MtN’s Tour de Negative Femininities

By Samantha Cohen

This is the seventh piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

The home-chopped bob with too-short bangs has always been my favorite haircut. It screams teenage theater girl or aspiring mental patient. It makes me think of knives. The girl with the home-chopped bob is so angry she’ll take a scissors to her hair, cut right into it at random, and probably use the scissors on other things, too. The bob chopper’s given up on being a good female – she’s given up on being pretty. She takes her emotions out on the very symbol of her good femininity: her hair. She externalizes her badness, advertises her desire to fail. And so she is institutionalized.

Only she hasn’t given up on being pretty, not really. The scissored-at-random look is different than the razored-all-over look. Her little bangs ask those who gaze upon her to still find her cute. Recognize my anger, her hair says, recognize its manifestation on my body, but adore me. The home-chopped bob externalizes the ambivalence and pathos of being female.

And so, in the mental institution with home-chopped Gaga we begin the “Marry the Night” video’s grand tour of negative femininities.

The mental institution has always been a fantasy space for me. I sort of blame the movie Girl, Interrupted for this.

Angelina's home-chopped bangs!

The mental institution is a place for unchecked feminine expression and sanctioned hysteria, a gathering space for failed females. It’s a lesbian separatist experiment-come-true. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona and Angelina sneak out for acoustic guitar sessions and eye sex. In “Marry the Night,” patients cavort madly in matching thongs, imaginary slumber party-style.

Gaga’s in the institution because she took a knife to her hair and then her body; because she couldn’t be a good female – “a saint” – like her mother.

But one must fail at femaleness in order to create. Creation is a selfish act, and the good female is unselfish. Gaga must accept herself as a failed female before she can be an artist, and so the mental institution is necessarily the first stop on her journey.

Gaga is not at the hospital to be restored to good femininity, like Winona in Girl, Interrupted, but to accept her failure. She just has to turn on some dramatic piano music and waltz into a studio apartment that, bathtub-in-the-kitchen, is the very signifier of glamorous New York artistic poverty, and that’s in some ways, an extension of the institution – a place for expressive seclusion.

And so she finds herself in the next incarnation of failed femaleness: the cloistered impoverished artist. She practices ballet, does performance art involving maxi pads and Cheerios, and writes songs in the kitchen bathtub as she bleaches her hair. Strutting around with a censoring black bar over her nipples, she even has an imaginary audience. Her speech is subtitled.

But Gaga’s already told us she’s beautified her past. Of course, real art poverty is the same as all other poverty. There’s no audience, and after awhile, it becomes difficult to imagine one.

And so, Gaga joins the world again, now as an artist. Which she can do, because she still has her bedazzler. She still has the tool to make herself into her own glittering object. And so she does.

And then she does “what any girl would do.” But what is it that any girl would do? She says it’s “start(ing) all over again” but her face tells us something different. 

Do you see it? It’s subtle. It could almost be that Gaga’s gum is stuck in her teeth. But, no. Gaga is going to suck cock. She’s going to embody yet another form of negative feminine: the whore.

Oh yes. She’s entered the capitalist/patriarchal system and she’s ready to sell herself to that ultimate patriarch: the Papa Paparazzi.

Gaga’s subtlety with her cock-sucking face is telling – she’s skilled at making her signals apparent only to those who know how to read them. This kind of coded signaling is itself a feminine form of communication. Men, Real Men (who may of course be women, too), the ones who run shit and to whom Gaga must whore herself are, as centuries worth of jokes and satire tell us, unobservant. Almost intentionally so – they wouldn’t want to be accused of the feminine activity of reading into things. And so, by convincing Real Men, at a glance, that she’s whatever they want her to be, Gaga gains the freedom to speak honestly, if clandestinely.

So Gaga’s a whore, but she can’t just be a whore. Like (Catholic schoolgirl) pop stars Britney and Christina, she must embrace both sides of the Madonna/whore binary. She must, too, be a saint. She clues us in on this in the same moment that she signals her intent-to-whore. Her studded denim, blonde 80s look alludes to Madonna, making a kind of visual pun that allows her to embody both the Madonna and the whore simultaneously, to effectively become a Madonna/whore hologram.

Unlike Britney and Christina, though, whom Real Men turn into whores and Madonnas in image only, Gaga becomes a real Madonna (more on this later), and a real whore. She “throw(s) on some leather and cruise(s)…in (her) fishnet gloves, (she’s) a sinner.” And it’s by embodying at once these opposing figures that Gaga has the freedom to create herself in her own image, to use those shiny patches.

By actually inhabiting both sides of the Madonna/whore binary, Gaga is able to become, while in the world, something that’s almost unfemale. By the time she’s ready for the world of the actual music video, she’s abandoned her uncontrolled, emotional femininity. Her movements have become precise, rigid, fierce. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling. She makes fists. She blows shit up. She’s become something that’s so far from popular representations of the Madonna and the whore that it’s not quite recognizable as female, so far from these representations that, upon her debut, U.S. audiences speculated about whether she was a man. In fact, she’s a Gaga. And it’s once she’s become a Gaga in this video that the actual music video can begin.

