Bifurcation of the Simple

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here.

Lady Gaga’s newest video, “Yoü and I”, released two days ahead of schedule on August 16th, includes the usual heavy dollop of striking images and dichotomies. There’s the bloody-heeled, black-clad, cyborg Gaga lurching gracefully down a sun-baked Nebraska highway; there is the mad-scientist lover and the Frankenstein Gaga-mermaid he creates; there is the virginal dream-state Gaga performing “Yoü and I” in a cornfield for the Jo Calderone Gaga.

Clearly, present here are sets of oppositions: Cyborg Gaga is both glamorous and very literally artificial, fake, robotic, made in the big city of show business and high technology – what is she doing in rural farm country, in the heartland? There’s also Jo Calderone, the hard-bitten greaser, and Nightie Gaga, the picture of an innocent farm-girl. Not only do these two oppose one another as simple man and woman, or rebellious hellion and doe-eyed virgin, but they also, as a couple, stand in sharp contrast to the freakish and raunchy pairing of Mermaid Gaga and her mad-scientist creator (who is, in his turn, marked as the opposite to his fishy pop creation by the wings tattooed on his back).

What does it all mean? Of course, oppositional pairings are nothing new to Gaga’s work. In my essay about the “Judas” song and video, I discussed several such pairings: Judas and Jesus themselves, as well as Gaga’s equation of betrayal and forgiveness in an interview. That piece suggested that these opposites might in fact be one and the same: Gaga’s vices are her strengths, her fears are her aspirations. In my essay “Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical ‘I’”, I considered the way in which Gaga’s character songs blur the distinctions between various individuals, with major ramifications for power, agency, and identity.

In the “Yoü and I” video, as in these previous works, Gaga is interested in a very special kind of opposition, or duality: namely, she is interested in binaries which only appear to oppose one another; but when we peer at them more closely, or understand them in a new, more profound light, we come to see that they are in fact indistinguishable from one another – they are unities. Cyborg Gaga is, after all, returning to her home – “it’s been a long time since I came around/been a long time but I’m back in town.” She may have changed in drastic, even horrifying ways, but can it be denied that she is still a creature of the place in which she was born? Of course, Jo Calderone is easy to explain in this light: he is Lady Gaga in the most literal sense. And as an artistic creation, acted out by her, he fits in perfectly well as the dream of Nightie Gaga – who, after all, must be dreaming of some hunk, or why is she scampering around in her underwear at night in the middle of a giant field of fertility metaphor?

Giant field of fertility metaphor

In a similar sense, the winged-scientist lover and Mermaid Gaga also belong together, require one another. The monstrous passion of the scientist requires its project, as his monstrous lover’s passion requires the object of its lust. He clearly craves his opposite, a fish woman to his birdman, and their coupling is obviously both joyful and desperate on the part of both parties. Though perhaps Mermaid Gaga didn’t know that she needed the transformation her tormentor-turned-creator-turned lover has inflicted upon her, she seems to realize it by the end of the video. And the pain and violence of her creation is not incidental – it parallels the bloody, raw heels of Cyborg Gaga as she marches home down the highway. Journeys of self-discovery, as well as of homecoming, are difficult and even painful. (Odysseus, the original home-comer, is given his name by his grandfather who takes it from the word odium; he is later only recognized by the scars on his body – physical manifestations of the odium heaped upon his being. His pain, therefore, is synonymous with his identity.)

Thus the “Yoü and I” video is perhaps Gaga’s most overt statement on identity thus far. The crux of this video is that, despite the oppositions between Nightie Gaga and Calderone Gaga, between Mermaid Gaga and Nightie Gaga, between Cyborg Gaga and Nebraska Homestead, and between the two different romantic pairs, all these different Gagas belong together: even more, they are one.

This is how the identity which Gaga posits, and which she explores not only in individual songs and performances, but also in her day-to-day performance art project, is able to be at once performative and essential. The title of her second album, Born this Way, certainly caused a hubbub among many observers who considered themselves informed. How could Gaga champion empowered self-creation, to say nothing of LGBT rights, and yet choose a name that positively screamed the essentialist understanding of identity: from birth and by birth we are determined? Such observers could take a lesson from Gaga in the (re)unification of supposed-binaries: does having a destiny truly preclude self-creation, or transformation? Isn’t it conceivable that one’s destiny might be to make a certain choice, and if so, hasn’t the opposition between fate and freedom become obsolete or arbitrary?  

