Ariana Grande walks in the footsteps of Fritz Lang with her video “34+35”. The director and actor is famous for his science fiction film “Metropolis” from 1927, in which a robot transforms into an artificial, human-looking woman, the copy of the real Maria (aka Mary). The video, which quotes the famous role model, was produced by Director X. V Magazine writes: “34+35” is the second track of Grande’s recent release “Positions”, “but it is first in sexually charged metaphors” (V Magazine, 17 November 2020). The robot in the “campy video” has the pretty head of Ariane Grande from the beginning. The point is to bring it to life. This happens in an apparatus reminiscent of the one in “Metropolis”. Of course, Ariana Grande is also the scientist who performs the experiment, so she corresponds to the crazy guy named Rotwang. Some lines in the song suggest that the Ariana Grande robot is a sex robot. “Can you stay up all night?/Fuck me ’til the daylight/Thirty-four, thirty-five”, sings the star from Boca Raton. V Magazine writes: “Presumably, a robot could do such a thing, and that is perhaps what this mechanized lady has been designed for.” (V Magazine, 17 November 2020) The purpose of the artificial Maria is different. She is used as a deceptive robot. As such, she is more in the tradition of the research of Ronald C. Arkin and Oliver Bendel.
BY OLIVER BENDEL
