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.     

Lady Gaga: In Search of a New Thriller

by Franklin Winslow

Lady Gaga, artist, trickster, fame hound, infamous, in all cases as large and involved as an epic. Her sexual ambiguity is often noted[1] as are the remnants of pop and fame culture she destabilizes and rearranges to create her aesthetic.[2]  One of the important aspects of her work is its mutability, its capacity to become even more over the top at any moment. Michael Jackson, too, built a career of outdoing himself. The Michael of “Bad” usurped the Michael of “Thriller” usurped the Michael of “Beat It.” But at the heart of both careers is not the capacity or willingness or ability to change. At the heart of both careers is narrative. Michael did not understand the nature of this narrative until much later in life, after his career in music had long faded. Lady Gaga, on the other hand, learned from Michael’s biggest success, his creation of a quintessential, pop narrative. Then she perfected it. Instead of a narrative of reinvention, Gaga gives her audience a narrative of transformation but not just any transformation, a particular “brand” of transformation, one I will from here refer to as “transformation-caught-in-media-res.” The Michael Jackson of the “Thriller” video comes closest to catching transformation-in-media-res. Lady Gaga has perfected the narrative technique Michael presents in this video.

Gaga’s career creates the appearance of constant evolution, one that appears to be a progression of many transformations, and this, as we know from her predecessors, is the foundation of a sustained career in pop. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Cindy Lauper, Justin Timberlake, Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera, among others, have struggled to “reinvent” their pop image(s) to extend the reign of their stardoms. Evolution is typically considered a one-way progression. The old is cast aside, and the new comes forward. The Justin who sang with N-Sync is a completely different Justin from the one who sings “Cry Me a River.”

Gaga’s narrative is quite different. She comes out piecemeal and passes as whole. As Meghan Vicks points out in her article “The Icon and the Monster: Lady Gaga as a Trickster of American Pop Culture,” Gaga’s costumes are a key example of how Gaga-as-icon is constructed and simultaneously deconstructed: cigarettes on sunglasses, stilettos instead of shoulder pads, chains in place of tops, veils used to drape her body as if dress, her body partially mummified in police warning tape. Gaga sells herself to us rearranged but apparently complete. Pieces on pieces pass as unified. But they are not. They are incomplete narratives. Gaga stalls narratives and forces them to co-exist where they normally would not have. She transplants them, collecting them together and giving them a new name, her own. Pieces stay pieces but become Gaga. This tension between incomplete and complete pushes her image to the verge of mythos without fully becoming myth, which is a key point of her narrative. She is always becoming Gaga.

Archetypes are usually stable, with known qualities. Gaga-as-archetype, on the other hand, becomes an ongoing act of trying to know, like the moment just before a first kiss, a moment of pre-knowledge that excites knowledge to the point of understanding. Gaga uses her narrative of stalled transformation to create an identity of non-identity, one that can so readily transform into any identity that it is recognized as the artist-as-person Gaga. To say that Gaga performs Gaga to audiences, that there is no line between performer and performance, that Gaga is “X”, is half-accurate at best. These stabilities are secondary to Gaga’s modus operandi. It’s because of her narrative of transformation, her change caught in its middle, that her audience is willing to accept her ongoing transformation, the dialogue she creates, between the identities of performer and performed, rehearser of phantom roles and victim of them, bigger than life and smaller than it at the same time. This is Gaga’s greatest trick. But she’s not tricking, nor is she simply transforming, she is performing a narrative, one of transformation passed as completed change, one of flux passed as non-flux.

Gaga isn’t operating by her own rules. She’s perfecting a system. In fact, Gaga is perfecting Michael Jackson’s narrative control. Michael Jackson, child, man, nurturer, spiritually malnourished, tormented, tormentor, changeling. If not the originator of the transformation narrative in pop, then certainly one of its largest contributors. But Jackson was no trickster, to borrow Vicks’ term. He morphed roles but was painfully sincere. When he took on a role, he wanted his audience to feel it with him, to experience the roles pathos. In the “Beat It” video, Michael is the street-level peacemaker, the grand negotiator of the criminal element but is also possibly a criminal. In the “Bad” video, Michael is capable of becoming the worst of the criminal element but remains apart from transformation.

