The Trajectory of the Monster: Some Musings on the Ascendance of a Myth and the Decay of the Female Celebrity

By Ella Bedard

The following piece is the ninth in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

To periodize Lady Gaga’s work up to this point, I would rather consider the evolution of her music videos than her music. I say this not to dismiss Gaga’s music, but to suggest that we look elsewhere for the artistic intrigue in her work. If, like the editors of this journal, one gives credence to the view that Gaga is not simply a musician but a performance artist, then it is the juxtaposition between her seemingly formulaic music and the bizarre spectacle of the performer that warrants our critical attention. I have suggested elsewhere that Gaga’s remarkably typical pop sound is part of a greater performative statement about identity, cultural conformity, and celebrity. In this short piece, I consider how these themes are taken up in Gaga’s latest music video. In my psychoanalytic reading, “Born This Way” is a comment on the fragmented selfhood of the celebrity. The video reveals how fame creates a disparity between the Ego of “Mother Monster” and the female body upon which that myth is written. However, in order to glean this meaning from “Born This Way,” we must pay attention to the carefully constructed aesthetic of her performance, and how it has changed since the beginning of her career. For this, we turn to the videos.

If we consider the spectrum of Gaga from early videos like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to later epics like “Telephone,” the trajectory goes something like the following. In 2008 and early 2009, when Gaga emerged with hits like “Just Dance” and “Eh, Eh,” she was fairly typical of the pop star type. There was something vaguely grotesque about her bow-hair, but nothing all that off-putting. At the very least, we could identify her by familiar cultural symbols: she had Italian heritage, she was young, she was confident, and liked to party. She was American – irreverently so. Also at that stage, Gaga was pretty unambiguous about her sexuality and gender. Her hips and heels identify her as female; the way she rubs them against her male interlocutors indicates her heterosexuality.

“Poker Face” delivered the first signs of gender ambiguity, which emerged more strongly in subsequent videos. Lyrics like “bluffin’ with my muffin’’ had Barbara Walter’s raising her eyebrows and asking questions about Gaga’s sexual history. Around this same time, a video circulated on the Internet that supposedly exposed Gaga as a man. The video shows her mounting a motorcycle during one of her performances. Apparently we see her penis slip out of her red booty shorts. Of course, the footage is hazy and confirms nothing. In later videos like “Telephone,” Gaga makes allusion to this hype, without setting the record straight.

Also at this time, we saw the emergence of cyborg feminist and post-humanist themes in Gaga’s videos. In “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” Gaga’s exudes a grotesque technological sexuality: hers is the smashed-up body where feminine flesh is inseparably twisted with cold hard robotic metal. In “Telephone,” Gaga appears in a skeletal cat suit with deathly white make up: she is woman, she is feline; she is alive, and she is dead. It is not only her status as woman, but also her status as human, that have been thrown into question.

                

To my mind, what is most interesting about Gaga is how she performs herself as a contingent site of citation. This is best encapsulated in the heavily collaged video for “Telephone,” where Gaga alludes to a plurality of possible identities without settling in any one. She has cultivated an elaborate aesthetic of pastiche, citing the style and sound of Madonna, Cher, and others. She is subversive and commercial, gendered and not, original and derivative. By continuously switching roles, she complicates these dualities and reveals how her identity, like any identity, is a contingency and a performance. She succeeds in her failing to play every part; she is unique only insofar as she acknowledges that her celebrity identity is a mimetic performance that draws on the gendered performances of her predecessors.

As a self-styled Fame Monster, Gaga’s acknowledges the extent to which her identity is constituted through the recognition of her followers. The ambiguities that surround Gaga reflect the myriad of contradicting sources that inform her identity. As her career progresses and Gaga becomes better known, we become increasingly less certain about what Gaga is. This is because Gaga is only the collage of photos and Internet rumors that constitute her celebrity. She is a reflection of the pluralized and fragmented field of information through which she appears for our consumption.

