Referential Mania: Analyzing Lady Gaga and Beyonce's "Telephone"

by Eddie McCaffray and Meghan Vicks 

1.  Prison and Identity

Eddie McCaffray: My first thoughts on this subject revolve around the breakdown of the prison as an institution.  Are prisoners supposed to have identity and personal expression in prison?  Fuck no.  But in Gaga's video, the prisoners are the most vamped-out, gorgeous, fashion-star people present.  To me this represents an apogee of heroic-outsider fascination.  Plenty of movies and books (and songs and video games and TV shows and and and) lionize loners, outsiders, and anti-heroes, and prisoners might be the most popular specific example.  Lady Gaga's continuing story clearly involves this game/dynamic, but it also highlights an interesting correlation with glamor that has also been present in such stories for a long time.  James Dean?  John Travolta?  Johnny Depp?  These guys all played multiple rough-and-tumble, lawless outsiders with mascara and top-notch hair-dressers.  And if audiences noticed they certainly weren't complaining - beautiful heroes thinly disguised as dirty villains are meeting their ultimate expression in the "Telephone" video, where prisoners flash and pop with distinctive clothes, make-up, and hair like never before. 

Is this an example of how postmodern information-age super-saturation is corroding the walls between inside and outside, faceless prisoner and whole, healthy, legally-defined individual?  Or is it an example of warring discourses of prison and punishment/treatment - instead of prisoners dangerous to society repaying a debt or at least being held at bay, we have patients - the incarcerated themselves as victims - who must be diagnosed and healed in order to rejoin society.  The "healthy" individual expression to be found in buying clothes and following fashion trends must be instilled, especially over and against more "socially-destructive" (and thus fractured, sick, mistaken) forms of self-assertion.

Meghan Vicks:  The cliched celebration/idolization of the prisoner is certainly present in "Telephone," but also, I think it's important (if not overly obvious) to point out that these are women prisoners, and Gaga is breaking into a scene and taking on the role of something that is traditionally masculine.  This is not to say that other media hasn't engaged with the female prisoner; yet despite the many examples of female prisoners and violence in both literature and real life, the general culture still seems to encounter female violence as an extreme aberration, as much more unusual and more monstrous than her male counterpart.

So Gaga is occupying a place that is traditionally marked as male, which only makes the female guard's remark "I told you she doesn't have a dick" even more significant and perhaps ironic.

2.  Cyborg & "The Telephone Effect"

Meghan Vicks:  The telephone functions as an extension of the human body.  Gaga wears the telephone as a helmet at one point, and her hair forms a receiver at another.  Telephone technology is not only ubiquitous, but has also become an organic part of the contemporary body.  When it's not a part of Gaga's costuming or hair, it's beckoning, interrupting, dictating.  And the humans are moved by its ring.  At one point Beyonce starts moving like a malfunctioning robot.  They're moved to violence, and/or moved as automata.  

Eddie McCaffray: As well as trapped by it.  When it stutters and freezes, so do the people using it.  Through all of this, however, I think we should avoid moralizing many of Gaga's themes.  Other than her feminist play - and even that works this way sometimes - I think that most of her uses of technology, commercialism, fame, and so on aren't meant to be critiques but problematizations, she's calling attention to how these things work and change, and that means celebrating as well as condemning.  After all, the telephone is important in her release from prison.  And, in contrast to the lyrics of the song, which present it as the tool someone is using to harass Lady Gaga and Beyonce, in the video it functions as a tool used between friends and comrades.    

Meghan Vicks:  That's an excellent point.  It's both restricting and freeing (or a creative power). Which leads us to the mass-murder in the diner.  During the breaking-news story, one of the graphics labels the mass-murder in the diner "The Telephone Effect," thereby indicating that the crime is symptomatic of the telephone and telephone culture.  And to make sense of this, I think of the various ways that the now-ubiquitous telephone not only breaks its way into our lives, but controls us.  It keeps interrupting our literal and metaphorical dances on the dance floor, and Lady Gaga and Beyonce rage against it, murder, and in doing so clear a space in the diner to dance.  ALSO!  Gaga's hair is let free after the mass murder happens, whereas as she's cooking (performing the role of the domestic goddess), her head is contained by various telephone head gear.  This reminds me of Racine's Phaedra (also a trapped figure), who asks "what hands have conspired to knot my hair?"  Gaga is telling us that telephone culture imprisons us.