Hegel, in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, writes,

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presuppose its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out it its end, is it actual. (10)

I argue that what Hegel means in this passage and what Gaga is attempting to say about identity have much in common. Hegel’s argument is that the really real, the “actual”, the human subject, must include both itself and the perception of itself. There is always a distance inherent in identity, a sense in which a person knows who and where they are, and also that they could be something else someplace else. Thus, in a way, identity is an empty space, a gulf across which the self is perceived by something at once itself and alien. Compare this idea to one of Gaga’s tweets in the days before the video was released: “We bare an Unbearable Human Inability: to just ‘be.’” She grasps what Hegel means when he writes that “this substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” – humans are nothing more than the perception of something missing, of a void wherein that perception will always struggle and transform in an attempt to be fulfilled. Hence the arduous distance Cyborg Gaga must traverse, which leaves her ankles caked with blood, before she can return to a home as alien as it must be familiar. Hence the painful, rapine, monstrous transformation Mermaid Gaga undergoes before the throes of pleasure, before the coming-home of orgasmic ecstasy; hence the desire of Nightie Gaga for her dream object, which is after all only an inversion of herself. That tweet also includes “love is a result” – the result of this striving, a homecoming across the gulf of the self, which is perhaps not so different from the gulf between two selves.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.

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The Pasteboard Mask: Our Lady Leviathan

By Laurence Ross

This is the fifth piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece, here for the second, here for the third, & here for the fourth..

Your tail will then split in two and shrink into what human beings call pretty legs. But it will hurt.

– the Sea Witch

“Well, I would kill for fashion.”

– Lady Gaga

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks … Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough … Talk to me not of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

– Ahab

There are two music videos for Lady Gaga’s newest single, “The Edge of Glory”: the one that exists and the one that does not. This is not exactly a lamentation for a reality that could have been. More so, this is a Borgesian analysis, a deconstruction of the imagined work, an essay at assaying the untaken path in the garden of forking paths.

The First (Second) Version, Which Exists:

If the aesthetic of “The Edge of Glory” is more reminiscent of MGM studios than of New York, it is for good reason – the video was not shot in New York. Moreover, there seems to be little attempt at making this set feel like New York. In what reality is there a street in New York (much less one with a burning building) that goes unpopulated for more than five minutes? Even as Gene Kelly sings and dances in the (artificial) street in the (artificial) rain, there are passersby, and Gaga, in taking a spin around the lamppost, is undoubtedly echoing this performance.

Perhaps that MGM context is the context in which this video should reside, the context in which we should approach our appreciations, lamentations, and critiques. Gaga, as always, is delivering a performance. She is on a set, a set whose artifice is purposely showing its seams at every edge. Gaga emphasizes this artifice, this edge, from the very first shot of the video: her hand emerges from behind the edge of the street-corner building, an edge we cannot see beyond. The second shot? Gaga’s hand running along the edge of an open window frame, an open window that leads into a room in which we can see nothing.

The antiquated and stark aesthetic of this music video – especially when compared to the super-saturated confections Gaga has been feeding her little monsters – seems to have caused a wide-spread reaction of being served a stalk of broccoli for dessert. But a music video made with the aesthetics of another time, (let’s say for example, since everyone is saying it anyway, the 80s), means something much different when the video is produced in 2011 rather than, well, the 80s. The video is, perhaps, less so an homage, and more so a new thought. The video wears the mask of antiquity, putting forward the question, what (if anything) is behind the mask? After all, we are looking at a stage set, the mask of a building, a building that is simply a façade, a shadow, an imitation of the real life thing.

The Second (First) Version, Which Does Not Exist:

Of that which does not exist, we have shadows, we have ghosts, we have specters. We have been the spectators of a handful of live performances of “The Edge of Glory” that complicate the existent video, creating a labyrinth of imagery. On “Le Grand Journal” (15 June, 2011), Gaga is literally spun around toward the crowd, revealing Lady Gaga-as-mermaid. She is half human/half fish. She is, from one aspect, a monstrous mutation. From another aspect, she is beautiful, born that way. And from yet another aspect, she is both, simultaneously. Your fish tail, which we find so beautiful, looks hideous to people on earth. Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is a paradox. And if Gaga is consistently anything at all, she is a paradox. Here is her stage, her performance with all the layered, mirrored complexities we expect Gaga to be continually birthing.

Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is out of water; she is out of her natural habitat. The mermaid is attracted to the surface world as Gaga, in “The Edge of Glory,” is attracted to the Other world, the world on the other side of that edge, whatever that world might be (be it death or simply the other side of the window, the turn around the street corner). Lady Gaga-as-mermaid needs a mask to breathe in this Other world, yet seems unwilling to actually use it. She seems committed to a type of death, a voluntary drowning in air, as she momentarily stares at and sings to the device that could give her life, give her breath, before discarding it. Or, conversely, the mask is a necessary device that facilitates her surgery. The mask is an anesthetic mask, one that will allow her to cross the line from water to land, from tail to legs, from one side of the water to the other, one that will allow her to cross the edge that is the water’s surface. And Gaga sings with eyes half-mast, already in a state of sedation. There are the doctors/angels dressed in white and aquatically moving at the foot of the operating table, offering masks up to Gaga – offerings of life and/or death, offering the paradox that one must die in order to live.

