Won’t you be my neighbor?: Individual ruminations from the Edge

By Lesley Kinzel

This is the fourth 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.

Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

– Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891

On my first listen, “The Edge of Glory” instantly brought to mind Berlin’s “Like Flames,” from the 1986 album Count Three & Pray. Though their melodies differ, both songs share the same soaring, triumphant pop sensibilities. Musically, they are both songs that celebrate; they are ending-credits songs. Lyrically, they are both about liberation. Terri Nunn sings about collaboration against oppression, using “we”:

The freedom bought, changed hands, was sold

The heat of love has turned ice-cold and

We never learn but we know too well

Heaven’s died and gone to hell

And Gaga counters with individual assurance, using “I”:

Put on your shades ‘cause I’ll be dancing in the flames

Tonight, yeah baby, tonight, yeah baby

It isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight,

Alright, alright

It’s hardly surprising, then, when Gaga appears in the video for “The Edge of Glory” with her Terri Nunn hair and her pink-smoke city-street backlot, in a vivid callback to an era of new-wave ego-driven ambition. This video is the anti-Gaga: restrained, minimalist, sticking to one idea, free of heavy-handed symbolism and plot. It is arguably one of the most unexpected and astonishing things she’s yet done.

It would be easy to pin “The Edge of Glory” down to pure 80s nostalgia, and it definitely evokes such memories. When MTV first launched in 1981, many of its early videos were minimalist in the extreme, not as an artistic statement, but because artists lacked either the motivation or the financial wherewithal to do more with this strange new marketing tool. That said, it didn’t take long for some artists to embrace the medium. Only a year into MTV’s dominance over pop music, we would see Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night” envisioned as a World War II themed epic in which Benatar, playing a bored factory worker, imagines herself as a fighter pilot in Europe alongside then-unknowns Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton. Benatar would follow this up in 1983 with the seminal “Love is a Battlefield,” believed to be the first video to feature acted dialogue outside of the music it’s supposedly promoting. Of course, some artists resented the sudden pressure to produce visuals when all they wanted was to make records, resulting in fuck-you offerings like The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” a “video” that simply shows a stereo playing the song. Fact is, music videos have always been serious business.

The biggest cultural change wrought by MTV has become the standard for pop stars today: music videos turned artists into brands, and gave their audiences the opportunity to fixate as much on the individual as on their music. This not only meant that talented stars could build their fanbase (see Michael Jackson), but also that artists with less raw talent but an interesting “look” could top the charts (see Madonna) even while efforts rooted in musical substance over video style foundered. The MTV era not only supported but helped to create the 1980s investment in individualism, one that persists today, by inventing artists whose “unique” personal style was as important, if not moreso, than their cumulative artistic output.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Gaga obviously does not lack the funding to create another video epic, so we can assume that “The Edge of Glory” was a conscious stylistic choice. And it seems that the video for “The Edge of Glory” was originally planned to be something bigger – something mermaid-themed, in fact – but the production was shut down after the first day, owing to an argument between Gaga and the original director. In this context, “The Edge of Glory” has as much in common with “Bastards of Young” as it does “Papa Don’t Preach” – it is not a video that doesn’t care, but rather it is a video that cares deeply. “Bastards of Young” stands today not as a careless effort, but as a firm statement against forced participation in visual culture. “The Edge of Glory” is far less dramatic in its approach, but it likewise shrugs off expectations and fiercely goes its own way, dispensing with costume changes, product placements, backup dancers, and multiple sets.

Instead, this is a video of ones. Gaga has said that “The Edge of Glory” was written about the death of her grandfather, and the referenced “edge” is the edge of life, over which we all slip just before passing on, the final journey which we all undertake alone. Instead of spinning a tale, “The Edge of Glory” captures a single moment in time. In it, Gaga is mostly solitary, save for the company of kindly brass-wielding angel Clarence Clemons, the legendary saxophonist who himself slipped over the edge this weekend in a sad and unpredictable synchronicity. Gaga wears only one outfit in the video, of vintage Versace, borrowed from Gianni Versace’s last collection before his murder in 1997. The entire video happens in one place. Gaga lip-syncs to the camera and dances recklessly, unchoreographed, as she might have in the privacy of her bedroom in less-famous days. The whole video feels like an improvised experiment in solitude and self-reflection. She is a wayward club kid on a Monday night; she is a bored teenager looking for an outlet; she is all dressed up with no place to go, and no one to go there with anyway. And will you look at her now.

