I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! - "Born This Way" Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion

By Roland Betancourt, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks

Meghan Vicks: Let’s begin with our thoughts about the song “Born This Way.” How does the song’s form work with, or against, the song’s message? In what ways does the song follow in the tradition of “celebrate yourself” anthems past, and in what ways does it break from that tradition? How does the song compare to Lady Gaga’s music from The Fame and The Fame Monster, and what does it indicate about the direction of Gaga’s project? I’m sure we’ll come up with more points and questions to analyze regarding the song, but for now let’s start here.

Eddie McCaffray: What I noticed immediately about the song were the lyrics - they make a point of saying exactly what it is people are accepting about themselves and others. There’s a long tradition of anthemic love-yourself songs that, for better or for worse, don’t make any explicit reference to anything of which someone might be intolerant. That’s fine, but for me it comes off as an attempt to cash in on all the good press and good vibes of such a song without risking the alienation of any potential part of a fan base. But this song isn’t like that - it makes references to God’s acceptance, to a “different lover,” and turns the LGBT(A) roll-call into a real litany. In a similar manner, when Gaga says “black, white, or beige” she’s departing from the cliche (which is to sing something like “black, white, or blue”) and taking the issue of race seriously. There’s room for joy and power and celebration, but there isn’t room for levity. It’s stunning that she could fit “. . . gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered . . .” into an up-tempo club-banger, and it’s wonderful that she wrote a song about tolerance that intolerant people can’t sing.

Besides that, I think the pretty-simple nature of the song sort of goes along with the simplicity of the message. It has a pounding beat and some very fun synth stylings flowered around it, but musically as well as lyrically the song is about just one thing. I also like the implications of “there ain’t no other way”; there’s a somewhat-understated note of militancy in the song. The song isn’t afraid of making very clear just what it expects people to accept, and it isn’t afraid of saying that intolerance is not an option.

And, finally, the intro seems like she is extending a hand to the religious community. “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-i-m,” as some have suggested, is a nod to Christians. The song isn’t about attacking anything besides intolerance, and if your religion can pass that very basic litmus test, then this is an anthem for you to celebrate your identity with as well - there are people out there who have their sights set on organized religion, people who aren’t treating it fairly just like some members of some organized religions aren’t treating others fairly. That’s not ok with this song either.

Meghan Vicks: Immediately upon the song’s release, Twitter exploded with people drawing comparisons between Madonna’s “Express Yourself”/“Vogue” and “Born This Way,” and many criticized Gaga for copying Madonna. While I don’t think that the song is an exact copy or blend of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” I do think that Gaga is purposely taking cues from Madonna (as she is always taking cues from those that came before her), and placing vocal and lyrical nods to her throughout “Born This Way.” That Gaga adopts and adapts what her predecessors have done is no secret; in a recent interview with Vogue she said,

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to - from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono - but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

She was born this way - from a genealogy of musicians, artists, and performers; significantly, she was cut - organically fashioned - from the cloth of the performer. “Born This Way” is no different; it’s also a product, or the offspring, of a long genealogy of anthemic, empowering songs that call on people to express themselves, love themselves, be themselves. So with “Born This Way,” Gaga’s rewriting Madonna’s message for a more radical agenda. As Gaga sings in the song’s opening lines, “My momma told me when I was young that we’re all superstars,” so Madonna sang nearly two decades earlier, “You’re a superstar, yes that’s what you are!” Madonna, of course, is a type of mother figure for all pop-starlets; when Gaga sings “we’re all superstars,” she’s singing as one of a generation who grew up listening to Madonna’s message from “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” In a way, given the song’s message, it absolutely needed to sound a bit like Madonna’s; but, given the 21st century context, it needed to be more straightforward (as Eddie talks about above) and also way more radical.

