Nirris Nagendrarajah | Contributor
Featured image courtesy of YouTube
Mere hours after its release, the days following, and, now, a month since Beyoncé unleashed her visual album Lemonade, her most refined work to date, the album has been heralded as a visionary work of art and feminism and blackness, criticized to the capitalist core by bell hooks and overshadowed by the themes of infidelity extensively explored in her previous works such as “Ring the Alarm” and “Jealous.”
Beyoncé, working with various directors including Kahlil Joseph, uses film to illuminate her music. Contributions by the likes of Melo-X, Diplo and Warsan Shire’s powerful and eerie poetry throughout the album renders the project into transcendence—there is no question as to why this opus has been met with its strident critical analysis and discussions like no artist in recent memory. Lemonade will continue to be deconstructed, argued and evaluated for its flaws and all—this is just the seed.
Take one pint of water…
In one of the first images, Beyoncé wears a black hoodie against red velvet curtains, evoking Trayvon Martin whose image later returns in the film in the hands of his mother and the cover of Claudia Rankine’s masterwork Citizen, and lined in front of her is a line of light bulbs—only there are two bulbs missing, effectively breaking an image of completeness.
The first quarter of the film explores the idea of brokenness that follows in the “Hold Up” sequence where Beyoncé takes the baseball bat to break car windows. She gives visibility to her emotional turmoil caused by infidelity through her aggression—the vintage car windows come to represent a past version of Beyoncé, broken and inferior to the future. When she drives over the cars in a black monster truck at the end of the sequence, shot specifically in black and white to signal the past, she moves toward a future.
Add a half-pound of sugar…
When we see her next, a slow motion reveal crosscut with a collective of black women working together to untie a knot that binds their arms together, Beyoncé leans over a car with her girls around her—this version is not here for the re-enactments of violence. She demands respect.
At the end of this sequence, Beyoncé repeats the first image of the film: she wears a red dress against black with a complete line of flickering fire surrounding her—the artifice of the light bulbs pale in comparison to the spiritual, symbolic and real fire that burns deep with the rage she evokes—a phoenix, the symbol of rebirth.
The juice of eight lemons…
Shot in an underground parking lot, “Don’t Hurt Yourself” is one of the many songs filmed in interiors: “Hold Up” on a soundstage, “Sorry” in a mansion and the centre of a football field, and “6 Inch” in a car and a home. But at the end of the song the house burns. A place of domesticity, subservience, piety and restriction upon the female body is dismantled and Beyoncé walks in front of it in an elegant white-lace gown.
In front of the burning house, and one of the few moments of extended silence in the film, Beyoncé stands with her fellow women, in formation, as a light flashes against her face cutting to a sweeping black-and-white shot of nature. She stands in front of the present and takes a trip back to the past to explore her Southern roots that were marked with slavery and trauma.
One of the strengths of the film version over the music alone is illustrated in the video for “6 Inch” where Beyoncé asserts her gaze onto the men on the street as she drives by in the backseat of a car. The Weeknd describes a girl in his verse. The second time that he begins, the sound rewinds and Beyoncé’s voice takes over, abandoning The Weeknd altogether. As the album progresses, so does she and her agency.
The zest of half lemon…
Lemonade explores black mobility, specifically black female mobility, and the spaces that the body can occupy. The film progresses from dingy and wet interiors to the expansive nature of the South in “Freedom,” the streets of New Orleans in “Formation,” outside the stonewalls in “All Night,” riding a horse in “Daddy Lessons,” and on a beach in “Love Drought.” This acts as Beyoncé’s argument to free herself from pain, suffering and the patriarchal control that Beyoncé and the fellow women by her side are able to stand outside the spaces they have come to occupy into visibility.
The film, paired with the title cards marking different stages of grief and the strength of the words Shire provides, are carefully constructed to not only take the bad and make it good or turn the sour into the sweet, but to take the past and present in order to make and envision a future—and if Lemonade is any indication, it will be a bright one of reconciliation, hope and justice.
Pour the water from one jug then to the other several times…
Like any relationship, Lemonade is not without its imperfections. “Daddy Lessons” tells the story of the way a father teaches his daughter to take care of herself in a country song that ultimately feels empty and repetitive, and while archival footage with Beyoncé’s own father adds an emotional beat, it pales in comparison to the ferocity that drives the rest of the album.
“Sandcastles” uses a weak metaphor, which is fit for someone like Selena Gomez, as a backdrop to show a gorgeously shot reconciliation by Reed Morano between her and Jay-Z. Beyoncé’s voice strains and her feelings are felt but the cliché-ridden Beyoncé has yet to leave her. Remember “1 + 1”? These two songs also happen to have the least interesting videos, both featuring important men in her life, and its existence is necessary to the album to understand what has shaped her: flawed lesson plans and promises. It’s from these duds that she is able to create what is one of the most personal, post-modern and interesting records since FKA twigs’ LP1, whose work and collaborators such as Kahlil Joseph have undoubtedly served as an inspiration in addition to Terrence Malick, Julie Dash and Toni Morrison.
Strain through a clean napkin…
Lemonade challenges the way we experience music and narrative, and is dripping in visual and aural implications that will leave you going back to it again and again—kind of like how Beyoncé has been doing her whole career by straining herself through her influences and experiences to get closer to who she is and how she sees herself. And by all accounts, Lemonade is the best version so far.
Serve.
This piece is not sufficient to fully explore what Beyoncé has poured in our cups—consider this condensed. Plenty of talented writers on the internet are providing stronger, important and more-educated pieces than I could ever provide on specific topics and references in the film that is not my expertise—so please search out these voices.