Among the original attractions at the 1955 opening of Disneyland was a dark ride called “Snow White and Her Adventures.” Many park visitors found the experience bewildering, in part because it was quite scary for children, but mostly because it seemed that Snow White herself was absent from the ride. There was a reason for this: the ride was designed with the intention that the passengers would take on the role of Snow White as they adventured along through the woods. This was a little too existential for your average Disney park guest, and so after several years of terrifying children and perplexing adults, the ride was revamped to lighten the mood and to drop in a few cursory appearances by the titular character. The original interactive “participation” of the ride passengers was lost in favor of an omniscient viewing experience not unlike watching the film on which the ride was based, except in this case the story stands still while the audience passes through it.

“The Edge of Glory” provides a similar experience, of a story standing still, and of the viewers’ position as somewhat undefined. Is Gaga singing to us, we wonder? Or to a mirror, or to a camera? And what is the difference?  “The Edge of Glory” is about death, according to Gaga, but this video is also about youth, and the individual, and that (forgotten, for some) adolescent confidence that we are uniquely important and precious, with endless possibilities open to us (even though, for too many, this is simply not true). In direct contrast to Gaga’s usual presentation at the head of a gaggle of supportive backup dancers, “The Edge of Glory” removes her self-assigned status as leader and thereby makes the video in which only Gaga exists less exclusively about Gaga than any other video she’s made – without an adoring public, without a backup squadron, without her little monsters, who is Lady Gaga? And what is the difference?

Many a disappointed response to “The Edge of Glory” referenced the video as “basically me dancing around my apartment” and that may be the point. Gaga lip-syncs along to the music, alone in her safest space, as many others have done, but she is not singing to us. Perhaps we are singing to her. Perhaps in “The Edge of Glory,” we are encouraged not to admire Lady Gaga but to be her, an embodiment of Wilde’s disturbing and disintegrating force, fierce killers of homogeneity.

Author Bio:

Lesley Kinzel is a writer, lapsed academic, cultural critic, and fat lady extraordinaire. She writes about popular culture and body politics at http://twowholecakes.com, and is currently working on her first book for The Feminist Press. She lives just outside Boston, MA with her husband and three very spoiled cats.

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Gaga/Magdalene: Unpacking Prostitution in “Judas”

By Lesley Kinzel

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

The historical record of Mary Magdalene may well be one of the most far-reaching cases of posthumous character assassination that Western Judeo-Christian culture has ever seen, or perpetrated. The result is that she may be the most mysterious and misunderstood woman that the world has yet known, having spent most of recorded human history misidentified as a prostitute until the label was withdrawn during Vatican II in 1969.

A thousand years of alleged whoredom is not a mark easily washed away, and so Mary Magdalene’s name continues to be synonymous with “prostitute” in popular culture. These days, it is generally accepted amongst biblical scholars that in her own time, Mary Magdalene was not so defined by the “seven demons” – whatever they may have been – from which she was liberated by Jesus. Her primary role was as one of the more crucial apostles. This is not to suggest she didn’t run into obstructionist misogyny even then. In the apocryphal gospel attributed to Mary Magdalene there is a story of her receiving a vision from the resurrected Jesus, and Peter immediately gives her shit about it:

“Did he then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?” Then Mary grieved and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart or that I am lying concerning the Savior?”

With a woman. A woman, then as now, could not be entirely trusted to tell the truth, to take the high road, to lead a movement of people. Women are naturally wicked, of course, prone to lies and suspicious motives, and so Mary Magdalene had to be made a prostitute in order to prove out the view that women do not belong as leaders and thinkers and takers of action – in the church, or anywhere else, for that matter. Her actions no longer have meaning if she took them for money. Are we to turn back and all listen to her? To a woman?

In the video for “Judas,” Lady Gaga takes on the role of Mary Magdalene, traveling with him and the rest of the apostles to a reminagined “New Jerusalem.” The Gaga/Magdalene connection is not surprising, given that Gaga has often been labeled a prostitute, an attention-whore, or otherwise as a woman who does not know her place. In the video, Gaga is repeatedly torn between Jesus and Judas, between sainthood and sin. She plays the role tough, with a swagger that heavily (and more than a little problematically) co-opts Latino gang culture. Gaga attempts to protect Jesus, both from Judas and from her own sinful “hooker”-y urges in Judas’ direction, and she, like most of us, is only halfway successful.

In the video’s pivotal scene, Gaga stands between Judas and Jesus at the moment of betrayal, prepared to kill Judas to stop the events that will result in Jesus’ death. Jesus, with a subtle shake of his head, instructs her to stand down, and Gaga collapses in despair. Before she falls, she smears vivid red lipstick on Judas’ face – a screaming look-at-me color, nothing demure about it – and prepares him for the kiss that will ultimately destroy both of the men she loves.

Judas has also been historically misunderstood, long thought to have betrayed Jesus to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver, himself a prostitute insofar as performing an allegedly immoral action in exchange for money. Contemporary scholarship has begun to doubt this version of events, however, arguing instead that Jesus asked Judas to “betray” him because he was the only apostle he could trust to do so. Either of these stories involve equal amounts of prostitution, as in both cases Judas is not kissing Jesus because he wants to, but because doing so promises a valuable reward, be it money or immortality. Obviously, the Christ narrative means little without crucifixion and death – the betrayal and death of Jesus in this story is as necessary as it is tragic.