Musically, the song combines disco with a solid rock beat, which I read as a merging of the gay culture with the mainstream. If we think about “Born This Way” as a gay anthem, then the musical composition of the song is pretty brilliant: Gaga has taken heavily from the arsenal of gay club music and created a rock song. Or, she’s turned a rock song into a disco ball fixture. It’s a very glittery rock song! Or tough-as-nails disco. In either case, musically “Born This Way” is a type of oxymoron that makes hetero-rock just as queer as disco, and homo-disco just as mainstream as rock. It’s an incredibly interesting musical vehicle in which to house the message of her song: that we’re all equally beautiful - black, white, beige, gay, straight, transgender … 

Roland Betancourt: Well, I think that in this song we are seeing a definite shift in the trajectory of Gaga’s work. I do not want to sound like there is some strict evolutionary model or a chronology that I wish to impose on Gaga, but there have been definite patterns in her work. I believe many of us can recall the early Gaga period, where she relied heavily on her collaborations with Space Cowboy. This was the period that was inaugurated by “Just Dance” and witnessed songs/videos such as “Poker Face” and “Love Game.” We then had a change with “Paparazzi” that has lasted much into the present, however, I would say that after the “Alejandro” music video things began to shift - mainly aesthetically and visually. “Born This Way” places this shift into the musical realm and ties in directly to the thematic issues that have been developing in her work about homosexuality and gay rights.

What is of first note is what Meghan is referring to as the Twitter-comparisons to Madonna, which I would also refer to as a more widespread outcry to the song. Looking at Gaga’s history though, we find “Just Dance” to have many similar parallels to “Born This Way.” In many ways, “Just Dance” serves as the jumping dance song that everyone wants to sing along and dance to, but not the song that you particularly see as revolutionary. Nevertheless, in “Born This Way” we encounter lyrics that are antithetical to the inconsiderate hedonism of “Just Dance.” I think the brilliant part of “Born This Way” is that she’s produced a song that we are already tired of hearing. The comparisons being made to Madonna, for example, may seem valid at first, but every time I have compared the songs they don’t really seem to be there. Sure there are some similarities that seem to be riffs on one another, as Meghan suggests above, but the song actually has less similarities than it would seem. Gaga has produced an uncanny song in the Freudian notion of the term, where it seems all too familiar yet also wholly foreign.


Eddie McCaffray: And what’s so great about the foreign-lodged-within-the-familiar is that it provokes rediscovery of the world - if not in Freud, in Heidegger and Shklovsky. To keep this concept in line with the aesthetic of “Born This Way,” only a continual process of self-(re)creation will keep one meaningful to oneself. Accepting the categories and patterns offered by the world in a simple rote mimesis - the primary risk of conformism - renders one a simple colony of that world. But Gaga’s play with and reappropriation of all manner of cultural symbols, combined with this message of radical (self-)acceptance, calls Little Monsters to keep themselves uncanny, to maintain the tight-rope walk of foreign and familiar within their own plastic souls. 

Meghan Vicks: How did the first performance of “Born This Way” affect and/or reflect the song’s message? 

Eddie McCaffray: Let’s take it at face value: she was born this way, on stage, in front of fans and in the middle of pop-culture pomp-and-circumstance, surrounded by elite dancers, in a crazy costume, singing a huge pop song, out of a giant plastic glowing egg/womb. As has been dealt with at length before, Gaga is created by fame, born in the spectacle that she does not assume but which she becomes - the spectacle isn’t something of which she is a prerequisite, it’s what makes her possible. She can only hide in plain view.

This is an idea that she discussed in her Sixty Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper just before the Grammys. Honesty is important to her personally and as a part of her relationship to the people who look up to her, enjoy her music, and so on. At the same time, who can live on camera all the time? As Cooper says, her costumes are “not only attention-getting, but attention-directing.” Gaga tells him that she “art-directs” every moment of her life in order to combine honesty, privacy, and constant total exposure. This is a central part of her project in general and the message of this song in particular: in the modern world, it is impossible to hide. We are all constantly skewered by a myriad of controlling gazes. Resistance is futile. Rather, self-expression - the active, conscious, joyful engagement with these gazes - is the escape from the downsides of such a life. In creating ourselves, especially in creating ourselves in the ambitious, powerful, faux-self-confident way that a rock star might, we create breathing room, cracks and crannies in our personas in which to live. This is beyond “fake it till you make it”; faking it is making it. As in her Grammy appearance, performance is present at the birth of Lady Gaga and all her Little Monsters. It is the egg, Lady Gaga the product.