Though Gaga’s aesthetic has changed significantly over time, the theme of celebrity is ever-present throughout the disparate phases of her career. In my reading of Gaga’s work, fame is synonymous with Ego, and is used to illustrate the performative and socially constructed nature of the Self. In his psychoanalytic writing, Jacques Lacan famously describes the paranoid-narcissistic structure of the “I”. He argues that the Ego is specifically not the reality-mediating faculty of the individual, but a form of alienating misidentification. The person whom “I” recognize in the mirror – the self that is reflected for me in the other – has homogeneity and wholeness that “I” find at odds with my own disjointed experience of selfhood. One always feels the gap between herself and the seemingly totalized other that stands before her. As opposed to competing with the wholeness of her reflection, the subject alienates her sense of self to it. It is this alienation of self to our spectral other that allows us to look in the mirror and proclaim “that is me!” Yet that projected and imagined self will always be a lie – an ideal – that one strives for but continuously fails to embody. In an attempt to banish the feeling of lack at the core of our being, we seek affirmation, love, and recognition from the other.

As Gaga acknowledges in the “Manifesto of Little Monster,” she exists by way of the mutually constitutive relationship between herself and her fans.

So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

This manifesto reads very differently from the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” which Gaga recites at the beginning of the “Born This Way” video:

On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.

Whereas the “Manifesto of Little Monster” acknowledges Gaga fans as the source of Gaga herself, the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” inverts the relationship, positing Mother Monster as first mover. In this creation myth, Gaga is the cause of the “new race” of little monsters. While the first manifesto explicitly acknowledges Gaga as a projection of her fans, the second manifesto denies this mutually. This is because the second manifesto is a performance of the projection. She is enacting the lie that she alludes to in the first manifesto – the lie “for which we kill.” And in fact, as we see in “Born This Way,” the negative side of this myth is destroying the physical body of Gaga, the site upon which the “spiritual hologram” is projected.

The moment the ego is constituted, a false dichotomy is created between the idealized ego and the failing self. This bifurcated “I” is the lens through which one perceives herself and the world: it is the constitutive distortion that will forever inform her perception of reality. The mythology that initiates the symbolic order of “Born This Way” introduces us to two Gagas: the good and the bad. However, when visually represented, the dichotomy is perhaps more accurate described as a division between Immortal Gaga and finite gaga.

“Born This Way” dramatizes the paranoiac-narcissistic symptoms of the fractured ego. As her celebrity grows, Captial-G Gaga becomes a more powerful, more intimidating Ego-ideal, which gaga can never live up to. The idealized Gaga sits bathed in light, surrounded by religious imagery. She is the “Spiritual Hologram,” the Gaga we constitute through our adoration. The anemic gaga who appears naked and in skeletal make-up is the negative image of that Goddess. As her Celebrity grows and the mythologized Gaga becomes a more powerful and convincing mirage, the disparity likewise increases between the idealized Ego and her finite counterparts, whom we see in varying states of decay.

The gaga who dances naked reveals the aggressivity buried in the narcissistic structure of the ego. There is something menacing about the way she moves. Whereas the added boniness on the face and shoulders of the eternal Gaga contributes to her regal expression, this same makeup on the dancing gaga gives us a different impression. We see how the desire to live up to her own image has taken its toll on the physical body of the celebrity. This gaga is what threatens the beloved Ego with disintegration. Likewise, in skeletal makeup, gaga dances freely, sometimes touching herself. She rejoices in the death of the Ego – that is, in her own death, which is the death of an impossible myth. She begs us to believe that she was born this way, while the visual juxtaposition between the two Gagas serves to undercut the song’s lyrics and fill them with irony. She is both Gaga and gaga, both Mother-Monster and the excess that disrupts the phantasm of the Ego-ideal. Simultaneously one and many, she exists somewhere in between, in that indiscernible zone between herself and her fans: and this is the Fame.

Author Bio:

Ella Bedard is a student of contemporary history, culture, and criticism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year she will be moving to Toronto where she hopes to pursue her interests in performance, gender ambiguity, and Gaga.

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The Monstrous Art of Pop

by Davide Panagia

[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in The Contemporary Condition (March 20, 2010)].

The issue is one of coming to terms with one’s relation to one’s culture. Nothing less is what the intensity of Lady Gaga’s feats of the spectacular make available.