Interestingly, Jesus’ death is totally absent from the “Judas” video, as are any of the historical events to follow Judas’ betrayal. Gaga instead reshapes the betrayal narrative as a metaphor for her own persona, caught between the competing assumptions about who she is and what she is trying to do. Is she a “fame hooker” as others have called her, and as she calls herself? Are her motives selfish or selfless? She confuses us at every turn; all we can expect from her is something we have failed to anticipate.

Immediately following the lipstick application, straddling the distance between Gaga’s despair and the prostitute-kiss between Judas and Jesus, the video breaks to a dream sequence in which a motionless Gaga is overcome by a cascade of waves reminsicent of the early mythological origins of a much older deity: the Greek goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite.

Gaga thereby connects herself with another powerful, otherworldly feminine archetype worshipped long before Jesus was a glimmer in his [F]ather’s eye, and one also associated with sacred prostitution. Aphrodite literally means “out of the foam”; as the story goes, she was born of the ocean, after Uranus’ son castrated (or possibly emasculated) the elder god and threw his severed genitals into the sea. Given the persistent rumors that Gaga is intersex, or possesses both male and female genitalia, the depiction of her in the role of a distinctly feminine, sex-centric goddess born as a result of the removal of male genitalia is both tongue-in-cheek and incredibly apt.

Gaga, however, is not lifted up by the waves in this iteration, but is rather knocked down by them, foreshadowing her demise at the end of this story, and, as she vanishes beneath the deluge, illustrating an erasure of feminine archetypes of power and leadership. Following this interlude, Gaga shares a ritual bath with both Jesus and Judas; now she is no common whore but a sacred prostitute, as in Aphrodite’s temple in Cornith, where sexual intercourse is a form of worship. In so doing, she honors the two biggest competing parts of herself: the one that wants to create art that makes a better world, and the one that simply wants to be famous and adored.

As Gaga’s videos go, “Judas” is curiously chaste, even given the prostitution themes. The closest Gaga comes to intimating sex with either Jesus or Judas is in the looks she gives them, but her physical contact with both men is either protective (as in the fight in the electric chapel), or violent (as when she shoves Judas down the stairs when they enter), or caretaking (as in her efforts to ritually clean the feet of both men in the temple bath). Visible sex is superfluous in this context. Here we are not meant to be looking at the defining acts of a prostitute; we are meant to be looking at the ideologies that create her as a cultural monster, the anti-woman.

The video concludes with Gaga wearing a heavily-embellished white dress, similar to a wedding gown, a primary symbol of purity and chastity. Of course, for Gaga to present herself in such a way is the ultimate blashemy – prostitutes can’t be wives, you know; prostitutes are women to be used and thrown away, not loved or respected, and once you have been a prostitute you can never be anything else. And so she is stoned by an angry mob. The video ends with her death, both Jesus and Judas tellingly absent, Gaga facing her detractors alone.

Gaga’s demise represents not only those who would punish her for failing to know her proper role, for daring to aspire beyond acceptable limits, but also the quick and complete destruction of any form of feminine power that is not othered and subjugated to the masculine. The dead Gaga is both the erased Aphrodite and the slandered Mary Magdalene, as well as every other woman who has had her reputation and her life destroyed for daring to raise her voice, to draw attention, or to have sex outside the boundaries men have set. Gaga adopts her “fame hooker” mantle even knowing the potential consequences.

The church made Mary Magdalene a prostitute because, according to popular cultural connotations going back as long as misogyny has existed, a prostitute is one of the worst things a woman can be. A prostitute is a woman who squanders the one thing she has of value, her sex, by selling it to whomever is willing to pay. Prostitution is culturally-coded as the opposite of selflessness, the ministration of pleasure by a woman whose motives are only to satisfy her lover when doing do enables her to satisfy herself. She comes first, in payment, or gratification, or both. Sex is not her privilege, nor a treasured opportunity to worship the masculine, but is rather an occupation by which she can support herself. A prostitute is a woman who is self-sufficient, a woman who needs no husband, no man to tell her how to live. She is a woman who resists convention for the sake of her own survival. “Judas” demands we look at our assumptions about women who dare to step outside the gendered boundaries, sexual and otherwise, that culture defines for us.

Author Bio:

Lesley Kinzel is a writer, lapsed academic, cultural critic, and fat lady extraordinaire. She writes about popular culture and body politics at http://twowholecakes.com, and is currently working on her first book for The Feminist Press. She lives just outside Boston, MA with her husband and three very spoiled cats.

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