Roland Betancourt: I have often been attracted to Gaga’s work in the manner that it reflects on the medium, which is a self-reflexivity that has been very important to contemporary art historians in the past 30 years - perhaps less so today. My article on Jo Calderone for the upcoming Gaga Stigmata book reflects on these issues. In particular, I have been fascinated by the place of the viral in Gaga’s work, but a notion of virality that exceeds its traditional discussion and looks more to the body of the artist. “Born This Way” ends with an interesting line, “Same DNA, but I was born this way.” This presents a complex issue. Same DNA as whom? Contemporary society sees DNA as a very essential building block and we constantly attempt to construct identities by virtue of it. Often we have stories in the news regarding the emergence of DNA evidence that absolves prisoners of crimes or identifies lost relatives. We like to constitute our fundamental identities on this biological code, and our daily identities on viral, binary-coded images - via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. This co-mingling of essences suggest that Gaga shares a certain coded identity with someone, but differs in nurture - she was birthed in a different manner.

The fact that her performance included a birthing from an egg before an audience, as Eddie has just pointed out, plays with the very notion that I addressed when discussing Jo Calderone and which Meghan discussed in her “Anatomy of Change” essay. Gaga’s birth is a performative visual act - I mean that in both senses of the word “performative.” Yet at the same time she partakes an essence with someone, perhaps her fans, perhaps other misfits, other outcast monsters, or perhaps even humanity?

Her “organ” - perhaps one big visual pun! - was surrounded by faces on globes and haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets. It reminds me of the instruments used to replace a cell nucleus in the cloning process - an image that for a period of time was prolific in the news following the cloning fears of the late 1990s.

There was a sense of some sort of laboratory-musical setting, a place where, through the dispersal of song, a viral reproduction could occur. Where others, through sound, could be infected or cloned as Lady Gaga - same DNA, different births. 

To play with the Madonna references (both the singer and the Virgin Mary), Gaga said in a recent interview for the upcoming Vogue, “I wrote [‘Born This Way’] in 10 fucking minutes … And it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” Her use of the term “immaculate conception” is quite loaded. On the one hand it points to Madonna’s own work and supports the notions of a Mother-Daughter/Madonna-Gaga relationship that Meghan has set forth. On the other hand, it cites the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit in the flesh of the Virgin through the performative speech act of the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel. Recalling Gaga’s Alexander McQueen 2010 VMA dress, one sees an image of an annunciation on it.

Specifically, it is the image of the Angel Gabriel holding the Latin text of the Annunciation on a sheet of parchment that visually manifests the oral pronouncement of Gabriel that enacts the incarnation. The image being used is the Renaissance Annunciation by Stephan Lochner for the Altar of the Three Magi in Cologne.

But in Gaga’s dress, as far as I can tell, the Virgin is absent. The direct object of the annunciation is missing, placing Gaga in the role of the receptacle for the body of Christ. It is her flesh from which shall be molded the salvation of humanity, and most importantly, this process occurs through sound, through proclamation. It was later that night, while wearing the meat dress, that Gaga sang a portion of “Born This Way” for the first time and thanked God and the gays. When asked who she thanked more, God or the gays, she replied, “I thank them both equally, because they made one another.” Certainly, what we find here is this notion of co-creation and co-constitution that Gaga has defined as so crucial to the fame. Nevertheless, as a good Catholic school girl, Gaga surely knows the opening of the Gospel of John that posits the relationship between God and the Logos (the Utterance/Word/Verb: aka Christ) as co-existing and co-eternal with God. Therefore, she posits the gays as a communal force, one that is bound by a suffering on behalf of mankind, as if bearing the brunt of their sins and treacheries. Is this not the type of idea that the song advocates? A notion of community, unity, and power that comes through the fire of abuse? “Don’t be a drag - just be a queen.”

