'Love' Video Proves Lana Del Rey Needs an Astronomy Class

Don’t ever tell me Lana Del Rey makes bad music videos. That’s fake news. But while we’ve already seen Lana dig into the depths of dark American iconography in “Ride” and blow up a goddamn helicopter in “High by the Beach,” she has yet to venture off into the infinite void of space — until now. It’s an incredibly dreamy video befitting a lovely tune.

It also completely throws out the laws of astrophysics and science out the window — or rather, out the universe.

At around the 2:20 mark, we see one of the video’s couples sitting in their newly-repaired beat-up truck, hurtling off towards the moon. Soon after, an unwitting skater girl seems to be wiping out in pure bliss in zero gravity. Another group of friends is slowly drifting off in a vintage car, spiraling head first into a violent yet captivating sun. There’s a bunch of other space imagery filtered through a ‘60s-effect lens, and later it’s revealed that Lana and her band are playing their anthem on the surface of the moon, no less.

The crew finally meet up on an extraterrestrial world somewhere. There’s an aquatic blue paradise underneath a gorgeously bright Milky Way streaking across the sky, and absurdly large neighboring planets dot the horizon. In the video’s last minute, we see what looks like a massive, ringed gas giant (Saturn?) in the distance, with a stream of shooting stars burning up through the atmosphere. The gang kicks back at a late-night diner located somewhere out of time and space, while another couple finally have a weightless embrace and passionate kiss.

Is there a world like this that exists anywhere in the universe? God no. This is fiction taken to its most extreme. The results are stunningly gorgeous, and totally unreal. We can get the obvious stuff out of the way first: Humans can’t float around in space without a space suit — the lack of air basically means a horrible death in a matter of minutes. Cars don’t make good spacecraft — least of all when you get too close to the sun. And we have yet to master interstellar space travel — be it in a classic truck or via skateboard.

But besides all that, the most intriguing part about the “Love” video is the idea of another Earth existing elsewhere. Merely on the basis of the celestial imagery that the video’s characters are blessed with, we know for certain this new planet is not in the solar system. There’s no reason to believe a planet like this can’t exist somewhere, but scientists have yet to discover a star system with all these pieces accounted for. Nearby gas giants and rocky planets, together with a crescent moon that appears out of nowhere, are just a few of the problems in this video.

But while the chances of finding a pristine oasis like the video’s characters do are nearly zero, scientists are scouring the galaxy for exoplanets that may prove to be habitable to life. It’s not a total stretch to think that one day — in the very distant future — we could see a crew wasting away their youth in an idyll world far away from here.

I can’t even complain that all the science is wrong in this video. Someone please cast Lana in a science-fiction flick about space travel.