This performance contains many of the elements that exist in the nonexistent video, a video (not) directed by Joseph Kahn. Mermaids, dancing doctors, the menacing tray of surgical instruments, the metallic operating table. The aquamarine wig – a color that simultaneously conjures images of the ocean and of hospital scrubs. We watch (or would watch) this spectacle as the captivated audience seated in the amphitheater of a surgical concert/Sea World show with the captive creature (the captive Gaga) as its centerpiece. We watch this performance from our seats, spectators hungry for spectacle, our bags of candy in hand, and we are tickled pink or blue or maybe both.

The Duality/Singularity of Gaga:

The existent version of the “The Edge of Glory” video is not without its complexities. The outfit/costume Lady Gaga wears throughout the entire video is a piece by Versace. Versace’s logo, the (disembodied) head of Medusa, adorns the outfit/costume. The Medusas are layered: one Medusa strung on a necklace and hanging free as an ornament, the other tightly affixed to Gaga’s throat on a choker. And the old woman clamped eight big oysters onto the princess’s tail to show her high rank. “Ow! That really hurts,” said the little mermaid. “Yes, beauty has its price,” the grandmother replied. Versace’s logo is often encircled in a wreath and represented as a coin. And as with any coin, there are two sides, one edge, and the viewer can only view one side at a time. To see the one side is to give up the other.

The box Gaga has painted on her cheek as a beauty mark signifies a container, a confinement, though this box is not filled in. The box is an open box, an open window of sorts, a third eye (as we have seen before in the “Born This Way” video). The box is simultaneously a symbol of constriction (a prison, a coffin, a vagina) and of freedom (an open space, a gateway to the soul, a vagina).

Medusa herself embodies a feminine paradox. She is a powerful, allegedly beautiful figure; though, if she is imbued with the desire to be with a man (as Gaga’s lyrics to the song are imbued), that desire would be unquenchable in her current, monstrous form. Any man that gazed upon her would turn to stone. Her one consolation was sitting in her little garden, with her arms wrapped around the beautiful marble statue. Medusa’s power is simultaneously a curse, her hair producing loneliness and amplifying longing. Medusa’s hair constitutes her (dual) identity. “I am my hair, I am my hair,” sings Gaga. “I’m the spirit of my hair, it’s all the glory that I bare.” And if Gaga is her hair and Gaga’s hair is conceived as all her glory, then that glory (identity) must be two-toned, two-toned as the half-black-half-white hair she bares throughout the existent video.

And though there is only one set in the existent version of “The Edge of Glory,” there are actually two Gagas: the Gaga on the fire escape and the Gaga on the street. The Gaga on the fire escape seems reluctant to escape the burning room she emerges from – and in fact, does not, first climbing up the ladder of the fire escape rather than down, and then re-entering the burning room at the video’s close. Meanwhile, the Gaga on the street is supposedly removed from the danger of the flames behind her. Both Gagas are backlit by red light (“fame hooker, prostitute wench,” “it isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight”), though the Gaga of the fire escape seems content to dance with the (artificial) building while the Gaga of the street kisses the very (artificial) street she walks on. Both Gagas seem to be egging the viewer on, beckoning the viewer to follow (and indeed, the viewer/camera does follow).

Then there are the lyrics of the song itself, which present two conflicting sides/stories to reconcile. Or perhaps not to reconcile, but to co-exist. There is the story of the song’s origin (the death of Lady Gaga’s grandfather) that Gaga delivered during her Google interview. And then there is the narrative that is most explicit in her performance on American Idol (25 May, 2011): a story of two lovers, which, if the lyrics are interpreted from a certain perspective, transforms the song into a type of murder ballad. Gaga sings, “Another shot before we kiss the other side / I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight.” The shot being either (or both) the shots of tequila that Gaga and her father drank in the wake of her grandfather’s death, or the shots of a double-suicide (the needled syringes of a couple of Darvon cocktails, or Gaga and her lover falling together from the edge of the crag). Both videos, the existent and the non-existent, seem to trace the narrative of the lover and the idea of wanting to follow someone into death, of giving up one’s life in its current form to be with another, and of (a type of) suicide. Death is present, by revolver or le petite mort – take your pick. Or pick both. But whichever you pick, death in this way, from a Christian perspective, is noted as a sin (“I’ll be dancing in the flames tonight”).