But in the “Thriller” video, he is much more than a high school hunk who takes his date out to a scary movie. He is also more than the movie’s scariest character. He is more than the combination of the two. He is a boy, a werewolf, a zombie, a high school sweet heart, a demon, and a dancer all at once. No single narrative is complete. All of the narratives co-exist at one time, or perhaps in no time, outside of it, in a space inhabited by transformation-in-media-res.

Michael Jackson’s image, identity, and music—the framework of his narrative—changed so often that, long after his career’s end, he resorted to mockery of this narrative flux in attempts to recapture what he had in the “Thriller” video, attempts to use his transformation narrative to hound up media attention. One example is the stunt in which he apparently dangled his newborn Prince Michael II over a banister for adoring fans in Berlin.[3]  I say “apparently” because this was a stunt of appearance, not a stunt of dramatic catharsis or an actual meltdown.[4]  This was not a scandal. It was the appearance of a scandal.

Michael knew the rules: pop does not award its highest honors to narratives of completion. Completion narratives, and stability in general, may win a Grammy or two, but will not sustain the public’s interest. Pop wants transformation. Pop wants the young Michael in direct opposition to the old Michael in opposition to many Michaels. Pop wants the Michael of the “Thriller” video. The Michael of 2002 could no longer provide this more pop viable Michael. So he provided an appearance that captured a similar moment of transformation, a moment of regression, one in which he put on that he doesn’t know how to care for a child.

In return, Michael the performer got the benefits of looking crazed and fatally flawed and psychologically damaged and more. It appears to be drama, but it isn’t drama. Michael manipulates the drama. Here Michael used the narrative of ongoing transformation, transformation-in-media-res, to gain the attention he was after, a similar attention to what he caught in his “Thriller” video. It’s a similar aesthetic principle to the one Gaga more consistently exploits, much more base, but no less artful. After his music career had long faded, Michael understood that the true power of the transformation narrative is incomplete transformation. This is the power pop adores most because an ongoing transformation is as scandalous as transgressing the worst taboo. In other words, an ongoing transformation is a scandalous transgression. It is an untouchable amalgamation, a nexus, an aleph, a childhood without end.

Lady Gaga gets it. Gaga inverts Jackson’s narrative framing: her image, identity, and music, her aesthetic, is housed within an incomplete transformation narrative, thus her scandal. And she needs to scandalize to remain relevant to the pop vernacular. Another way in which Gaga separates herself from Michael Jackson is the fact that Gaga does not load her narrative identity with her own pathos. Michael did. We saw Michael Jackson as he saw himself. When we look at the werewolf in his “Thriller” video, we are looking at Michael’s acceptance of a universe in which he is a werewolf. He stepped into that role and became a werewolf for a moment. He wasn’t the werewolf all of the time.

On the other hand, Gaga’s transformation myth, the Gaga vernacular, takes the everyday stuff of our material existence, cigarettes and sunglasses, and rearranges it into a scandal, thus presenting a vision of the stuff as more viable, charged with the Gaga transformation, the Gaga scandal, and more desirable for it. Gaga doesn’t need to become scandalous. Scandal becomes Gaga, both in the sense of transformation and in the way it suits her. But not Michael. We often see his limitations, his role-to-role existence. We would never see our Lady in the role of werewolf. We will always believe that she is the werewolf and that she can pass as human if needed, but why would she need to look human? That’s the stuff of Michael Jackson.

