A woman with her lips painted bright red sensually blows out a candle as the camera pans out to reveal its position atop a cake decorated to look like the American flag. As the woman sings the words “American queen is the American dream” over the cake—interspersed with shots of young people frollicking and partying outside of a large white house—she paints a stark picture of American patriotism.
After the group presentation last week that discussed representations of America in music videos, I became curious about how America, the American Dream, and neoliberalism are represented from an outside perspective. This opening to “Hollywood” by Welsh singer MARINA (also known as Marina and the Diamonds) provides a stunning visual endorsement of the American dream. Throughout the video, MARINA dances through a large house wearing a variety of American flag themed outfits while partying, waving flags, and joyously indulging in her representation of the ideal Hollywood lifestyle.
Despite the video’s visual affirmation of the glamour of the American dream, MARINA’s lyrics paint a different picture of America. She sings about a hostess on her flight to the US “trying to stimulate a mind / that is slowly starting to decay” while reading a gossip magazine, singing to her “Hollywood infected your brain” and that she has been “puking American dreams” in the chorus. Her lyrics throw jabs like these at the vapid and materialistic nature of America and her conception of the American dream throughout the song. However, the clash between MARINA’s lyricism and the visuals of her music video communicate an important message: MARINA cannot help buying into the American dream—being “Obsessed with the mess that’s America”—because she fits the narrow vision of who the American dream is imagined for. She recognizes in her lyrics that she bears the privilege of fitting the image of an American celebrity or movie star, singing about being compared to Shakira and Catherine Zeta Jones. She cannot help but bite into the idea of the American dream, even as she criticizes it, because she knows that she can fit the vision of the “American queen” that she sings about.
This music video contrasts starkly with the video for Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl.” At the opening of the video, Miski sits propped on a chair as a crew neatens her outfit and fusses over applying bits of hairspray to her before she suddenly locks eyes with a man across from her. The two exchange flirtatious glances, smiles, and waves. As Mitski blushes and waves shyly, a white woman dressed in jean shorts and wearing a flower crown—the picture of an ideal All-American girl—approaches the man and the two start flirtatiously touching as the smile drops from Mitski’s face. As the two of them flirt and eventually progress to making out, Mitski turns to her own hand, sensually kissing and caressing it as shots of Mitski on her own contrast with shots of the couple.
In the background of shots of Mitski and the couple, she sings “And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” As the video progresses, the couple becomes progressively more intimate and unclothed, eventually wrapping themselves in nothing but an American flag as Mitski plays guitar on her own. This juxtaposition between Mitski on her own and the couple shrouded in the flag, along with the lyrics, signal that this couple represents the American dream that Mitskii has been excluded from. As a Japanese-American, Mitski has grown up being caught between both her American birthplace and her Japanese heritage and close relationship with her Japanese ancestry. She laments in the song, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / but I do,” both illustrating the distance between her upbringing and that of this all-American boy and her refusal to shun her upbringing in order to fit into an American ideal.
Like MARINA, Mitski presents a story of aspiration of fitting into the narrative of the American dream as an outsider. Both simultaneously critique the American dream while singing about how they cannot help but reach for it. They demonstrate how culture has become so saturated with idealization of what is offered to those who fit the “all-American” ideal that, even in critiquing it and having some kind of distanced viewpoint, they cannot help but participate in the kind of behaviors and consumption that bring them closer to it. However, while MARINA’s video presents a story of someone who has been accepted into this ideal, in part because of her whiteness and conformity to American beauty standards, Mitski’s illustrates how this ideal remains exclusionary for those who do not fit the image of a “best American girl.” In contrast with MARINA’s video, which critiques America while providing a visual endorsement of the American dream, Mitski sings about aspiring towards an “all-American” ideal while visually representing this impossibility for her. No matter what she does or how much she tries to be an all-American girl like her counterpart in the video, even having a team of stylists fuss over her, she remains on the outside looking in.
2 replies on “Representation of The American Dream in MARINA’s “Hollywood” and Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl””
MARINA’s “Hollywood” thrives on contradiction, while the lyrics hollow it out, exposing the rot beneath the sparkle. Her whiteness, Euro-American beauty, and ability to play into celebrity culture allow her to access and even profit from a dream she knows is shallow—yet she is not immune to its seduction. This conflict gives the song a kind of complicity that feels both self-aware and unavoidable, which you capture with the line, “She cannot help but bite into the idea of the American dream.”
In contrast, Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” devastates precisely because of the absence of even that conflicted access. Your reading highlights how the video stages rejection not just in romance, but in cultural belonging. The white couple wrapped in the American flag isn’t just a symbol of nationalism, but of an unattainable norm that Mitski both longs for and refuses to assimilate into.
Together, these videos suggest that the American Dream operates not as a universal aspiration, but as a selective fantasy—offered freely to some, held at arm’s length from others. MARINA and Mitski both show how this fantasy is internalized even by those who critique it. But where MARINA plays within the dream’s terms, critiquing from the inside, Mitski remains positioned on the outside, illustrating how exclusion isn’t just social but deeply personal and embodied.
As a member of the group that focused on representation of US patriotism in music videos, I can’t help but respond. Your analyses of Mitski and MARINA bring something that my group selection lacked – a non-American national perspective (or in the case of Mitski a hyphenated-Americanness). Note that I did not say non-American alone since, as you point out, American hegemony is an export that has so thoroughly saturated the discourse of the American Dream™ and other American ideals that there is likely not a true “non-American” perspective that is at least a little bit infused with American thought.
Your section on Mitski’s contention with all-american ideals also has a compulsory heteronormativity active in it. The lyrics of “all-american boy” and “all-american girl” seem to deterministically make them pairable only to each other and not to themselves. Imagine how different the video would have been if the all-american ideal couple was same-sex.