Think of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, a poem in which a woman in heaven presses herself against the very edge of the rampart, the golden bars, in longing for her lover who is still stuck on Earth. She is unsatisfied with a heaven where her lover is absent; she wants, “Only to live as once on earth / With Love – only to be, / As then awhile, forever now, / Together, I and he” (lines 128-132). This is a type of love Rossetti recognized as pride, (granted, pride in one’s love, but pride nonetheless), and pride is the sin of Lucifer, the sin that is the origin of hell. Love and sin, for Rossetti and for Gaga, become fused into one desire, one action. Gaga then muses, “It isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight,” implying another form of prideful love: self-love. You might call it vanity. But is loving one’s self such a terrible thing? In “Born This Way,” Gaga sings, “There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are,” and we are left with yet another paradox: love as sin.

Guillotining Gaga:

There is one other performance of “The Edge of Glory” to consider: the guillotine-lined stage of Germany’s Next Top Model (9 June, 2011). The entire performance begins with a Gaga in shadow, a ghost-Gaga (“Scheiße”), then transitions into a dualistic-Gaga, Gaga at the piano (“Born This Way”) looking at herself in the mirror (the boudoir, the vanity), and then she walks through the three guillotines of sex, money, and vanity (“The Edge of Glory”). Beneath the guillotine in which she is finally beheaded (the one labeled vanity), she lays back in a facsimile of a hair salon’s shampoo chair, as if she is getting her hair cut/washed/altered/styled (a creative act, an act of life in spite of death, “that I’ll die living just as free as my hair”) instead of suffering an execution, a beheading, a death in the same vein as Medusa. The little mermaid was also beheaded, not in Hans Christian Anderson’s fiction but in our own reality. The statue of the little mermaid that resides in Copenhagen has had its head sawn off twice, a statue that is already a reproduction of the original, a copy, an artifice that can be continually replicated and recast. And of course, through Gaga’s execution, Gaga does not die, but instead survives. The little mermaid drank the bitter, fiery potion, and it felt to her as if a double-edged sword was passing through her delicate body. She fainted and fell down as if dead. Gaga executes yet another birth. There again are two heads: the old head and the new head, the real head and the false head. “Beauty is a lie!” Gaga screams, baring the severed, false head for all to see. There is, once again, Gaga after Gaga, Gaga bearing Gaga, Gaga both employing and exposing artifice as the means of her identity/hair/art/fame/act/reality.

Similarly, at the end of the existent music video, the final shot is of Gaga’s head in reverse, hanging upside down, loose and swaying, before she rights herself again and crosses over the threshold of the window frame.

“I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight,” she sings. But what is on the other side of the edge? Now you mustn’t think for a moment that there is nothing but bare, white sand down there. Oh, no! The most wondrous trees and plants grow at the bottom of the sea, with stalks and leaves so supple that they stir with life at the slightest ripple in the water. Gaga still stands after the fall of the guillotine, still baring her hair, and bearing another Gaga in the process. Perhaps the other side of life is not death, but life. Perhaps the two sides of a coin are the same. Perhaps there are double-headed coins (Versace). Perhaps the tail is an illusion. Perhaps the mermaid, in this reality, does not exist.

Note: The italicized portions of the text are lines taken from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Bibliography:

Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2008. Print.

Bain, Becky. “‘American Idol’ Finale: We Judge The Performances.” Idolator. 26 May 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Almost Loses Her Head On ‘Germany’s Next Top Model.’” Idolator. 9 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Is A Little Mermaid On ‘Le Grand Jounal.’” Idolator. 15 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2007. Print.

Born This Way. Dir. Nick Knight and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Daw, Robbie. “Review Revue: Critics React To Lady Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory” Video.” Idolator. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Lady Gaga. “Born This Way.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Hair.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Judas.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “The Edge of Glory.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2002. Print.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Blessed Damozel.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. E. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1446. Print.

The Edge of Glory. Dir. Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

The Edge of Glory. (Not) Dir. Joseph Kahn and Lady Gaga. (Not) Perf. Lady Gaga. (Not) 2011. (Non-existent) Film.

Wieselman, Jarett. “What went wrong with Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory’ video?” New York Post. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Writer Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

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Betrayal/Forgiveness

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here.

This essay examines four dualities surrounding “Judas” the song and Judas the video: (1) Gaga’s equation of forgiveness and betrayal in a recent interview, (2) the wordplay of “Biblical sense” and (3) of “conjugal sense” in the bridge verse of the song, and finally (4) that of Judas/Jesus themselves. What I suspect is interesting about each of these dualities is that, in the process of doubling or mirroring that takes place between the opposing poles, the emphasis is on the collapse of the duality into one (ambiguous?) unity. Though doubles may often operate as diametrically-opposed principles-in-conflict, or provide a better understanding of two concepts/characters through contrast, the doubles in Gaga’s “Judas” more often deal in reduction to a single principle or character, and the ensuing ambiguity of opposites becoming one and the same.