But, as Eddie points out, it also works to free us (Beyonce breaks Gaga out of prison by calling).  So like the cigarette sunglasses (see below), it's both.  Which is in keeping with Gaga's ambiguity (man or woman?  hair or hat?  alluring or revolting? etc).  

Eddie McCaffray: Well, what is "telephone culture"?  A culture of constant, massive, long-distance, instantaneous communication.  Communication that intrudes and precludes, but that also facilitates, allows, and enjoins.  This is a culture that frees us and brings us together in very real ways.  I know that my life has been vastly improved by the telephone.  Telecommunications breaks down barriers - all that altruistic quixotic shit the lobbyists say is true.  But it also invades, distorts, dumbs-down, and interrupts us.  Claims that the information - and communication - saturated world does real damage to prolonged thinking and academic pursuits are hard to dismiss.  Telephone culture - like every culture - is a massive, complicated group invention that has arisen and persisted because it addresses real human needs and solves real human problems.  Capitalism (and communism), patriarchy (and feminism), and every invention from vaccines to the printing press do just the same thing.  While in the song, Gaga explores just one side of this coin - the negative one - her video offers another view.  There the telephone frees her and reunites her.

3.  Criminal Female

Meghan Vicks:  Gaga's body dressed in the "Crime Scene Do Not Cross" tape.  Gaga + Beyonce as murderesses. Gaga and Beyonce laughing, dancing, standing stone-faced as their victims die.  Women really kicking the shit out of one another in prison.  Misbehaving girlfriend (or disobedient prostitute?).  Poisoning waitress.  

Eddie McCaffray: Poisoning is a crime with a particularly powerful set of connotations. It is one of the most acutely anti-social crimes, up there with arson, because it attacks indiscriminately through the medium of food.  Food is a sacred, carefully-controlled, highly-social experience, and poison (or the fear of poison) turns it from a source of comfort and community into a vector for suspicion and neurotic worry.  It's cowardly and totally vicious, unlike almost all other broadly-defined crimes which are possible to imagine in understandable or even heroic terms.  Poisoning is always cold, calculated, and deliberate.  It cannot be an accident or a crime of passion.  I think it had some really serious metaphorical meanings along these lines in medieval times (though I'm not sure), but in urban situations where large reserves of safe and potable water were important and vulnerable resources, and in the menace associated with the new anonymity offered by towns and cities, this crime made people seriously uncomfortable.

I think it may also have been connected with women (or, more accurately, misogynist stereotypes) - a crime which is calculating and conniving, totally independent of the relative physical strength of victim and perpetrator, and intimately associated with food preparation.  

4.  Real + Fake Product Placement
Meghan Vicks:  The video is peppered with both real (e.g. Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Polaroid, Chanel, Diet Coke, Virgin, Plenty of Fish) and fake products (e.g. Poison TV, Double-Breasted Drive-Thru, CookNKill Recipes).  This combination of real and fake allows the video to both enjoy the benefits of product placement, and parody the enterprise in the same swoop.  Once again, we're dealing, I think, with a carnivalesque aesthetic, or a type of conceptualist art that parodies by displaying too loudly or too blatantly that which is being mocked (overidentification).  The comfortably familiar form is being used to market poison, and at the same time its used to promote Polaroid.  Gaga's having her cake and eating it too.

Eddie McCaffray: I hope it's not poisoned!!

5.  Tarantino's Pussy Wagon

Eddie McCaffray: Well the Pussy Wagon - which is actually the one which appeared in Kill Bill - is only the most blatant reference to Tarantino.  A lot of features of the video seem too similar to be coincidence, and the van serves as a kind of "yes, this is done on purpose and even, to an extent, in collaboration" mark.  I would say that the most obvious similarities are the dialogue and the joy in violence.  It's always a fun trick to try and nail down what's really distinctive about Tarantino dialogue: here it reveals itself as language which seems full of inside jokes and references to which the viewer is not privy as well as cliched aphorisms and altruisms delivered with clearly purposeful awkwardness.  When thinking about Tarantino dialogue I'm tempted to say that the significance of these conventions has to do with bricolage (as do so many style choices of Tarantino and probably Lady Gaga).  All this cryptic-but-banal, slick-but-goofy phrasing makes obvious the radical over-saturation of speaking - and by extension meaning itself - in the information and mass-media age.  Viewers as well as characters are lost in a sea of discourses produced so fast as to be radically unfinished and almost nonsensical.  I made some mention of this in a recent blog post, where I called the zeitgeist hopelessly schizophrenic, but Tarantino and Gaga are moving beyond this depressed and euphemistic understanding of such a bricolage to the more characteristically-optimistic postmodern conception.  Instead of a case of insanity ravaging the noosphere and rotting any semblance of meaning or order, the endless flow of words and meanings is a fertile explosion that does nothing to decrease the validity of any individual significance.  It is only the modern insecurity - which equates exclusivity and hierarchical organization with worth - that makes the rise of bricolage seem like a loss or corruption.  Any less-biased view cannot help but see that there is only more of everything we always loved.

