Mitski’s new single, “Working for the Knife”, uses the psychic relationship with film to talk about the psychic relationship with art under capitalism. While Mitski is sometimes laundered down to a confessional writer, she often states in interviews that she writes more usually about the process of making music, the process of making art–about which she sings with desperation in Geyser that despite her desires and her best efforts, “it’s not real\ it’s not real\ it’s not real enough.”

In the music video, she acts out a variety of filmic archetypes, from the sinister competence of the chain-smoking cowboy with her invisible cigarette to the manic ecstasy or fear of the tortured female horror movie protagonist, who stomps and flails with her hair flying around her face to expiate whatever enormous terrible emotion it is that lives inside her. (This figure is the “unhinged woman” in the Internet parlance of the moment. Overuse of a word causes what linguists call semantic bleaching, the invisibilization of the embedded metaphor. What comes through the door that sits off its hinges?) What’s terrible about capitalism, she might want to say, is that it commodifies not only the actual product of your creative spirit, but even the very reason you want to create, if you are an artist working in a certain stream. Capitalism causes you to buy and sell your only tool to make life mean anything, to force yourself to manufacture such meaning-making or to fake manufacturing it.