First, what of Gaga’s statement that betrayal and forgiveness “go hand in hand.” In the context of “Judas,” how are these two concepts, these two actions, similar, connected, even the same? How might this be understood? Betrayal can be thought of as abandoning or turning against a principle or person. For example, Judas betrayed Jesus in both senses; he abandoned, even attacked, Jesus by giving Jesus to his enemies. At the same time, he contravened and threw down the principle of Jesus’ teachings, to which as a disciple he had dedicated himself. He betrayed both Jesus and himself. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is purposeful, loving acceptance. A person can forgive another person or something more nebulous like fate or society. People even forgive themselves, either for something they’ve done to another or for some personal failing damaging or relevant only to themselves. In a more radical sense, forgiveness means to overlook or ignore something, as when God forgives the sins of men.

So what does it mean to say these two concepts “go hand in hand,” as Gaga does? What connection can they have? Over the course of her short career, Lady Gaga has espoused a message of self-acceptance and self-creation (or transformation) – isn’t this as much a paradox or contradiction as equating betrayal and forgiveness? These two uncertainties have the same answer: the self is fundamentally a continuing transformation; if it accepted what it was, forgave itself at some point, and thus abandoned that transformative nature, then it would have also betrayed itself. The self is not born that way, the way it was at some specific point, but born this way in an always-moving, always-changing present.

Lady Gaga, especially with the release of singles from and information about the upcoming Born This Way album, suggests that the true self is a kind of creative, transformative principle. It is artistic expression, rather than an artistic expression, and thus acceptance and embodiment of that true nature requires both change and artifice. The true self is art-ificial, something consciously made anew constantly.

In recently released HBO behind-the-scenes footage of the Monster Ball, Lady Gaga, in tears, says that she still sometimes feels like “a loser,” even when up on stage performing before thousands of screaming adorers. The Lady Gaga persona is not a comfortable expression of Stefani Germonatta’s true nature, it is not Stefani Germonatta’s essential self; rather, it is an act of will, carried out despite fear and weakness, a process of self-formation that is identical to the overcoming of fears and insecurities that are, of course, essential to her self in some way – the persona, her self, is a self-overcoming. In this sense, then, the transformative, performative aspect is united with the idea of an essence. Essence is self-overcoming. Continual transformation, despite and even for the sake of fear and danger, is what the self ideally is. Given this, forgiveness as an acceptance of what already exists in the self is also a betrayal, because it abandons the principle of that self as transformative.

Thus, when asked about “body modification” (her bone-horns) in a recent Bazaar interview, Gaga answered, “Well, first of all, they’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones . . . they’ve always been inside me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am.” This quote simultaneously captures the extent to which artifice becomes natural in Gaga’s aesthetics or ethics of self (the prosthetics are real and are hers because she chooses them as such), and the way that essence is not a completed existence, but a living principle according to which the self is manifested, according to which it is continuously transformed into what it is. If Gaga had accepted her bone-horn-less self, forgiven that lack, she would have betrayed her self by abandoning its principle of change. Consider also her statement regarding Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest in the same interview: “In the video, we use Rico, who is tattooed head to toe. He was born that way. Although he wasn’t born with tattoos, it was his ultimate destiny to become to man he is today.” And his destiny to become the man he will be tomorrow.

This equation – forgiveness as a betrayal of oneself – takes on new meanings when refracted through the lenses of the other dualisms in the “Judas” song and video. I now move to the bridge verse of the song, which precedes immediately the central interlude of the music video: “In the most Biblical sense/I am beyond repentance/fame hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind/but in the conjugal sense/I just speak in future tense/Judas kiss me if offenced or wear ear condom next time.” In this verse, both “Biblical” and “conjugal” are each presented as having a singular “sense” – but both adjectives have fully-functioning double meanings. “Biblical” refers either to, of course, the Bible and Christian religion/theology in general, or to “knowing” someone “Biblically” – having sex with them. Likewise, “conjugal” may refer to both sex or marriage, and verb conjugation (“I just speak in future tense”). How do these senses relate to forgiveness, betrayal, and the self as an essential, transformative principle?

