Playing Video Games: Lana Del Rey & Simulation Theory
The internet went crazy when Lana Del Rey appeared at Paris Fashion Week with her new husband, Jeremy Dufrene; an alligator wrangler from the swamps of southern Louisiana.
Lana was in a flowing silk gown holding his arm, while he walked beside her in what looked like his every day gater-greeting work-wear. It was oddly romantic.
People have been fascinated by Lana Del Rey’s sudden marriage, particularly by reports that she hid her identity when she and Jeremy Dufrene first met, that she quietly lived with him and his children in a trailer in rural Louisiana, that he has the rather uncommon job of working with alligators, and that she managed to remain almost entirely off the radar while dating. And while all of that is undeniably intriguing given her global fame, what I find the most interesting is the manifest of this relationship; the underlying pattern, the algorithm of it… something no one ever seems to comment on.
Most people know who Lana Del Rey is. She rose to prominence in the early 2010s with her Old Hollywood vocals and aesthetic. She first caught attention online for her self-made music videos comprised of collages of vintage footage intercut with her own self-filmed performances at home. In the song that first went viral she sang slowly, again, and again; “playing video games.”
After her notoriously awkward and widely panned debut on Saturday Night Live, she became a household name overnight. Yet, miraculously, her follow up release solidified her place in pop culture: Born to Die (2012), with its lush cinematic production, established her as a leading figure in the music industry.
One of the singles off of that album, “Blue Jeans,” came with her first professionally produced music video: Produced entirely in black and white, Lana appears as an almost holographic figure in the opening, poised before a rippling ring of water. She is at first a reflection across the surface of the water, before diving into a pool… filled with alligators.
The rest of the video shows her moving in slow motion through the water between the large creatures as if it were some kind of water ballet. Not much else happens in the video, it’s a mood piece, but in hindsight is that really all there is to it?
This summer the author, and graduate of MIT and Stanford, Rizwan Virk, gave a talk at the Harvard Club of New York related to his book, The Simulation Hypothesis. The event was titled, “living in a simulation.” I was traveling to the West Coast at the time of his talk and couldn’t attend, but the theme interested me enough to explore his theories on my own.
Like many others, he makes a compelling case for the idea that our universe may be a sophisticated computer simulation, a kind of digital construct running on an advanced civilization’s technology. Drawing on parallels between quantum physics, information theory, and video game design, Virk suggests that what we perceive as physical reality could instead be a rendering, updated moment by moment according to computational rules. He argues that improbable alignments; synchronicities, symbolic echoes, etc… could be the simulation’s method of “rendering” said data points.
The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is also known for his believe that there’s a “better than 50–50 chance” we’re living in a simulation, though he frames it as a provocative thought experiment rather than a proven fact.
It feels important to note here, that many (most?) would argue this is all pseudoscience, and that our brains are simply trained to try to make something meaningful out of complex coincidences, and random data. What fun is that though? I’ll carry on.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard describes a postmodern condition in which simulations and copies without originals, what he calls simulacra, come to replace reality itself, producing a state of hyperreality where the imitation feels more real than the real. In the context of Lana Del Rey’s life and art, which is fully meshed with digital media via the entertainment industry, it’s tempting to read the alignment of her personal narrative, with the alligator-wrangling husband, as part of this kind of symbolic layering.
The idea of life as a simulation opens up intriguing questions about “manifesting.” Thoughts and expectations might function less as private experiences and more as inputs into the code itself. In video games, certain commands or cheat codes unlock hidden features; in a simulation, focusing one’s mind or beliefs could, at least theoretically, place a bias on the “rendering” of outcomes.
Viewed through the lens of algorithmic patterns, Lana’s creative sequences then reflect on her reality in a way that resembles a feedback loop: inputs (creative vision) generate outputs (material world response) that subsequently inform new states within the system. In a simulated or reflective universe, as posited by Virk and explored in computational physics, such correlations could be seen as emergent properties of an underlying information structure, where rules and encoded constraints produce outcomes that align with behavioral inputs.
Lana herself said in a 2024 interview that the act of being creative is a form of manifestation, a sentiment I deeply share. It makes one wonder whether she recognized that the “video game” she sang of on repeat in 2011 might culminate in her marrying the man in 2024 who tames the alligators she swam among in 2012.
The mind reels.