Of course, the meaning of gaga is relevant here as well.  Like dictionary.com says, gaga means "excessively and foolishly enthusiastic", "ardently fond; infatuated", and "demented; crazy; dotty" - these definitions are characteristic not only of the bricolage invoked in this specific production, but Gaga's general preoccupation and interest in fame from the perspective both of famous performer and non-famous viewer.  I'm getting pretty off-topic here, but let's also consider the word "infamous" as it relates to the events and themes of the "Telephone" video.  What do you call a famous monster?


Meghan Vicks:  Amy Bishop!

6.  Aestheticizing and/or Commercializing Murder
Meghan Vicks:  Oh god, I thought the images of people dropping dead into their food were just beautiful.  The heightened soundtrack that captured the slurping, choking, coughing, gagging, and sipping of people eating:  they was so drippingly vulgar, and yet drew me in nonetheless.  An eye rolls back in the head, a dog is handed a morsel of food, partially ruminated pancakes vomit out of a mouth, and then head after head either toppling back or falling forward into the plate.  And then, THEN, surrounded by these corpses, the video's dance centerpiece is staged.  Beyonce and Gaga and co., decked out in stars and stripes outfits, get down while the camera keeps inserting frames of the newly-dead bodies.  Even the dog.  It's funny and beautiful, and a little creepy too, but most of all, I kept thinking, This is how Humbert Humbert would have orchestrated a mass murder in an American diner.  The elevated aesthetic brushstrokes of Gaga's project turn this into a carnival of carnage and a perverse celebration of America, and yes it's violent, but it's so SO pretty.  It makes me want more.

 Above:  Humbert Humbert (played by James Mason) contemplates how to murder his wife (from the film Lolita 1964; directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Eddie McCaffray: She's definitely a shock jock(ette).  Mass murder in a diner, frivolity, and the American Dream is a pretty obscene juxtaposition for some.  The combination of death and celebration, though an ancient combo which has appeared in countless iterations, makes me think of The Rite of Spring.  Which also had a pretty simple score. 

Meghan Vicks:  Also, the video is a piece of pop art designed to be sold, with murder as the centerpiece.  Murder for sale.  Murder draped in the accoutrements of commercial and late-night TV infomercials.  Murder as benign and mainstream as Wonder Bread.  Murder with cool, blinking, neon graphics and selling-points.  Murder in five easy steps.  You don't even have to think about it, just buy. 

7.  Dead dog

Eddie McCaffray: The main significance that caught my attention in the shot of the dead dog (it's mixed in with all the other corpse-shots right before and during the big dance number in the diner) is that, while I don't think dead people are all that shocking in modern American mass culture - even in frivolous, joyous, celebratory, or anesthetized moments - dead pets, especially dogs, still are.  How many people do you know who don't really bat an eye at death in action or horror movies but respond strongly and verbally to violence inflicted on dogs or cats?  I would even suggest that killing a beloved or heroic pet is often a tool directors and other artists use specifically for a big, and visceral, audience reaction.  Secret Window and Cape Fear spring immediately to my mind, but I'm sure there are many others.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in characteristic genius fashion, parodies (while simultaneously using to full effect) this trick when Angelus murders Willow's fish.

Meghan also points out to that there is a shot of someone feeding the dog just before the shit hits the fan.  Pick your line of inquiry in regards to this three seconds of footage: how it breaks down the borders between man and beast at a particularly sensitive time (the ritual of eating, in a restaurant of all places); or, how innocent animals are corrupted (and thus damned and punished - or simply rendered collateral damage - by their human masters).

8.  Homage to Michael Jackson & Madonna
Eddie McCaffray:  All I noticed were the shoulder pads on Beyonce's pseudo-military jacket, which are obviously a big MJ signature.  