All these trends, notions of DNA, and Immaculate Conception, however, focus on the central notion of conception and birth, the idea of self-production and performance, which is seen as the crucial and fundamental postulate of 1990s self-esteem/identity-politics rhetoric. The idea of “being yourself” and, as some may want to compare, “Expressing Yourself.” Nevertheless, I would argue that Gaga’s focus goes directly to the issue of the performance itself. Just as the Virgin served as a model for Christian artists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because she presented the body from which the image of God was formed, the material substance, so Gaga plays a similar ontological role. It is in the closing lines of the song, regarding DNA, that the stripped dancers unite and dance entwined and form the “monster paw” that Gaga proclaims at the beginning of the song.

The idea of self-creation is seen here within a rhetoric of the self and community that is radically different from the “individual” of the 1990s, which was structured on this unique, quasi-isolated “I.” Many of us were fed the myth that you could exist as a quasi-island of self-defined identity. In Gaga, however, the message seems to be the same, but the rhetoric presents the notion of a dividual - a person that exists within a community, linked through networks and self-images. What this song and the Grammy performance re-iterate within Gaga’s corpus is that the identity politics of the past have been radically shifted, and that the self is constituted within a network of images, just as Gaga defines herself within the networked images of pop-culture. What we wish to attack in Gaga through comparison merely stresses the radical shift in how the eye/I is constituted via one another in contemporary society. 

Eddie McCaffray: Right! Maybe you could argue that the kind of identity Lady Gaga invokes is a kind that is inextricably tied to the hyper-media post-pop world in which we live. She’s a twisted reflection, an unsanctioned amalgamation, a satirical-partisan-celebrant; she doesn’t articulate a unique inner code, but bends the world back on itself in a distortion that remains essentially her own because of the act of its creation. Not expression but refraction.

Meghan Vicks: You guys are absolutely brilliant, but I need to talk about Gaga’s shoes and shoulders (this is so fucking typical: the men talk about science and religion, the women talk about clothes!). Did you see her shoes!? I haven’t yet been able to find a picture that shows a closeup, but her shoes were amazing. They were nude, and they looked like they were an organic part of her body - as if her legs had flippin’ sprouted stilettos! And her ankle bones protruded just as her shoulder bones did. It looked like she had reshaped, or regrown, her body in such a way that she now rocks shoulder pads that actually are her shoulders. As I wrote about earlier, the line between fashion and the body has blurred to such an extent that the distinctions between the two no longer exist: her shoulders have become her shoulder pads, and her feet have become her heels.

As Eddie talks about above, she’s corporeally born this [visual, performative] way: in fashion, on the stage, through a performance. The shoulder pads, in particular, are incredibly important in the scope of Gaga’s oeuvre. When she designed the blue outfit that she wore for “Poker Face,” she explained, “I knew I wanted it to be futuristic, so I thought shoulder pads cause that’s my thing. But I wanted it to be a new shoulder pad.” Hyperbolic shoulder pads have been a staple of Gaga’s work, so much so that they’ve evolved to become a part of Gaga’s body. They also, as Gaga indicates, signify something futuristic; in the case of the “Born This Way” performance, Gaga is reborn among a new race of humans (see the horns protruding from the cheekbones, the forehead, and the shoulders) who are are organically made from flesh and fashion, and reality and spectacle.

But for a song and a message that is so futuristic, the performance and the costuming feels very primordial and organic - not as space-age or typically futuristic as Gaga singing “Poker Face” with her video glasses, for instance, or as Gaga’s fire-shooting bra. And the performance is not nearly as hyper-consciously aware of its own performativity as much of Gaga’s earlier work is. So it is futuristic in a paradoxical way that calls to mind origins, beginnings, and birth.

