Emma Westenberg | Lucky Strike / 2019 [music video]

heart in hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emma Westenberg (director) Lucky Strike / 2019 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

Sitting on a California beach, Troye Sivan, clearly having a crush on the beach bartender (Brandon Good), begs his would-be lover to “Tell me all the ways to love you.”

Oh, I want to know just how to love you

The jewel of California

Oh I want to skip stones on your skin boy

And drown me in your water

 

And my boy like a queen,

Unlike one you’ve ever seen

He knows how to love me better

A hit of dopamine, higher than I’ve ever been

He knows how to love me better

 

Cause you’re safe like spring time

Short days, long nights, boy

Tell me all the ways to love you

 

Cause you taste like lucky strikes,

You drag, I light, boy

Tell me all the ways to love you

    Clearly this man has the young man’s heart in his hands, as Sivan begs for a way to be able to fully express his love.

    Soon the rather disparate beach crowd around him have joined in on his dance of pleasure, slightly reminiscent of Salome in Oscar Wilde’s famous play and later opera—only here, despite the fact that the bartender holds the singer’s heart in his hands, there is no perversity. This is male on male love, pure and simple, with the blonde Australian beauty, in the end, left on the beach alone.

 

  Is it sad or joyful? In this case, it’s hard to tell, particularly if his wondrous day with the bartender is simply one of his imagination. There is a strong sense of longing here that is missing from some of his more joyous videos.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).