Again we have our pick of meanings and significances: Beyonce is a new black monarch of popular music; the rampant appropriation, relocation, and juxtaposition of symbols characteristic of bricolage and postmodernism; or just the simple (and, honestly, probably unintentional) fun of using a military symbol as your locus of homage (which of course is a word that originally meant the swearing of oaths of fealty in feudal societies - oaths that often included a commitment to military service).  

Meghan Vicks:  There's also Gaga's little MichaelJackson-esque dance move as she's let out of the prison.  

OOOOH, and I just remembered!  She channels one of Madonna's many images during her dance sequence in the prison.  

Isn't it interesting that the two artists she embodies or echoes in this prison segment are both the former King and current Queen of pop?!  So when Gaga is let out of prison, this may either imply the release of these two figures from some sort of cultural/social shackles as well, or else, this indicates that Gaga is kissing those former royals good bye.  Hmmmm.  I'm more inclined toward the latter interpretation.  That Michael Jackson and Madonna are always trying to express themselves or confess themselves out of the various prisons society has put them in (gender, racial, psychological, etc.), or perceive themselves as being caught in a prison of sorts, whereas Gaga is not a figure trying to escape a prison.  She creates her identity and performance, rather than releasing it.  And she's not making any excuses for it.

Eddie McCaffray: Also, a black woman set whitey free.

9. Americana 

Meghan Vicks:  It goes without saying that the diner is a staple of American culture, and the fact that they chose this space to launch an attack signifies a coordinating attack (terrorism?!) against the mom-and-pop, cherry-pie side of America.  Yet, once they have killed the diners, Gaga, Beyonce, and their posse do a dance dressed in outfits bearing the American flag, hippie garb, and lots of red, white, and blue.  As if America is destroyed by America; the revolution is destroyed/followed by the revolution; America turns rabid on itself (look at the shot below; they're dancing and strangling themselves at the same time!).  It's like a miniature version (or even parody) of the crises of modernity; the inventions and darlings of the modern world destroyed that modern world.  OH GOD!  Yeats' lion-man beast  is slouching toward Bethlehem, ALL OVER AGAIN!

Eddie McCaffray: This basically applies to any confusing (and thus interesting) moments in the video, but I do think that all this shuffling of imagery, symbols, and so on always reinforces the hyper-pop nature of postmodernism and vice-versa.  To a certain extent, you don't have to explain why they drive Tarantino's van or why they're suddenly wearing American flag clothes or crime scene tape.  Everything blurs together because there's so much of it and it's whirling so damn fast. 

Meghan Vicks: Exactly!  See my earlier post, that explains how Gaga is a modern day Trickster! 

10.  Gaga's sister functions as double/earlier version of Gaga 

Meghan Vicks:  Lady Gaga's younger sister, Natalie Germanotta, appears during the fight scene in the prison, and is styled in a way that is reminiscent of an earlier, dark-haired version of Gaga.  Gaga is seen standing by this earlier version of Gaga as the fight breaks out, and then walks away from her double in order to answer Beyonce's call.  As one of our readers pointed out, "Gaga is showing her audience (once again) that she has left her former self behind," and I think this is right.  When they're standing next to one another, there's a sort of mirror-play happening, as if Gaga is confronting her former self, a former self that acts, in my view, like she's pretty comfortable in the prison.  Nonchalant, even.  Gaga has to tear herself away from this former-self figure, and in doing so, takes the first step to breaking out of the prison (Beyonce, a later text message confirms, is bailing Gaga out). As that same reader so nicely put it, "It was only after she became Gaga that she became free."  Or a FREE BITCH, Baby!  Broke out of that Prison for Bitches, BAY-BEH!

BAM!

Question still lingers:  what type of person does this former self represent?  Besides a person who is trapped or imprisoned by society/culture?  

Eddie McCaffray: Well, the prison can function as a symbol for any number of prejudices - against women (it IS a prison for bitches, after all), against homosexuality, and probably others.  She could be representing herself leaving such prejudices behind, or just simply choosing to (finally) speak out against them.  Of course it could also be a personal metaphor for getting famous.  Or all of the above. 