We’re still dealing with monsters, though. Absolutely beautiful from one angle, and grotesque from another. As Roland and I were discussing on the phone earlier today, the bone structure that Gaga is playing with is aesthetically gorgeous from the frontal perspective, and monstrous from the profile. Look at Gaga’s face in these posters for Born This Way that have been plastered all over NYC:

 

From the front, Gaga has the desired bone structure of a model: incredibly high cheek bones, cat-eyes, arched brows, very thin. But from the side, the aesthetically beautiful becomes grotesque:

But the grotesque is always figured positively in Gaga’s aesthetic that embraces freaks, monsters, and queers. So again, as “Born This Way” is both disco and rock (sparkly rock, hard-core disco), so the costuming is beautifully monstrous. She’s turned the monster into a model, and vice versa.

Other points to consider and analyze:

• The gospel-esque outro of “Born This Way”
• “Born This Way” choreography
• Gaga’s hair during the performance
• Gaga, the Mother Monster, who hatches from an egg
• Gaga’s entrance on the Red Carpet in an egg, incubating
• Other topics of the Sixty Minutes interview: quotes, clothes, coffee-slurping, fake diamond
• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor quote during the performance (Gaga’s organ solo)
• Gaga's shout-out to Whitney Houston as inspiration for Born This Way
• Gaga's hat!

Dear Readers!

Please add your thoughts, analyses, and questions to the comments below. Let’s make (another) discussion, little monsters!

Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" - Preliminary Ideas and Discussion!

by Eddie McCaffray & Meghan Vicks

1. Military and Totalitarian Uniforms

Eddie McCaffray:  Clearly this is one of the video's most immediately recognizable aesthetics.  Dancers throughout sport leather trench-coats with wide lapels, peaked military-style caps, trousers, boots, and assault rifles.  Even their hair color and physical appearance are uniform.  The significances of this attire are two-fold and mutually-reinforcing.  The men (and Lady Gaga) are part of a group - an army - united by bonds forged in conflict, and that results not only in a deep and powerful bond of brother(mostly)hood but also in an intensification of the alienation and ostrification such a militant union might originally have come together to oppose.  By finding its voice, by forging a coherent identity, such an army perversely makes itself easier to target.  Lady Gaga and her dancers came together to defend themselves and perhaps even fight against a world that rejected and victimized them, but the more effectively they strengthen themselves and their relationship to one another through mutual struggle and hardship (to say nothing of sexy uniforms or powerful weapons), the more they actually make themselves different - and easier to discriminate against.

2.  Gay Army 

Meghan Vicks:  In a recent interview, Gaga explained that the "Alejandro" video is about the “purity of my friendships with my gay friends. And how I’ve been unable to find that with a straight man in my life. It’s a celebration and an admiration of gay love – it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together. In the video I’m pining for the love of my gay friends – but they just don’t want me.”  One of the main ways that the "gay love" is expressed in the video is through a hyperbolized brotherhood that closely resembles an army, even drawing from the stylings of 1920s Germany.  "Gay Love" is therefore militarized, likely out of necessity: society is constantly blacklisting, condemning, and persecuting the gay community.  The only way they can exist as a group is to band together and fight back.  I think this is why Gaga represents this community as militaristic: they need to be brandishing semi-automatics if they intend to walk around with fishnets and stilettos.  They need to be disciplined and trained as a fighting machine if they want to dance together and throw one another on the floor.  So we see this in the video:  their dancing is simultaneously erotic and combative, combining sexual advances with punches and throws.  Their costuming is also both militaristic and feminine and/or sexual: combat boots or stilettos, studded helmets, skin-tight shorts.


However, I can't help but be worried by the implications of this concept, as the costuming and mise-en-scene of the video are highly reminiscent of Weimer Germany, and many films that represent it (think Cabaret, Metropolis).  Which makes me wonder: is there something dark and sinister about this community that is born by a survival imperative, by the necessity to combat homophobia and gay discrimination and hatred?  Gaga herself feels like they "just don't want me."  