The two meanings of “Biblical sense” are brought out by the following lines: the reference to “repentance” indicates that Gaga is far beyond the betrayal of (asking for) forgiveness. Her revolutionary project – of self-fashioning, of artistic expression, of LGBT rights advocacy – is pure in its bravery, strength, and ferocity. In three senses, Lady Gaga is beyond repentance, is not afflicted by the doubt or hesitation with which acceptance of an imperfect world or self is to some extent synonymous. First, she does not risk caving to a fear that might prevent her continual self-overcoming. Second, her desire for fame is trumped by and cannot compromise her artistic drives. Third, she feels no desire to forgive an intolerant society its vices and thus temper her advocacy. But at the same time, the opposite of each of these propositions is true: she is only a “fame hooker,” prostituting herself for exactly what she claims to be beyond. The reflexive vomiting of her “mind,” her creativity, and even, perhaps, her advocacy, is all only a desperate ploy for acceptance.

“Conjugal sense” functions in the same Janus-faced fashion. Does the marriage suggested by “conjugal” indicate Gaga’s commitment to her revolutionary projects, or does it suggest her submission, her clinging to, fame and acceptance? Is she married to principle or to convenience? Is she a slatternly Eve (subservient wife and ancient damnation of Fallen Man), or is she the dedicated and pure nun betrothed to Jesus? Is her project all “future tense,” a continuously-evoked false promise? Or does it mean that she is truly committed to the future towards which she claims to work, the future of the “new race, free of prejudice”? Gaga is endlessly torn between two opposite poles (as suggested in the Manifesto of Mother Monster); Jesus, her virtue, calls her to self-overcoming, art, and the advocacy of social justice. At the same time, Judas, the demon she clings to, pulls her back to a betrayal of those principles – to an acceptance (forgiveness) of the world as it is now.

I believe that these paradoxes and ambiguities come to fruition in the final duality, that which is obviously the fundamental allegory of the song and video: Jesus and Judas. The intimate and fraught relationship of these two figures has suggested itself to many readers. Judas, in one sense the ultimate villain, is required for the success of the ultimate hero, Jesus. And who needs Jesus, who claimed to come for the sake of sinners, more than the ultimate sinner? Jesus requires Judas in order to be betrayed; Judas requires Jesus in order to be forgiven – both fundamentally need what the other represents. They make one another possible, not despite their diametrical opposition, but because of it. Would it be too extreme a stretch to regard them, like forgiveness and betrayal, like the unrepentant fame-hooker and the nun-whore, as two sides of the same coin?

This ambiguous unity of supposedly-opposed principles and identities is at the core of Gaga’s “Judas”: the collapse of distinctions is omnipresent in both song and video. The lyrics make it impossible to ever be sure who is singing to whom; indeed it is impossible to argue that there is a continual narrator or addressee at all. Take the first verse: “When he comes to me, I am ready/I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/Even after three times, he betrays me.” These lines include the possibilities of Jesus speaking about Judas (and about Peter), of Magdalene speaking about Jesus, and of the Gaga-character speaking about the Judas-character. They even suggest Jesus as a liar (or jealous lover), if the “he” of the foot-washing is the masculine owner of the lying tongue. What of the piercing, possibly furious, undoubtedly jealous gaze of Jesus in the video – who, it must be noted, lacks a name on his motorcycle jacket (another possible indicator that identity is ambiguous)? 

Does “king with no crown” refer unproblematically to Jesus, or does his crown of thorns, made not only explicit but positively gaudy in the video, disqualify him? Could Judas be the king with no crown? And given this uncertainty, is the Gaga of the lyrics “I’ll bring him down, bring him down-down” a weapon directed against Jesus or, as the video shows, a weapon directed by Jesus against Judas? Are the clung-to Judas and virtuous Jesus of the lyrics the same characters as those who bear their signifiers in the video? What does all this ambiguity suggest about that for which Gaga is struggling, and what is impeding, endangering, or opposing her struggle?

Nietzsche suggested, in a long-lost line from his posthumous-patchwork The Will to Power, the idea of “duality as too weak a unity.” I wonder if a similar thought is far from Gaga’s mind regarding the Judas project: she is clearly desperate to accomplish something, and at the same time desperately afraid of the forces (internal as much as external) that threaten that accomplishing. But in a song and video that set up an opposition so often treated as the ultimate black-and-white – Jesus and Judas – and then profoundly blurs the distinctions and identities involved, might she not be suggesting that, regarding her project and its impediments, her perception of duality is a weakness or a misunderstanding? Are her demons and her virtues, her weaknesses and her strengths, her fears and her hopes, really one and the same?