11.  Feminism

Eddie McCaffray: What strikes me about Lady Gaga's feminism is just how advanced it is.  This is going to sound pretty doublethinky, but what identifies it as advanced is the same thing that makes it easy to miss as feminism.  Of course, she is representing women as powerful, independent, even dangerous.  So in a sense this looks like the second wave move to lionize Woman and women (hear me roar!).  But her use of a setting which, in fiction, is almost always male, and her frightening, aggressive, often not-so-sexy sexuality do much more to blur the line between men and women than they do to reclaim and rehabilitate the idea of the female gender.   I won't deny that plenty of times in her nearly ten-minute video she is deliberately and conventionally sexy.  Sex, sexiness, and sexuality have been vital parts of dancing and entertainment (at every part of the cultural spectrum) for too long to deny or overturn.  But there are also many scenes and outfits which, while highly sexual (cage dancing, bras and thongs, heavy makeup, tight and translucent clothes) are not really attractive, at least not to a conventional appetite.  After all, what about all her studs and spikes (often in worrisome places!)?  Lady Gaga is mixing and matching what usually function as unique calling cards for different genders, and in so doing  she removes the basis for prejudice and discrimination more effectively than if she simply praised women or calumniated men.

The other point on feminism I wanted to address the Thelma-and-Louise similarity.  Meghan and I had a conversation some months ago in which we tried to think of female versions of "bromances" (lovingly dubbed the homance?) - and they're very hard to come up with.  Almost any movie you can find (at least, if you're as out of the indie loop as we are) that has as its centerpiece the friendship of two female protagonists unrelated by blood has a more or less blatant theme of lesbianism.  While such movies are perfectly fine (often far better than fine, if not exploitative) in my opinion, the lack of movies about straight female relationships is not.  Why can't fiction ever dwell on such a relationship without invoking the shock and controversy (and, to be honest, partisanship) of lesbianism?  Especially when so many movies investigate and celebrate the bromance. 

Anyway - before this long section gets any longer - I tend to think of Thelma and Louise as one of the relatively less-lesbian homances out there.  Which is on one hand a sad comment on the ridiculous preponderance of lesbian homances, but on the other hand makes it one of the most important movies for a video with the feminist (post-feminist?) aspirations of this one to quote.  The homance is postfeminist in just the way Gaga's makeup and Telephone's prison scenes are.  Not only is it not about men, not only is it not about men and women, it isn't even really about women - the prolonged meditation on friendship helps force such a movie to be about a couple of people.

Of course, there are powerful lesbian themes in the video as well.  I can't deny it - but I think Gaga at least takes a couple of decent stabs not at rehabilitating the construction of the feminine gender (which, after so many years of patriarchy, is and will always be a male construction), but at attacking the whole taxonomy of gender itself.   

12.  Cigarette Sunglasses

Meghan Vicks:  I've always been fascinated by Gaga's play with eyewear, especially because many times, her eyewear impedes her vision rather than aids it.  Here, the cigarette sunglasses produce a literal smokescreen; Gaga's hiding something, diverting somebody's attention, masking (eye) movement.  Metaphorically, I'm reminded of various discussions of the power of the gaze to assert and define identity, and as a newcomer in prison, Gaga's gaze (or power) has been seriously taken away.  Here, we should recall that she's not only in prison, but draped in chains - details that further underscore her entrapment.  I find it quite fitting, therefore, that Gaga's gaze is cut off at this point as well.

So these are the basic ideas that floundered in my mind as I watched the video.  And then I read our readers' comments, and wow!  There's much more to think about.  And so much that really contradicts my initial thoughts.  One anonymous commenter, for instance, wrote about how "the cigarette sunglasses represent power and money," and goes on to point out that cigarettes are a type of currency in prison.  Burning the cigarettes is thus the equivalent of burning cash ("Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" anyone?!), and a HUGE power statement.  As if Gaga strolls into the exercise yard blatantly advertising the fact that one girl's currency is another girl's fashion statement.

So the power is once again combined with the powerlessness, which we see so often in Gaga's aesthetic.  It's what makes her so very fascinating, I think. 

Eddie McCaffray: Both sides of the coin, again.  It is what makes her fascinating.  She's dwelling in and expanding the problematic here, rather than resolving and ending it.  As in "the telephone effect," in her engagement with feminism, gay rights, fame and celebrity, and her own sexuality, she offers a multiplicity of meanings that contrast with and enhance one another.   