Her songs and videos – and her artistic life in general – relentlessly pursue the limits of Pop, not as a representational genre but as a medium. It is in this sense that she is an inheritor of the Warhol legacy; but, I would say without reservation (though with an awareness of the unpopular claim I am about to make), she surpasses Warhol through her discovery of the medium of Pop. For where Warhol transformed art into Pop and thereby created a new representational genre, Lady Gaga has transformed Pop into an art with a set of aesthetic convictions, possibilities, and ambitions all its own.

As absurd as this might sound to those lackluster critics who will (and do) insist that Lady Gaga is all style and no substance, the simultaneous release of two major concept albums – The Fame and The Fame Monster – prove the extent to which in our contemporary condition style and substance are incompossibilities of one another. And before readers think that I am claiming that the incompossibility of style and substance means a kind of postmodern irony at the heart of Lady Gaga’s performances, please allow me to correct any misapprehensions of the sort: the claim about the irony of performativity wants to grant purpose to multivalent objects of aesthetic worth and thus betroth to them an intelligibility that makes them accessible and available to our interpretive expectations. My point, instead, is that what defines an aesthetic object is its ability to place the listener or viewer (in this case, both) in an uncertain situation where one’s capacity to give priority to either style or substance as the ground of judgment is disoriented. This, because our modes of sensorial apprehension are discomposed by the experience of the object. Aesthetic experience, in other words, occurs at the dark precursor, somewhere between sensation and reference. And the incompossibilities of sensation and reference are the tools of Lady Gaga’s art.

But I digress.

As we are incessantly reminded, Lady Gaga’s music follows a line of descent with some of the more relevant music and videos coming out of 1980s MTV pop culture, most notably the rhythmic flows of Madonna, the dance hooks of Michael Jackson, and the lyrical voicings of Cindy Lauper (though, as a note of personal insight, I would also add the profound influence of Cameo’s “Word Up” song and video). “Dance in the Dark,” from her recently released The Fame Monster, is most explicitly indebted to Madonna’s lyrical montage with its free-flow rambling in the middle of the song that revisits Vogue’s “Rita Hayworth gave good face” moment:

Marilyn

Judy

Sylvia

Tellem' how you feel girls!

Work your blonde (Jean) Benet Ramsey

We'll haunt like Liberace

Find your freedom in the music 

Find your Jesus

Find your Kubrick

You will never fall apart 

Diana, you’re still in our hearts

Never let you fall apart

Together we'll dance in the dark

But her successful partnership with the Swedish director and video artist, Jonas Åkerlund, betrays another line of descent in her aesthetic stylings found in some of the more progressive of the current Swedish synth-pop disco bands; including (I would say) Fever Ray and The Knife, but also Abba (listen to “Alejandro” and you will hear “Fernando”) and Roxette. Like her collaborations with the recently deceased Alexander McQueen (who premiered Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” in his Spring 2009 show) and the Italian installation artist Francesco Vezzoli (at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the videos that Åkerlund has produced and directed for Lady Gaga screen her insistence that what is crucial to our contemporary condition is our capacity for interface: that is, that our handling and beholdings of the objects of our culture speaks to our willingness to handle and behold one another. The simultaneous release of the song and video “Telephone” (on March 11, 2010) is a case in point.

Telephone’s lyrics are about a young woman at a dance club who does not want to be bothered by people calling her on her cell phone because she is too busy having a good time. “Stop callin’; Stop callin’; I don’t want to talk any more! I left my head and my heart on the dance floor,” proclaims the ritornello. Simple enough.

The song, however, announces something different than the lyrics. Upon first listening to it, I was disappointed by Gaga’s use of Auto-tune, something I didn’t think she needed given that she has an excellent voice. Auto-tune is the controversial audio processor (used by many in the music industry) that allows anyone to sing at perfect pitch by adjusting off-key performances through the use of a phase vocoder – it is the device that made Cher’s altered vocal effect in “Believe” possible and catchy. Upon second listening, however, I realized that the placing of the Auto-tune alteration in “Telephone” is not intended for pitch correction, but is an attempt to mimic through voice the sound of a ringer and to give emphasis to the artificiality of everyday life. The prominence of Auto-tune and the fact that “Telephone” lyrically and melodically swings to the beat of a busy dial-tone makes available our integration with multimedia technological culture so that the “Stop callin’” of the ritornello isn’t merely a request but is also a marker of our cultural interface: there is no naturalness to voice, especially in the digital age. 