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JudasGaGa: The Double Kiss

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for “Judas.” Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

Lady Gaga’s project has long dealt with doubles. During the Fame era, her performance was often reflective; much like Warhol, she positioned herself as a mirror upon which to imitate her interviewer (e.g. Barbara Walters, Larry King), her audience (e.g. The Queen, little monsters), cultural narratives about the female body (the Meat Dress) and about the pop star (VMA “Paparazzi” performance). She was accompanied, in a way, by doubles (and triples, and quadruples…) wherever she went, reflecting her fans and thereby embodying their “spiritual hologram,” becoming their double. Her first album, The Fame, was really a double album, soon attended by its dark underbelly, The Fame Monster. Whatever pop lightness and fierceness The Fame presented, it did so while casting shadows whose shape revealed a grotesque monster. Similarly, the video for “Born This Way” witnessed two miraculous births – one good, the other evil. Mother monster split into two, embodied both a prejudice-free heavenly being, and a violently hellish one. If Gaga was herself a mirror during The Fame/Monster, then she now looks into her own mirror during the era of Born This Way. Warhol said to himself, “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” His answer was “nothing”; Gaga’s answer appears to be another mirror. Think of Gaga’s birthing vagina in “Born This Way,” composed of two mirrors that reflect one another infinitely, thereby generating the infinite birth of Lady Gaga. Another mirroring: Gaga costumed and made up to reflect Rico’s skeleton tattoos and Mugler suit, but in a feminine form. Gaga mimicking Michael Jackson and then Madonna at the end of “Born This Way,” enacting their zombied doubles. Finally, I’m reminded of the recent photo shoot for Bazaar, not one but eleven Gagas, copied or cloned – the mitosis of now.

The video for “Judas” is also highly invested in the notion of the double, a double whose synthesis is Lady Gaga herself. Quite straightforwardly, both the video and the song present Jesus as Gaga’s light and Judas as her darkness – both are intimately a part of Gaga, part and parcel to her own being. As Gaga has said of the video, “If you have no shadows then you’re not standing in the light,” indicating that good and evil are symbiotically connected. The video for “Judas” thus synthesizes the double into a unified figure, demonstrates how this seemingly opposing pair comprises a whole, collapses oppositions into a single expression or being – Mary Magdalene/Lady Gaga is the synthesis of Judas/Dark and Jesus/Light.

Many elements of the video enact a doubling that is ultimately reconciled. The choreography, for example, is graphed along a kind of Hegelian thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. More than any of her previous choreography, the dancing for “Judas” is very even-sided: movement on the right (thesis) is followed by the reflected movement on the left (anti-thesis), finally punctuated by a third movement that synthesizes the previous two. Especially during the chorus, this seems to be the schematic design behind the choreography. Significant, too, is the heart-shaped gesture Gaga and her dancers make with their hands, which is often the synthesizing sign; love, (it has been rumored), has the power to reconcile opposites, and it does so as a gesture in Gaga’s dance.

Think, also, of the dancing when Gaga sings, “Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas GaGa” (2:09-2:16) – this thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis is reenacted four times during this short segment, finally punctuating Gaga herself as the body of reconciliation. During the first three “Judas Juda-a-a”, she punches upward to her right then to her left for “Judas”, and then combines these opposing punches into a symmetrical two-fists for “Juda-a-a”. The final “Judas GaGa” ends with a defiant singular fist on the “GaGa”, which brings together the opposing movements, significantly upon the utterance of Gaga’s name. Gaga is thus both named and gestured as the site of reconciliation between oppositions, which enacts a third reconciliation: that of the word (the spiritual) with the world (the flesh, the material).

This synthesis of the word with the world – wor(l)d – ties in with the extensive religious imagery and narrative that the video employs. Unlike mundane objects, religious objects automatically carry with them both a material and a spiritual reality. In essence, the religious object is a kind of oxymoron – spiritual material, esoteric physicality, tangible God. The religious sacraments, too, are defined according to this same paradox: “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us.” The video for “Judas” employs the epistemology of the religious object in its narrative, its imagery, its costuming, and even in its formal filmic composition of Gaga. She is repeatedly composed according to the techniques of icon painting, and becomes, in effect, a kind of living icon. Icon painting is itself a spiritual process wherein the artist perceives himself as a vessel through which to channel God’s inspiration, and often fasts and prays for days to ready himself to paint. The noted characteristics of icon painting include two-dimensionality and purposefully unrealistic dimensions (to emphasize that what is visualized is not of our three-dimensional world, but rather of the spiritual otherworld), religious figures drawn with extremely large, almost-disproportional eyes (considered windows into the soul), and colors that are gilded to emphasize a heavenly glow. Often, icons are decorated with jewels and gold, left as offerings by worshipers.

In “Judas,” the headshots of Gaga are composed according to many of these characteristics of the icon.