13.  Lesbianism/Gay Issues 

Eddie McCaffray: Lady Gaga's stance on homosexuality and the issues of prejudice and discrimination which confronts it today is well known.  Many fans have made really good points about how she deals with lesbianism and homosexuality in this video.  In contrast to other popular depictions of lesbianism in popular culture, Lady Gaga really does work to reclaim lesbianism for lesbians.  The butch or androgynous depiction of many women in the prison scene, most particularly the one Lady Gaga kisses, represents a lesbianism that is definitely not for the benefit of a male viewer.  Often, lesbianism is carefully represented to be as arousing for straight men as possible.  This ranges from pornography to "I Kissed A Girl", and while I'm not here to shoot down either one of those (I tend to believe that the problems with both are more with how they're viewed and what mindset has produced them, and that both could appear in a healthier, less-exploitative atmosphere without major changes to the texts themselves), "Telephone" can definitely be said to do a least a little real, emancipatory work on this front.  While making a hot buck of course - no one here is pretending that angle doesn't exist.

I think it's particularly interesting that MissOfficer is accessing the plentyoffish.com from inside the prison - relatively anonymous online dating is perhaps her only lifeline from the very real prison of public scorn, exploitative fascination, and intolerance for transgendered people.  The fact that she is a guard in the prison is only more suggestive - though the prison is undoubtedly sustained and maintained by external and invisible forces of the patriarchy, in true panopticon fashion we are all our own jailers.

Finally, as I argued under Point #11, real emancipation must be based on an attack against the oppressive taxonomy itself, not on an attempt to reclaim what will always be pejorative distinctions imposed by the very order against which one requires emancipation in the first place.  Again, androgyny plays its role for Gaga.   This is how deconstructive (which, in my opinion, is the single most powerful form) emancipation works.  It doesn't argue the merits, it mocks and destabilizes the whole edifice which facilitates the debate.  Can one really expect to beat ancient and pervasive biases, biases built into so much fundamental thinking and speaking, in a fair discussion?  The deck will always be stacked - it's only by replacing comfortable, entrenched discourse with play and joyful chaos that freedom, such as it is, is really possible.     

14.  Connections to earlier videos 

Eddie McCaffray: Lady Gaga is clearly interested in connecting her videos to one another via little signature moves and nods.  These range from her "ok" move to the shared use of Mickey Mouse sunglasses: Beyonce dons them in "Telephone" just after poisoning everyone, just as Gaga puts them on after poisoning Skarsgard in "Paparazzi".  Similarly, her translucent-dress-with-nipple-tape ensemble is brought back from the "Bad Romance" video. 

Ultimately, I'm not sure if many of these tricks are much more than just that.  Many directors (including Kubrick, whom Gaga has name-dropped before) have signature shots they like to reproduce from film to film.  Plenty of other musicians and performers have also connected their work this way: Frank Zappa even had a term for the practice, calling it "conceptual continuity" and building little chains of in-jokes and repeated lyrics that bridged studio and live material across decades.  Nabokov would often play with "coincidence," which took the form of mysteriously repeated names, numbers, and other infinitesimal details in his writing.  Alfred Appel, Jr. explained the practice in his introduction to Lolita thus: "Mythic or prosaic names and certain fatidic numbers recur with slight variations in many books, carrying no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that someone beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of one master pattern."   

Meghan Vicks:  Nabokov (via Humbert Humbert) also warned us, "Always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style."  In relation to this, I'd like to warn our readers, "Always trust a murderer for a fancy video style."  OR!  ALWAYS TRUST A MURDERER FOR A FANCY VIDEO ANALYSIS!  

15.  Cheetah Costume

Meghan Vicks:  What can I say about the cheetah costume?  Big pussy rides in a big pussy wagon!

But seriously, a big pussy DOES ride in a big pussy wagon, and she makes it so glamorous and fierce and RAWR!  I also like to think of this as an affirmation of her pussy-ownership, especially in light of the penis rumors.

And then, there are the various ways in which Gaga in the cheetah costume echoes other points of pop culture.  As one of our commenters explained, "The cheetah costume.  Very Shania Twain.  Was this on purpose?  Is Gagaloo poking fun at the very centerpiece (country music) of Americana?"  

I remember Shania Twain in that cheetah garment too, and there does seem to be an echo of that in Gaga's performance.  Is it on purpose, though?  That seems to be the million dollar question, and that's also the question that I don't think really matters. Gaga's art and performance can mean a lot out of Gaga's original intention, and whether or not she was thinking Shania Twain, this interpretation works.  Especially when we add up all the various nods to different aspects of American culture peppered throughout the video.