Throughout the music video, we see what it is to be a Madonna.

Whoring gives Gaga the freedom to return to the bathtub, to her space of creation, which is also her space of baptism.

Gaga purifies herself in order to “make love to this dark,” to create. In Gaga’s bathtub, the Madonna is not all about piety and selflessness. This Madonna communes with the divine, with the mystical, with the dark, in order to create. This is not a new idea of course – the Virgin Mary herself communed with the divine so hard, got so deeply in touch with the dark otherworldly, that she got pregnant with an actual baby who was part-human, part-divine. Gaga restores the image of the Madonna to what she is: another embodiment of the negative feminine.

Gaga’s Madonna is not a Madonna that the U.S. Christian right (who are almost synonymous with Real Men) would approve. She’s in touch with the dark, with the unconscious, with the frightening spiritual world.

Real Men are content, Gaga implies, as long as their cocks get sucked. And thus, Gaga turns the Madonna/whore binary on its head, making saintliness encompass emotion and darkness and everything scarily feminine, while the whore gives Real Men what they want, gaining freedom as currency.

And the chorus of “Marry the Night” sounds to me like an imperative as well as an invocation. I hear Gaga invoking Mama M-Mary, the night. Mary the dark, Mary the source of magical creation. But I also hear, “Mama m-marry the night,” which sounds to me like it sounds when I hear LA Latina mothers call their daughters mama, a term of endearment, a recognition of their inescapable femaleness. Mother monster is dispensing some advice. She advises us to marry the night. To embrace inner darkness and create from that darkness. To commune with the otherworldly, to reinvent ourselves. To turn tricks and be tricksters. To embrace solitude as well as the bedazzler. To do the home-chopped bob if we need to, but to eventually become so tough and glamorous in the world that we’ll be allowed space to return to our own rooms for emotional/psychotic/hysterical creation.

And with the Mary figure at the end of the video, Gaga offers us a god to worship. This Mary’s hard and shiny, content alone in the darkness, transmitting signals from her satellite head, knowing they'll be properly received.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen, creative editor of Gaga Stigmata, is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles. Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine. She teaches a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts.

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Hair Textiles and Gaga

By Tove Hermanson

We all know Gaga loves her wigs, but she also dabbles with clothes that resemble wigs, as with this LaVer dress she recently wore to a taping of The View:

Gaga on the View, May 2011

LaVer couture hair dress, 2010 collection

Since medieval times, locks of hair have been given to lovers as amulets, and the Victorians wove hair of the deceased into jewelry (more on fashion and mourning). These customs reveal the sentimental properties we imbue hair with (in a way we do not imbue, say, fingernail clippings or dead skin), as a representation of a greater spiritual, emotional, and sensual body.

Victorian hair jewelry

Hair is one of those components of the body that has a split personality: one the one hand, it's a sensual symbol of youth, fertility and sexuality; on the other hand, when it is removed from its proper (that is, expected) source, it becomes something horrible and icky (in a tub drain, on your clothes, etc.). Alexander McQueen tapped into both the marvelous and the macabre associations of hair (specifically that Victorian prostitutes would sell theirs for kits of hair locks, which were bought by people to give to their lovers[i]) by sewing clear packets of neatly coiled tufts of hair into the linings of his garments as his signature label; in early collections, it was his own hair:

Alexander McQueen hair label

While hair from a loved one may conjure desire, longing, or melancholy (relatively benign emotions), a clump of unfamiliar hair is typically met with repulsion. Kate Kretz explored the comfort, familiarity, sentimentality, and seemingly contradicting uneasiness displaced hair elicits from us by embroidering human hair directly onto a pillowcase; the hair could just as easily be a blood stain, so wrong does it seem, severed from the body that produced it (imagine laying your face onto that!):

My Young Lover, 2005 by Kate Kretz

Humans are obsessed with caring for the hair on our heads (the hair product isles in any drug store is testament to that), and equally obsessed with removing hair from “undesirable” places (legs, underarms, bikini areas, backs, chests). Body hair on women has been considered undesirable in many cultures for millenia. Since the great Ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures, women having been mixing their own version of Nads (a sugary depilatory, if you haven’t seen the hilarious infomercials) and home-brewed bleaches to remove and conceal unwanted facial and body hair: golden razors were even found in the tomb of Egyptian Queen Hetepheres[ii] (so she could shave in the afterlife?).

Simply moving hair from a “desirable” location (head, eyelashes), to an “undesirable” one (anywhere else) grosses most of us out. Lady Gaga loves to push the boundaries of psychological comfort, and she revels in the sartorial social statement. To wit, in performances of her new song “Hair,” she has been appearing in a series of dresses made entirely of hair extensions (frequently matched to her wigs). In her recent performance of “Hair” on the Paul O’Grady Show, she wore a bald cap over her natural mane while serenading her wig (which matched her hair dress), and put it on halfway through, to complement the chorus “I am my hair”:

Gaga on Paul O’Grady Show with dyed hair dress by Charlie Le Mindu, June 2011

The piano itself is covered with a textile of darker, curlier fake hair that looks not unlike Alexander McQueen’s synthetic hair coat from a decade ago:

Alexander McQueen “Eshu” collection, Fall/Winter 2000-01

Words like “freak” and “free” appear in Gaga’s “Hair” and also the song “Hair” from the ‘60s musical Hair, as well as an ambiguous social agenda that is nonetheless important to the singers, embedded within their respective ‘dos (long and natural as in Hair, or long and fake for Gaga). Each song’s lyrics refer to parental disapproval, judgement from the public, and an overwhelming urge to fight this prejudice against nonconformist appearance, with hair as the symbol of individuality.