Eddie: There's something dark and sinister about every community because every community is driven - hell, even constituted - by its survival imperative.  Every organization has bodies in the foundations, including both the contradictions which underlie all ideologies and literal mass graves.  That's one of the most basic thrusts of modern and post-modern philosophy: that a society or organization's strength rests in its ability to other, and the application of the ability to other creates and then victimizes its object.  Just as modern thinking teaches man that the essence of his humanity is his grammatical existence as a subject, it reveals the horror that comes to life whenever man is moved to the wrong side of the verb.  That's what Lady Gaga is lamenting - that this power any society requires in the most fundamental way has created a rift between her and her gay friends.  It has made that rift in two ways simultaneously: by othering these people into an enemy to attack and by forcing them to accept and advance that very project of othering in order to survive.  That's the truly horrifying and perverse revelation: that even those organizations we admire and we love to be a part of, that give us a beautiful feeling  of belonging and comrade-ship, that even those require sacrificial lambs.  The Gay Army is a wonderful thing, a shield and a home to those who need one most of all.  But like any coherent group, it carries inside its nature the potential for new discrimination.  

Fascism gets its name from the Italian fasci, a bundle of sticks embodying how the strength of the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.  You'll find a very similar symbol on a US quarter.   

3. Reflecting Madonna, but with a twist
 

Meghan:  In many ways "Alejandro" reflects various Madonna videos from the 90s.  There seem to be visual quotes and cues at least from "Vogue," "Express Yourself," "Human Nature," and Evita.  Gaga's reflecting of Madonna is in keeping with her general aesthetic, which Kathryn Leedom beautifully discusses in the most recent article on Gaga Stigmata.  Leedom argues that Gaga's aesthetic is a "reflective performance," and points out that, "Considering the reflective aspects of her fashion and music combined, a certain paradox begins to emerge in which Lady Gaga is extremely unique and yet reminiscent of many various people."  In "Alejandro," Gaga resurrects and reflects the Madonna of the 90s, however with one important twist: Gaga doesn't actually bed any of these men.  In Madonna's "Express Yourself," whose dance sequence with men push-up-ing and lunging seems to be the predecessor for the choreography in "Alejandro," one of those men leaves his comrades to bed Madonna.  In contrast, Gaga can "fake bed" the men, but they won't actually give into her.  She remains un-bedded, and they remain a closed group.  It doesn't matter what position Gaga tries, and our lithe and acrobatic pop star indeed tries them all - she can't be included in their gay love, and the performance and enactment of them flipping and doggy-thrusting on the bed only enhances the image of them "faking, but not making it." 

It's as if Gaga's rewritten "Express Yourself" and "Vogue," but it's not heterosexual sexuality that's fulfilled (as it is especially in "Express Yourself"), no matter how or what position Gaga tries.   

4.  Religious Imagery 

Meghan:  A lot of the religious imagery in the video employs the cross or the garments of a nun's habit in such a way that they actually enforce celibacy, or a physical hindering of the body.  The cross literally covers Gaga's crotch, as a sort of chastity belt; her hands are tangled in the rosary similar to the way ropes tangle bodies on the bed; and whenever she's draped in a type of nun's habit, her body is mostly immobile.  Think of Gaga lying completely still on the bed, standing motionless, or even being tossed around and lifted by the Gay Army as though she's a rag doll - when Gaga doesn't move, or is limp, she's wearing religious clothing.  As if her body is literally restricted by the religious insignia.  Probably the most beautiful image of this is Gaga swallowing the the rosary, which hinders her voice. 

In contrast, Gaga is most mobile when the religious imagery is absent.  

Eddie: The rosary not only stifles her voice but invades her body.  The religious costume in the video definitely seems to contribute to the themes of totalitarianism.  The Gay Army dances, marches, and trains around Gaga as she stands dressed like a nun or bishop.  Behind her, images of war and violence play on a giant screen.  The fanaticism inspired, extorted, or sought by totalitarian or fascist regimes is often linked to religious fervor.  The evocation of such fanaticism emphases not only the militancy of Lady Gaga and her dancers, but the all-powerful influence of the masternarratives which have facilitated and actively created the rift Lady Gaga laments in this video. 