16.  What's connection between the song and the video? 

Meghan Vicks:  I feel like there's definitely a disconnect between the song and the video, at least if we listen and watch literally.  That is to say, the connection between the song and the video is metaphorical.  And oh!  How I LOOOOOVE metaphors.  A good friend of mine recently pointed out on her blog that the word "rhapsodizing" comes from "rhaptein" ("to stitch") + "oide" ("song"); and so to rhapsodize means to stitch a song.  This is my metaphorical way of saying that to understand the connection between the song and the video, we ourselves need to rhapsodize, play with metaphors, connect the dots between the two through symbol and simile and analysis.

I hope we've done that. 

Post-Script:  We definitely want to say how much we appreciate everyone who read and commented on these posts when they first showed up on Meghan's blog. For publication in Gaga Stigmata, we decided that these pieces should read a little less like blog-post-conversations-with-commenters, so we edited out direct references to all of your great thoughts.  Nevertheless, we really thank you guys for reading, thinking, and responding.  You've certainly improved markedly our own thinking about this fascinating video.  This writing originally appeared as two separate posts on Meghan's blog, where it languished briefly before Lady Gaga somehow got wind of it and posted a link on her twitter feed.  Since then, we've gotten hundreds of great comments and come into contact with lots of interesting people hiding out there in the Internet.     

You Cannot Gaga Gaga

by Jack Halberstam

Can you hear me? Listen up: I am gaga for Gaga. I know we all are now, and I was already gaga for Beyoncé except now Gaga is gaga for Beyoncé too so…so I am gonna have to call them both up on the t-t-telephone and find out how to get a piece of the action. And the action, by the way, has little to do with the phallus, real, imagined, lesbian or bionic. Thanks to Tavia (see below) for his brilliant and on point reading of the disappointing and disappearing phallus but from here on out, it is about phones, headsets, hearing, receivers and objects that become subjects, glasses that smoke, food that bites. If the sappy, eco-friendly message of James Cameron’s bloated 3-D off-world was “I see you,” the cooky, cocky, whacky voice-mail left by Gaga/Beyoncé is “I hear you.” The ear and the phone are neither vagina and penis nor speaker and listener, in this agenda-bending extravaganza the telephone is an Avital Ronell wet dream – electric speech served with a twist of live wire. And, by the way, what is up with divas and phones? Remember that Blondie was hanging on one, Madonna was hanging one up, even Beyoncé in “If I was a boy,” was turning one off and telling “everyone it’s broken/so that they would think I was sleeping alone.”

“It is a question of answerability,” says Ronell in The Telephone Book, “you picking it up means the call has come through.”

But what is it saying? When you get the call, who speaks and who listens? And what happens when she tells you to STOP CALLING MOTHERF#*KER!

Telephone, for the two people who missed it, is the breakout online Gaga/Beyoncé extravaganza set in a women’s prison in LA. In this ten minute mini film,  Lady Gaga wears her diet coke in her hair, her heart on her sleeve and models a series of hats made out of telephones while she and Beyoncé perform in “Thelma and Louise” meets Marcel DuChamp meets Set It Off. They dip and bob, stutter and wink across a landscape of diners and deserts leaving a trail of bodies in their wake – the crime they are punishing? Honey theft. Yes, like queen bees deciding to kick the drones to the curb while keeping their honey for themselves, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé buzz around dangerously looking for the next sucker to sting.

In their “pussy wagon” Gaga and Beyoncé chart new territory for femme liberation, female aggression, feminine techno embodiment and instant gratification – using a Polaroid camera, Gaga captures her “Honey Bee,” (that’s Beyoncé to you) leaving the scene of the crime and promises that they are leaving and never coming back. Throwing the picture to the ground, the gesture suggests that images are cheap but check out the sound system. The telephone line goes dead, the connection is lost, the heroines are far from the law, lost to the boyfriends calling on their phones, far from home, and far from dead. Their honey is safe and their desire is as shiny and new as the glittering heels they used to walk over the corpses. Featuring cameos by female body-builders, female body artist Heather Cassils and Gaga’s sister, the video gives sisterhood a brand new name: NOISE . The prison yard kiss with Cassils, in particular, reminds the viewer that this is a queer sisterhood, a strange sisterhood and one which is not afraid to flirt with some heavy-duty butch-femme, S/M dynamics. Cassils has talked in an interview about what the video has done for her visibility.