Åkerlund’s music videos are known for their mock movie-trailer stylings. And though at times humorous, their real effect is not one of parody but of intensity. The colors, contrasts, and close-ups throughout the “Telephone” video, for instance, are exaggerated to the point of the monstrous. It’s almost as if Åkerlund is trying to show the viewer what a video can do, and not simply what it can represent. And, indeed, with “Telephone” this disconnect is especially palpable given the fact that the video has nothing to do with the lyric’s themes of being in a dance club and not wanting to answer one’s phone. 

Correction: Lady Gaga is in a club of sorts – a rough trade women’s prison in the middle of a desert – and we can surmise why she ended up there if we think of “Telephone” as a sequel to the other Gaga/Åkerlund collaboration, “Paparazzi,” wherein Lady Gaga kills a boyfriend who, in turn, had tried to kill her by throwing her off a balcony. A further disconnect: Gaga’s collaboration with Beyoncé in the song “Telephone” is turned into a “Thelma and Louise” partnership when the two ladies – in full dis/fashion regalia (including makeup whose colors recall the pastels of their automobile) – board their “Pussy Wagon” (the pick up truck that Uma Thurman had used to escape the hospital in Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and go on a highway diner killing spree. Once again, a monstrous disconnect that is perfectly in-line with the theme of The Fame Monster – the ugly side of fame where makeup is transubstantiated into black tears, or even spilled blood.

That Lady Gaga has made a concept album with both The Fame and The Fame Monster worthy of a Patrick Bateman monologue is a notable achievement; even more remarkable is that this conceptual artifice ties into some of the best instances of American popular culture, especially the pulp crime genre that Robert Warshow had written so elegantly about in the 1940s. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow claims that “What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans” (The Immediate Experience). It is universal to Americans, he goes on to explain, because Americans react to it immediately, at once sympathizing and dissociating themselves from it: the gangster, Warshow says, “is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”

The persona of the gangster is transubstantiated, for Lady Gaga, into the persona of the Fame Monster (notably, a trope Michael Mann has also explored in his recent film, Public Enemies): the fashion icon/victim, the doer and the sufferer, the one who projects an image and is defeated by that same projection. And isn’t this what we all do? Do we not all project images and bear the weight of others’ projections? Facebook, the iPhone, wi-fi, and 3-G (soon to be 4-G) wireless networks are not merely the ornamental contexture of contemporary culture, they are the instruments of interface with it; they are the mediums through which events of relata emerge in our contemporary condition, they are the objects we handle and behold when we handle and behold one another.

It’s precisely this aspect of Gaga that the lackluster critics overlook with vertiginous accuracy. Most stunningly, Camille Paglia’s recent iconoclastic rant in the pages of The Sunday Times (“Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex.” September 12, 2010) mumbles such incomprehensions by accusing Gaga of being a “ruthless recycler of other people’s work,” citing the recent “Alejandro” video as an instance of Madonna-theft and then asking “at what point does homage become theft?” Despite Paglia’s clichéd vitriol, the question is the right one to ask. And, in fact, Paglia gives us the answer to her question in declaring that “Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age.” What might I mean by this? 

Simply put, the song (and video) “Alejandro” are Gaga’s attempt not so much at homage but at putting into view what the digital age affords. Let’s think here about some of the major events that might be associated with our digital age. Other than the monumental advent of personal computing and the Internet, one major digital age phenomenon that comes to mind is the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. A second major event: cut and paste interface technology like that available in software programs such as Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, Quicktime, Vuze, and Hardware. And a third: the proliferation of virtual venues for the projection and transmission of the products that emerge from our use of digital manipulation software – virtual venues like You Tube, Facebook, Pirate Bay, and so forth. Such conventions, software, and venues make the adoption, extraction, manipulation, appropriation and transmission of audio and video, song and image, immediately available elements of popular culture. The idea here is a complex, though not complicated, one: to live in the digital age means that we no longer submit to the position of passive spectatorship. That is, we are no longer merely consumers: we are also handlers. And by “handlers” I mean people who engage popular culture through transmission as much as through reception. This, it seems, is one of the key ontological shifts that comes with new media digitality. The song and video “Alejandro” places that ontological shift into full view.