At a Good Morning America Summer Concert, Gaga shared with the audience, “People used to make fun of me for my wigs, and I’m just telling you without my wigs I feel like I can only be one person and I want to be so many.” She then proceeded to don not one, but several wigs over the course of the song.

Compare Gaga’s blonde hair dress and blonde wig to Maison Martin Margiela’s hair dress from a couple years ago:

Gaga in blonde hair dress, October 2010

Maison Martin Margiela, SS09

Like Gaga, Margiela also paired the wig jacket with a wig of identical false hair that tumbles into the garment, burring the boundary between desirable (i.e. head) hair, and undesirable (i.e. body hair).

Until the last few decades with the emergence of the so-called “metrosexual,” men’s body hair has gone largely unnoticed and unregulated, while women’s body hair has been increasingly vilified: women’s shrinking underwear and swimsuit styles have corresponded to shrinking stylized pubic hair surface area. Compare this illustration from the original The Joy of Sex (published in 1972, a singular decade when body hair of men and women was encouraged to grow undisturbed), to this more recent photo of Gisele Bundchen in a bikini-- Gisele’s pubic hair must be depilatoried to the size of a quarter for none to show:

Left: from The Joy of Sex, 1972; Right: Gisele Bundcen

The delightfully vulgar electroclash-y singer Peaches pushed the limits of “acceptable” female hair in her music video Set it Off. Over the course of the video, her hair grows – head hair and eyelashes, but also underarm hair, her treasure trail advances on her belly, and her pubic hair creeps down her legs. Gaga wore a similar merkin, underarm hair, and head wig in teal for a performance of “Born This Way” at the MuchMusic Awards:

Peaches in Set it Off video (excuse the terrible quality of the video still)

Gaga at MuchMusic Awards, 2011

Beyond the pure gross factor (which in and of itself is satisfying, I think), by experimenting with hair dresses and body hair wigs, Gaga contributes to this commentary on controlled female sexuality via (head) hair care and (body) hair removal/censorship.

Though her underarm and pubic hair is not usually depicted, Mary Magdalene of the Golden Legend is frequently portrayed with her (natural) hair so long that a) she can wash Jesus’ feet with it, and b) she can wear it as a flimsy dress of sorts. John the Baptist is also said to have worn a shirt of hair, though it is not his own (the itching was a perpetual, self-inflicted punishment):

Penitent Mary Magdalene by Titian, c. 1531 – 35

Maesta: St. John the Baptist by Simone Martini, 15th century

Roland previously wrote:

In the collapsing of Biblical stories there are three Marys that are merged into a single figure: Mary of Bethany, Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the Prostitute. In Western Christianity (i.e. Catholicism), Mary is the redeemed prostitute who meets Christ, abandons her ways, and goes on to preach the Gospel to the idol-worshippers in Marseilles. Eventually, following the Golden Legend, she becomes a hermit. She resides in the desert, and every day is lifted by angels to receive nourishment from God. While she originally wears a hair shirt (or simply covers herself with her long flowing hair), in artistic representations her hair shirt is sometimes depicted as actual body hair.

Mary’s hair is a symbol of her sex’s sensuality, an instrument of charity and redemption, and it also hints at her profession’s presumed immodesty. Like Madonna, Gaga returns again and again to themes of religion and sex in her performances; as a prostitute-turned-Christian, Mary Magdalene literally embodies both. In the “Judas” video, Gaga places herself in Mary’s role (albeit not in hair dresses).

Mary Magdalene is a likely reference point in the phenomenal “hair sculptures” of stylist duo Gregory Dean (the first of which resembles Gaga’s LaVer dress, yes?). Note how the model’s ponytail merges seamlessly into her dresses, eradicating the boundaries between head and body tresses, “acceptable” and “unacceptable” hair, simultaneously rebellious, political, and irreverently religious:

I don’t know about you, but I kinda want one.

---

[i]Alexander McQueen quotation from “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” by Andrew Bolton, Yale University Press, New Haven: 2011. p. 35.

[ii]Virginia Sarah Smith, Clean: a history of personal hygiene and purity, Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.66f

Author Bio:

Tove Hermanson is a freelance writer and lecturer on fashion history and culture with a background in English, Film Theory, Art History, and Costume Design. She explores everyday culture through a fashion-historical lens to gain insight into politics, social and class struggles, gender and sexual identity themes, race issues, and more. She currently publishes articles in the Huffington Post, the academic fashion blogs Worn Through and her own Thread for Thought, in addition to ad hoc lectures. Additionally, she is the Editor of the Costume Society of America's monthly E-Newsletter.

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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.

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

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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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