The blogosphere is already full of readings and revelations about the video – it is a Foucaultian take on prison and “technological entrapment”; here on Bullybloggers, it has been read as the channeling of Butler’s “Lesbian Phallus”; it is obscene, murderous, cruel to animals, misogynist, man-hating, homophobic and heterophobic; and I think you could safely place it as a Deleuzian exploration of flow and affect not to mention an episode in Object Oriented Philosophy. So whether the philosophy in question is drawn from Zizek on speed, Ronell on crack or Meillassoux on ecstasy, this video obviously chains a few good ideas to a few very good bodies and puts thought into motion. So what is the “telephone” in this sonic drama and what is Gaga doing with it?

Notice many of the phones in the film are landlines – the phone in the jail (or “club” as Gaga calls it), the green phone in Beyoncé’s bedroom, the blue phone that Lady Gaga wears as she makes sandwiches – these phones are fixed in place, not mobile, wearable but also restricting – “Tonight I’ll not be taking no calls because I’ll be dancing…Stop calling, stop calling, cause I don’t want to talk anymore/Stop calling, stop calling, I don’t want to think anymore/I got my head and my heart out on the dance floor.” The push and pull of the game of telephone resembles the rhythms of hetero dating – she waits, he calls; she answers, he speaks, she yells, he hangs up. But they also resemble stalking—“stop calling, stop calling”—and they sound like the surveillance calls brilliantly dissected as part of the marriage script in Laura Kipnis’s Against Love – “Hi hon, just called to check in…where are you now?” The mobile phone is a player in the battle of lovers and so Lady Gaga and Beyoncé decide to unleash themselves from the tyranny of the phone – instead of hanging on the telephone, they become the telephone. The music pulses like a ring tone (like the ring tone it is about to anyway become), it burbles and beeps, hiccups and repeats, insistently, calling and ringing, ringing and calling and chaining us all to the charisma of the pop beat.

Like the ringing music, the choreography is also phony, phonic, supersonic – like the clipped conversations that lovers have on phones with reception and messages fading in and out, the divas strut and twist their bodies into jerking machines – in one remarkable sequence, a break in the dinette dance scene, Beyoncé, dressed in her Michael Jackson uniform complete with epaulets stands with her eyes wide open and her mouth opening and closing to the stuttering “eh…eh…eh…eh” of the music. Beyoncé is channeling phone here, she is the receiver, the answering machine and the dial tone all in one and all are saying the same thing – no one is home! In another sequence when Gaga is leaving the prison, she stutter steps in another homage to Jackson but also to convey the shift in time-scapes from doing time in prison to taking a dropped call from Beyoncé out in the real world. Time, in “Telephone,” ripples with queerness, stops, starts, repeats: and while time stops for the losers in their way, Beyoncé and Gaga are tripping off to a utopia of milk and honey. Beyoncé and Lady Gaga repeatedly lift their hands to their mouths to make the telephone sign and they sing into handsets and hold the phone like a dick they are about to rip off. Is this film about castration? Oh yeah baby. Your phone is going to be off the hook, your land line is now cordless, your cordless lost reception, your mobile is turned off, your girlfriend is turned on and she is escaping in a pussy wagon with another woman!

Well, so is the phone the phallus after all? Is the mobile phone a dildo? Is the old landline a kind of metaphor for male penis and the new “virgin” cell phone a metaphor for the lesbian phallus? I still think that phallic as phones may be and phunny as the connection between phone and phallus becomes throughout the video, the real sex organ in this piece is the ear, and while the phallus may well circulate, this is pussy power all the way. Lady Gaga and Beyoncé demonstrate a femininity done right and over done to the point of parody. But here is where it gets interesting – while Lady Gaga always seemed like a drag queen in her outrageous costumes, in this incarnation she reminds us that no one does femininity like a fierce femme and while you can already see the drag shows going on in a bad gay bar near you with super tall drag queens lipsyncing to Gaga and Beyoncé and cat-fighting their way across the stage, remember you heard it here first – you cannot Gaga Gaga, honey so don’t even try! She is camping camp, she is dragging drag, she is ironing irony (ok…ok), she  has done it, been it, worn it. And be warned, don’t call her, she’ll call you!

Author Bio:  Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC. Halberstam teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film.

Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.