To put this slightly differently, and in the hope of comforting some of Camille Paglia’s acerbic distress: What Lady Gaga is up to with “Alejandro” is neither simply homage nor theft but indexing: through such performances she indexes the handlings that our digital age makes available. One need only take a closer look and listen at “Alejandro” to note how forceful her commitment to and aesthetics of handling is. The song (as already mentioned) betrays its indebtedness to Abba. But one can’t help also hear resonances of Roxette and, in the opening hook, a stunning recall of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” “Alejandro” (the song) is neither homage nor theft but a mash-up; and “Alejandro” (the video) is also neither homage nor theft but a photo-shopped assemblage. This is what the nature of Pop in the digital age is; and Lady Gaga is, in this regard, not simply a media Pop star but a New Media Pop artist. 

In his book on film, one of the first books in the study of film ever written by an American philosopher, Stanley Cavell declares (in 1971) that “it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself – to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks” (The World Viewed, 103). For Cavell the task of the artist is to make available in his or her art the conditions of possibility (and therefore also the limits of possibility) of that art. Anything less amounts to formulaic reproduction and artistic failure. The task of the artist in the modern period, in other words, is that of making available the immediate experience of an art-form by making present the constitutive elements that make that art-form possible.

The elements that make New Media Pop art at once possible and convincing are not qualities that belong to the object, they are effects that arise from one’s interface with it; specifically, I’m talking about the sense of conviction that comes with an immediate grasp of a work. New Media Pop art is New Media Pop art because it affords an immediate grasp. Hence the importance of the shortness of the pop song, for instance, and its hook. In a two-to-three minute period the artist must convey a sense of absolute precision and certitude that will resonate or hold beyond the moment of impact, thereby creating the sensation that nothing else matters to the art-form at that moment other than that work, as if that work is the only thing that can count as Pop. Through this experience of absolute – almost theological – conviction we discover that the task of New Media Pop art – the “muse of the art itself” – is to declare immediacy for itself. Nothing less amounts to artistic (and not just commercial) failure.

Therein lies the mendaciousness of the aesthetic object: a work’s prestige, or its conjuring trick, is its conveyance of a conviction without authority or ground to validate that conviction. It’s in this sense that Lady Gaga is absolutely right to declare, in the Summer 2010 double-issue of Rolling Stone, that “Music is a lie. Art is a lie. It is a lie. You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true” (Rolling Stone, July 8-22, 2010, p. 71). Art can only afford sensations; but sensations (as David Hume showed long ago) do not belong to the province of verification, or to that kind of knowledge that would give veracity to one’s judgments. The mendaciousness of which I speak, marked by the “as if” of my previous paragraph, thus returns us to the condition of incompossibility discussed in my introductory remarks. The wonderful lie made true through receptivity is another way of suggesting that the incompossible ground of aesthetic experience is sourced and sustained only through our expressions of conviction in the face of the vivaciousness of our sensations. 

This is the aesthetic ambition that Lady Gaga claims for New Media Pop art in and through her music, her videos, and her performances. The task now is to come to terms with it; that is, to conjure the terms of its possibility and to think through what the new criteria of judgment, appraisal, and (indeed) disapproval might be in the face of Gaga’s projection of this New Media Pop aesthetic. 

Through The Fame and The Fame Monster Lady Gaga has made the claim that Pop commands an immediate attention that no other medium of art can pretend to or duplicate, and it is precisely the immediacy of her stardom, and Pop’s availability through it, that marks for Lady Gaga one of the cornerstones of our contemporary condition: our interface with and handling of culture as opposed to our subjection to it. 

Author Bio: 
Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.