So it’s not just that Lady Gaga’s persona is mutable, or that she is particularly skilled at turning ideas inside out and flipping iconographies on their heads. It’s not even that Gaga privileges the monstrous over the personal. Although, Gaga’s art achieves all of these affects with aplomb. Gaga’s particular gift, at this moment in art and at this decadent point in pop’s history, is to appear stable and unstable simultaneously, to appear thrilling but removed from the thrill. And to say that Gaga taps into an archetype and then deploys her aesthetic, is only half of the story. Foremost, she creates an ongoing conversation between archetypes, a narrative, from which she delivers her aesthetics; whereas, Michael dabbled in unconnected narratives and aesthetics and struggled to make them appear connected.

Gaga is the trickster to Michael Jackson’s self-styled hero or hero gone mad, but that isn’t what makes her pop genius. Her pop is genius because she understands it as an expanding narrative universe, a universe of many images and stories that continue from one into another; whereas, Michael’s pop sensibility, in comparison, is one of a bunch of individual pieces, singles and LP’s, handled much like individual short stories. As long as our Lady continues to mix and match her narrative universe on a broad scale, she’ll remain pop’s darling. And conceivably, any performer willing to continue rearranging those narratives could become our next Lady.

Notes:

[1] A few examples:

Als, Hilton. “Girls Will Be Boys; JoAnne Akalaitis brings ‘The Bacchae’ to Central Park.” The New Yorker. 7 September 2009: 82. The Critics. The Theatre. Print.

Hampson, Sarah. “Lady Gaga: Is she or isn't she?” The Globe and Mail (Canada). 27 February 2010: L1. Globe Style. Print.

Maher, Kevin. “In Her Prime.” Weekend Australian. 13 March 2010: 14. All-round Review Edition. Print.

Sage, Adam. “Twitter in trouble after setting Sarkozy rumour mill whirring; France.” The Times (London). 20 March 2010: 47. Edition 2. National Edition. Print.

And a particularly good one in which the writer tells of her child's take on Gaga's "Pokerface."

Sassy, Dawn Collinson. “Let’s not talk about sex, baby. It makes me blush.” Liverpool Daily Echo. 28 April 2009: 18. Edition 1. Print.

[2] Artforum’s Diary entry “Star Turn” from November 20, 2009, is a good example. Here Gaga inverts her over-the-top aesthetic to provide an “art crowd” something it may not have expected. Gaga destabilizes audience expectations simultaneously creating a self-critique:

“Enter the formally dressed Lady Gaga and Vezzoli in carnival masks contributed by Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin. Seating herself at the keyboard of a pink Steinway adorned with blue butterflies by Damien Hirst, Gaga accompanied herself for a new ballad, “Speechless,” while Vezzoli pantomimed the sewing of Gaga’s face on an embroidery disc. They should always be so understated. In fact, the whole performance, which ran all of eight minutes, had an elegance that belied the baroque surreality of the night. Star fucking is really not Vezzoli’s strong suit. It’s irony, something the Hollywood bunch, which watched in respectful silence, seemed to miss.

Most noticeable was Gaga’s squashed tower of a top hat, designed by Gehry, fabricated by Prada in leather and silk and strongly resembling nearby Disney Music Hall—with a difference. ‘She changed it!’ the architect exclaimed afterward, explaining that it was supposed to be taller but that Gaga had adjusted it to suit herself. Since when had he turned to millinery? ‘I stepped through the looking glass twenty years ago,’ Gehry said. ‘And I’ve been a mad hatter ever since.’”

[3] Vineyard, Jennifer. “Michael Jackson Calls Baby-Dangling Incident A ‘Terrible Mistake’.” www.mtv.com. 20 November 2002. News. On-line.

[4] See Margo Jefferson’s book On Michael Jackson p. 11-12.  

Author Bio:

Franklin Winslow’s writing has recently appeared in The L Magazine, Coldfront, and Gigantic and is forthcoming at The Rumpus. He teaches at CUNY Baruch and has led writing workshops elsewhere. He’s finishing a collection of stories, which is about how we struggle to love where we live and who we live with. He’s also at work on a novel.