6.  Gaga's Frozen Heart on a Pillow & The Funeral Procession 

Eddie:  This is definitely a neat little icon.  For a video that is explicitly intended as an expression of love, loss, and insurmountable difference, Lady Gaga being forced to carry her own frozen heart at the head of a funeral procession seems very appropriate.  In a real way, this video is one of mourning for a lost, impossible closeness.  It also reinforces the idea that man is an artificial, porous creation of his own imagining, sustained by his inventions and his pretense far more essentially than by anything "natural" or immanent.  He might excise this or that problematic organ (I'm looking at you, the appendix*), modify himself with drugs, or even survive otherwise-mortal wounds.   

Meghan:  I think it's also significant that the shot of the frozen heart is filmed in such a way as to position the heart where Gaga's crotch should be.  As if to reinforce that the type of love she's burying is sexual love for Alejandro. 

7.  Cyborgs 

Eddie: There's a lot of cyborg imagery in the video, mainly puppet strings and gigantic metal frames attached to human bodies in disturbing fashion.  It is possible to imagine optimistic - even beautiful - technological modifications to the human body.  But the intersection of machines and bodies taking place in this video is intended to be as disturbing and worrisome as possible.  Even beyond this basic pessimism, all the cyborg implants and machines revolve around control and restraint.  This fear, that the progress of civilization and technology will only provide more and more powerful means to curb the freedoms it supposedly engenders, is embodied by the puppet strings attached to limbs and eye-lids and by huge metal braces bolted directly into human flesh.  The effects of these devices are not left to the the imagination either: many scenes involve robotic dancing or marching, while Lady Gaga and others lie inert under their harsh nylon strings.  This also serves to further reveal the powerful hand modern society and technology have in creating people on an individual and very real level.  The connection that Lady Gaga feels is impossible for her to share with her gay friends - the subject of the video - is one that has been cut off by the strict genders created by modern discursive power, and this cyborg imagery is just another example of that.  If man's inventions are artificial, than man is himself artificial.  He makes himself.   

8.  Gun Bra

Meghan:  Gaga's bra that not only lifts, but also functions as two guns, is a fashionable declaration of Gaga's enlisting in the gay army as a woman; she's not fighting for her own rights, but for the rights of the gay community.  She turns her feminine assets into a weapon for their cause.  This multitasking brassiere is moreover a descendant of Madonna's famous cone bra, which was widely understood as an "in-your-face" (literally!) symbol of her feminine pride and power.  Gaga adopts Madonna's famous symbol of feminine pride, and refashions it into a feminine weapon fighting alongside the gay community.  

Eddie: Also, to get a little symbolic with it, Lady Gaga is playing with androgyny again.  She stuck big phalluses on her breasts.  Bam.  

Meghan:  So her boobs are now two dicks.  Upside-down, trickster aesthetic again.  To put it crudely, it's like finding an ass where a mouth should be - very carnivalesque.  Gaga is once again challenging strict binary oppositions, confusing the borders that construct our knowable world. 


Other things to discuss:

1. Snow Imagery: What's the point of putting snow in the video? A sort of cold war, or dystopian aesthetic?
2. Gaga's face melts away at the end - Why?
3. Contrast between the song (very summery, warm, fun, sun-soaked Mexico) and the video (incredibly dark, cold, dreary, perhaps German).
4. Stonewall Riots?  Any connection?
5. Connections to earlier videos?  Or important contrasts?  Comparisons?

*This article's appendix has been removed.

Dear Readers!  Please leave your comments and your own interpretations, thoughts about the video, questions, things we left out, etc.  Feel free to leave links to your own reviews of the video as well.  Let's make a discussion, Little Monsters!