…He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. Which means that this hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life— this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero. You’re exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat. And they’re not heroic defeats; they’re ignoble defeats. Finally, one day you say, ‘Let him die— I can’t invest any more in this heroic position.’ From there, you just live your life as if it’s real— as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.

I met him four years ago. He was making pornography then. He was famous for it, sort of—famous for making the worst pornography, a pornography of transgression and violation, a pornography that seemed intended less to glorify sex than to advertise the death of the soul. People were calling him the devil back then—in fact, that’s exactly what he said when I met him: “People call me the devil”—but I liked him immediately. He was solicitous, and he was smart. He talked about surrealism and breaking down the wall between viewer and participant. Then I went to watch him make a pornographic movie out in the Valley and saw something so irredeemably obscene that I figured, Okay, Gregory Dark really is the devil, or at least someone I should stay away from.

Then, last year, I watched a Britney Spears video for a song called “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” on MTV. I kept waiting for that adorable little cutlet to break out into a suggestive hootchy-koo, but she never did. The video was aggressively wholesome—given over to a wholesomeness that was unreal and fetishized—and at the end of it, when I looked for the name of its director, I saw that it was Gregory Dark. Then I saw a video by Mandy Moore, another teenage glamour-puss, who is marketed to little girls who are still too innocent for the coy come-ons of Britney Spears and the frank sexual howling of Christina Aguilera. Gregory Dark directed the Mandy Moore video, too. I called him up, and he said, “Oh, yes, I remember you—we were sort of friends.” He said that he didn’t make pornography anymore but had, in the years since, made about a hundred music videos. He said that he was in great demand, and that in fact he was trying to work out a deal to direct a feature film for New Line. I asked him what he was doing next, and he said he was directing a video for a fourteen-year-old girl. I asked whether I could come out and see him, and he hesitated—he was, he said, a changed man, and he didn’t want to be judged as a pornographer anymore. I pressed. I said, C’mon, man, you know me. At last he gave in, and I went out to see whether Gregory Dark was indeed a changed man or had simply cut some kind of crafty deal to take control of the hearts of America’s virgin daughters.

“The weirder strain of criticism concerns authenticity. People seem to feel that Del Rey is trying to trick us, though it’s impossible to figure out exactly what that trick would be, as we are dealing with an entertainer and her audience, not a naturally fractious relationship. Detractors cite a variety of presumed conspiracies, some involving the influence of her father, Rob Grant, who is a successful Internet entrepreneur; the rumor of manipulative managers guiding her; the reality of professional songwriters working with her; the question of who paid for the cartoons and the paparazzi footage of the actress Paz de la Huerta that appear in the “Video Games” clip; and how Grant’s top lip got so big so fast. (Grant says she’s undergone no surgical procedures.) Surely no equivalent male star would be subject to the same level of examination.

Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, ‘Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in The Iron Lady.’