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In her video for “5 dollars,” Christine and the Queens presents a wonderfully roguish take on the business of sex and the sexuality of business. Héloïse Letissier, the French pop singer behind Christine and the Queens, described the song as “dealing with some kind of love — the kind you can buy.” While five dollars might not seem like much for such services, the track is an upbeat, rousing ‘80’s-synth-pop inspired anthem with radically celebratory lyrics hailing the “eager and unashamed” and those who have had to struggle to be recognized, the “some of us who just had to fight / for even being looked at right.” In the accompanying video, Letissier pairs these punkish and puckish declarations of pride with cleverly complicated and taboo-challenging visuals.
The video opens with Letissier getting ready for her day — exercising, showering, moisturizing — after an evidently passionate night: She sports a bright red bruise on her neck, of which she amusedly takes note, and conspicuous scratch marks along her back. While attuned to her body and the physicality of her sexuality, the video resolutely does not objectify her; one never senses that she is in less than full control of how she is being portrayed. When she gets dressed, she selects clothes from a closet that is, as she described in the aforementioned statement to Vogue, “‘American Gigolo’ with a twist.” It contains an impressive collection of both dapper suits, of the type Richard Gere wore in the 1980 film, and immaculate black leather gear. While she dances in a sweetly silly way, complete with many finger-guns, she puts on a chest harness and briefly considers a matching chained collar. Then, in the video’s perfect turn, she buttons a crisp, pinstriped, white dress shirt over the harness and adds a grey glen plaid vest and trim blazer, to match. She completes her marvelously androgynous suit with neat pants, a red tie, and shimmering black gloves. Picking up a handsome leather briefcase, she briefly admires her dashing reflections in a tripartite mirror before walking out the door.
Letissier cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions from her visual choices and reminds us that what we see is a product of our own projected fantasies: “I wouldn’t advise to conclude anything too drastic, since you’re glaring yourself, in an obscene fashion — voyeur. The hustler is also someone who allows you to project onto him or her, before disappearing to leave you alone with your fantasmes.” However, it’s worth noting that the video is certainly suggestive. Where in mainstream American culture, leather gear is regarded as outré and business dress as clean and upright, by bringing together the two in this fashion, Letissier cleverly positions the business suit as the ultimate fetish item, in both senses of the word. That is, she reveals the business suit as both an object of cultural erotic fixation and one that is societally imbued with mythic powers. Through her appropriation and redeployment of this iconic symbol, Letissier radically challenges the iconography of elite male power — or at least, that’s my fantasme.
—Staff writer A.J. Cohn can be reached at adam.cohn@thecrimson.com.