Like iconic representations, Gaga’s eyes are emphasized, she seemingly glows (illuminated by a background light), her makeup is done in such a way as to flatten out her features and further elongate her nose (again, like noses in icons), and her nails – encrusted with jewels – recall the rich decoration with which worshipers adorn icons. The costume she wears during the scene of the “Judas Kiss” is also, perhaps not coincidentally, highly reminiscent of the blue robe and head covering Mary is often seen wearing in many icons (see the second and third icon, above; thanks to Roland Betancourt for drawing this to my attention).

Thus, Gaga paints herself as an icon in “Judas”; even her creative process is akin to the methodology of the icon painter – inspiration is understood to come from a spiritual source (e.g. God, a muse), and flows forth (in Gaga’s case, more of a vomiting forth). One then honors and worships that which is produced during those moments of spiritual inspiration. Gaga’s visual self-composition as a living icon positions herself as both a corporeal and a spiritual figure, the painting made flesh (or the biblical narrative/word made flesh), a site both literal and metaphorical at once, incorporating into one being traditional oppositions between the sacred and the profane – which are the oxymoronic qualities of all religious objects.

The scene of the Judas kiss brings to a beautiful crescendo both the idea of the double and the notion of corporeal spirituality. Indeed, we can argue that the kiss itself is doubled, split into two. The first kiss involves Gaga, the lipstick gun, and Judas, whereas the second kiss reenacts the biblical scene where Judas kisses Jesus. This doubled kiss frames the interjectory scene where the music pauses (3:44-4:19) and Gaga is seen, her arms outstretched to mimic a cross, with waves crashing into and over her, and also bathing Jesus’ feet (with Judas present as well). In the space between these two kisses, Gaga is both baptized by and sacrificed to the waves.

Baptism and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, reconciled in the figure of Gaga at this moment. Likewise, the scene in which Gaga washes Jesus’ feet also contains within it a doubling: it recalls both Mary Magdalene’s washing of Jesus’ feet with her hair, as well as Jesus’ washing of his apostles’ feet, (a rite that is still practiced on Holy Thursday when the priest washes the feet of his congregation). When Gaga washes Jesus’ feet, she both embodies the position of Mary Magdalene, and mirrors the position of Jesus washing the feet of his apostles. With Jesus before her, she reflects him, serves as a prophesy for what is to come. As such, during the space of the music’s pause, suspended between the two kisses, Gaga performs a synthesized doubling of baptism/sacrifice, as well as a synthesized doubling of Mary Magdalene/Jesus. The effect is to embody in a single figure what is traditionally at odds: whore with God, material with spiritual, salvation with destruction, feminine with masculine.

The first kiss – composed of the lipstick gun, Judas, and Gaga – makes literal the idea of a killer kiss in the object of a gun that shoots lipstick. It is the kiss of betrayal: Gaga does not want to give it, and collapses after having done so. The second kiss – between Judas and Jesus – is a kiss of forgiveness and acceptance: Jesus smiles slightly as Judas calmly kisses his cheek.

Taken together, these two kisses reconcile betrayal and forgiveness in the same gesture (as Gaga has claimed, “forgiveness and betrayal are hand in hand”), again uniting opposites.

With the Judas Kiss, Jesus is both betrayed and grants forgiveness; Gaga, too, is both forgiven and betrayed. If Judas is also to be considered a sacrificial figure (his betrayal prophesied and necessary for the crucifixion, and thus the resurrection, to come to pass), so Gaga, as the site of synthesis of light and dark, Jesus and Judas, depicts this sacrifice. In the final scene, dressed in a white wedding dress and accessorized with dyed-black hair and painted-black nails, she represents the marriage of light (Jesus) and darkness (Judas) into a unified sacrificial figure – assumedly stoned to death for the sake of forgiveness and resurrection. Mary Magdalene/Gaga is the marriage of Jesus and Judas, light and darkness, into a single sacrificial being.

It is also a stoning prophesied. Look at the final headshot of Gaga, which features another doubling: a crystallized tear on the right side of her face, and a living tear falling from her left eye. The crystallized tear prophesies the living tear that we witness come.

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11 PM, May 6, 2011 - Edited to add:
Re-watching the video after posting this analysis, I noticed something I'd completely overlooked: the first dance during the chorus ("I'm just a holy fool ...") inside the Electric Chapel (between 1:38 and 2:16) is first done by a company of female dancers, and then, with the shot's cut, the dancers switch to a company of all male dancers.

Feminine Dance Company

Masculine Dance Company

The switch between male and female back-up dancers occurs with every cut during this scene – as if enacting a Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis through the composition of opposing masculine and feminine dance companies. Significantly, after the synthesis has occurred (discussed above, upon Gaga's singing of "Judas GaGa") the dance company seen thereafter during the second refrain of the chorus is a blend of all genders. Gaga's synthesis unites opposing genders into one dance company. 

Synthesized-Gendered Dance Company