explaining of how “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” was filmed, “We just made it ourselves—Jeremy, Dylan, Connor, uh, Anna, who does my hair. She tried, but it was too humid so she ended up being our cameraman as well.” Though Cofone’s original footage isn’t the only kind that finds its way into the video, which is made extra creepy thanks to the series of vintage cartoons that also later appear in it. But then, Del Rey established this signature “aesthetic” of hers from the get-go. One that cemented her as having a knack for unearthing clips from the past and framing them in such a way as to make them, for one reason or another, quite unsettling.

In 2011, the year before her debut album, Born to Die, was released, Del Rey proved this with the video that would immediately and forever enter her into the cultural lexicon: “Video Games.” Awash in images of “Americana”—girls twirling each other around, vibrant people swimming I the ocean, an American flag billowing in the wind, the Hollywood sign in black and white, figures sitting by the beach against the backdrop of a glistening sunset reflected in the water—these snapshots are belied by something more ominous. Something far grimmer. That much is made most apparent in the paparazzi-filmed footage of a drunk Paz de la Huerta falling down with reckless abandon as one of the onlookers asks, “Is she all right?” As if he actually cares. As if everything she’s doing isn’t playing right into what the “consumers” of such “content” wanted (and still do).

Indeed, fresh from the 2000s in 2011, Del Rey and those of her generation were accustomed to seeing women treated in this way by the paparazzi (with Britney Spears as the foremost example). As objects for “entertainment.” But the way that de la Huerta acts—so unbothered and “I don’t care if you see me like this or not”—seemed to be what appealed to Del Rey at the time, who noted to i-D the same year the video was released, “She loves falling down, she fucking revels in her own disaster. She knows exactly what’s happening and she loves it. I put it in because I thought it was right for the song… I let my intuition guide me. I have a very strong narrative in mind. Maybe you could say it’s my take on the dark side of the American Dream… fame gone bad, but I just think it’s funny.”

Del Rey probably also thinks it’s funny to stick her head in the oven around the two-minute-forty-four-second mark. This said after she sings, “Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do/Know how absolutely bad I’m with an oven.” And, taken within her Sylvia Plath-alluding context (for most anyone worth their salt in literary knowledge is aware Plath killed herself by sticking her head in the oven), Del Rey does what she does best: refers to something “pleasant” and “wholesome” (e.g., a stove), and then exposes its dark, decaying underbelly. Just as she’s been doing with America itself for quite some time (though still chirping during the monologue in the 2012 video for “Ride,” “I believe in the country America used to be”). The stove is, thus, both a tool of life (through food) and death (through domestic dissatisfaction and depression).

It’s also on-brand for Del Rey to switch to using color film at random, as she does the instant the sticking-her-head-in-the-oven scene comes on. This followed by a found clip of smokestacks to refer to the exhaust gas produced by a stove, which is why some varietals—especially the kind found in the backwaters of Louisiana—of the appliance are connected directly to the chimney to release such gas outside of the home (because why shouldn’t the environment be exposed to it instead?).

Switching to the vintage cartoon scene she also favored in “Video Games,” Betty Boop then appears, in a moment pulled from 1934’s Betty in Blunderland. Del Rey also incorporates another scene from a different Betty Boop offering, 1933’s Snow-White, during which Koko the Clown gets positively spectral (perhaps a nod to Del Rey’s line, “Yeah, I’m a ghost, doesn’t mean I feel nothin’”). From there, the randomness/unhingedness escalates, with scenes of Del Rey and her “gator-loving” husband, Jeremy Dufrene, laughing together in the snow, Del Rey stirring the pot (in more ways than one) on the stove and being pushed on the John Deere mower she mentions in the first verse (“Likes to push me on this green John Deere mower”).

As for Dufrene’s looming and lurking presence throughout this video, it’s perhaps the most jarring image of all. For even though Del Rey has never been shy about featuring her sig others in her work (see also: the video for “Summer Wine” or hear also: “And then there’s Donoghue” as a lyric in “Kintsugi”), his presence in this work is far more major than any previous love of Del Rey’s could have hoped for, right down to him being listed as one of the song’s co-writers. It’s almost tantamount to Taylor Swift “letting” Travis Kelce appear as one of the tailcoat-wearing performers during “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” at The Eras Tour. In other words, it signals just how “cemented” things are between Del Rey and Dufrene (who even altered her signature LDR necklace to read LDD instead).

Cemented enough for the collective of video “directors” on this to feature some quick intercut scenes of Dufrene just kind of standing there starting around the two-minute-twelve mark. His image in these moments adding to the creepy/Southern Gothic feel of it all—with everyone knowing that the South in general is a haunted place without Del Rey seeming to confirm that theory by looking generally possessed (even if only by love) as she dances in summer attire in the snow.

While some have been “miffed” by Del Rey’s seeming lack of effort with regard to making this video, it’s not as if she’s ever been known for releasing “polished” visuals for her songs, with her most “high-value production” one still arguably being “Born to Die.” In fact, apart from select videos from certain album cycles, Del Rey dabbled only briefly with a consistent string of “real” music videos during the Lust for Life era (specifically, “Love,” “Lust for Life” and “White Mustang”).

As she goes back more overtly than ever to her “homemade”/“found footage” roots, it still bears remarking that “Video Games” has a much more coiffed, so to speak, look to it (and hell, Del Rey even bothers to accurately lip-sync her own lyrics during “Video Games” instead of frequently tapering off and laughing as she does during “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter”). Not to mention an underlying message that, although aware of the dark side of most things (namely, fame and the United States), upholds a more hopeful, aspirational tone than what comes across in “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter.” A compare and contrast between the last scenes of the latter and the last scenes of “Video Games” heightens that notion. For in “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter,” it concludes with Del Rey again in the sepia-toned sequence they shot, smiling in a hair-raising sort of manner (though she probably just wanted to convey her happiness) as the snow continues to fall on her hair, gathering to form clusters before she shakes her head a bit to remove them.

Some of the final scenes of “Video Games,” however, stick to the found footage motif and again go back to a billowing-in-the-breeze American flag followed by a seagull soaring through the air. Then there’s another vintage clip of paparazzi with their flashbulb cameras (those “stolen images, stolen images”) before Del Rey concludes it all with a shot of the Hollywood sign. This being back when she still romanticized Los Angeles in lieu of Louisiana. But, let’s put it this way, L.A. films a lot better than LA when it comes to Del Rey’s video editing jobs.