The Warrior Queen: Marry The Night, Trauma, Regression, and Recovery

By K.M. Zwick

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

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

– Sigmund Freud

When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened. It’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie is much more honest, because I invented it.

– Lady Gaga, “Marry The Night” Video

Sigmund Freud posited that sex (creation/joining) and violence (destruction/separation) are attractive to the most primal and perhaps truest internal aspects of all of us. He called us “polymorphously perverse,” which means that we are fundamentally pleasure-seeking, through libidinal as well as aggressive drives. What we really want is often considered “perverted,” linking sex, fetishes, violence, comfort, nurturance, joy, and death together in so many different ways and, ahem, positions, that our unconscious is basically a clusterfuck of perversion, desire, and fantasy. Modern-day analysts might suggest there is no such thing as perversion, per se, in terms of what is desired within the mind, because perversion is so ubiquitous. Additionally, what is consensually enacted between two (or more) individuals might not be considered perverse as much as it would be considered honest – an honest engagement with what is often a combination of sex and death. Simultaneous creation and destruction. Our libidinal instincts intertwined with our aggressive ones can create powerful wishes, fantasies, fetishes, and proclivities that are not only intensely sexual but are also intensely mortal; that is, destructive. It is, perhaps, the constant repression of our deepest fantasies that leads to neurosis; it is, perhaps, the denial of the interplay between sex and death – pleasure and aggression – that results in anxious and escapist symptoms in so many. Telling ourselves that sexual and aggressive fantasies are “bad” or “wrong” is likely to lead to puritanical subversion of what is most basic, and therefore authentic, in us. Freud might have argued that we are not sick when we are in touch with our most primal instincts (in safe, consensual fashions) but rather that we are most sick when we deny their existence, relevance, and the pleasurable effect of such instincts.

* * * * *

As I watch the video for “Marry The Night,” I don’t care, particularly, if Lady Gaga knows a lot about psychoanalysis or not. I think that she might, if not because she has read about it then because she has lived it to some extent. But even that – Ms. Germanotta’s autobiography – I don’t care about, per se. I have read the accounts that this video is about the worst day of her life: the day Def Jam dropped her. This video, however, uses explicit imagery related to trauma (destruction) and re-invention (creation) that hits a pre-verbal, regressive libidinal and aggressive chord. And this is what I find so rewarding and authentic about many of her videos, but most especially the video for “Marry The Night.” I care, as a trauma therapist and as a trauma survivor, that the art she makes and the world she inhabits in her music and especially in this video open up a universe for the viewer in which violent trauma, transformation, sex, mortality, creation, destruction, re-creation, and re-destruction are exposed, claimed, and normalized. That gutted psyche is Lady Gaga’s normal world.  

To say she glorifies sexuality and mortality, or trauma and sex, would be a mistake. The desire to combine those two aspects of life is so normal as to be quaint, in terms of an analytic reading of basic human psychodynamics. To label what Lady Gaga is doing with trauma, sex, death, and invention “bizarre” misses, I believe, how essentially basic and deeply human her themes are. 

What I find perhaps most pleasing about Gaga’s self-transformation in the “Marry The Night” video, which I will explore in more detail below, is that she is bringing to the fore an innocent reveling, often childlike, in fundamental and common intra-psychic processes. Not only is she a gorgeously unhinged libido and aggression, but she is also imaginative, she makes of herself and her world the imaginary, arguably engaging in something akin to pop music play therapy. She aligns herself with her internal complexes and makes art with them. She is pleasure-seeking, even through pain, perhaps particularly through pain. She is polymorphously perverse, but rather than being ashamed of it, she is proud of it.

* * * * * 

In small children, psychoanalysis posits that, especially prior to the phallic stage of psychosexual development, wishes to join (sexual) and wishes to destroy (aggressive) are uncomplicated by the superego. The internal life of a small child is, according to Freud, a life of unrepressed libidinal and aggressive desires, many of which are acted out: sucking a mother’s nipple, playing in the mud and water (metaphorical feces and urine, another form of “playing with oneself”), enjoying unfettered nudity, reacting intensely when feeling threatened, attacking others by biting, hitting, shunning. It is a life before shame, before guilt, before punishment, and often before words. This internal life is not erased with the pressures of social and familial norms or with the activation of the superego (or, the conscience); it is, analysts generally posit, repressed.

Such intense libidinal and aggressive desires and actions resurface during the teenage years, when the latency (repression) stage is coming to an end. Teenagers are, in many ways, like small children, activated again by sexual and aggressive tendencies, destroying close bonds with their parents while they create pleasurable bonds with love interests, friends, and activities outside the family. The destruction of the pleasurable parent-child closeness is a necessary component of the creation of a pleasurable self outside the home. Aggression and pleasure are linked. Of course, healthy development will find late-age teens able to hold the two sources of pleasure at the same time – a self that bonds with parents in a new and different way, and a self that bonds with those outside the nuclear family. Re-creation occurs, re-definition, and what was destroyed was necessary to destroy in order to transform and grow. The sexual and aggressive drives, creation and destruction, seem often to be crucially linked and intertwined at turning points for development, self-discovery, self-expression, and transformation, as well as intertwined in developments that help us form bonds with others. 

In this, I am merely speaking of normative psychological development. When we add into the mix trauma in childhood, we add new layers of destruction and creation that are difficult to tease apart in a general sense for the purposes of this piece. However, broadly speaking, severe psychic and physical trauma – such as early abandonment by a parent, sexual, physical, or verbal abuse, generalized emotional neglect, divorce – brings with it new forms of joining and destruction. Trauma can be so powerful, and can create such intense (sometimes self-)destructive pure id tendencies in the child or even the grown person, that the desires related to the trauma will be sometimes permanently repressed and find expression in seemingly unrelated feelings and behaviors. Additionally, trauma often triggers regressive states in the victim, dragging a person back to an earlier and more childlike psychosexual stage of development – often oral and/or anal – and again, defensive behavioral patterns may emerge to deal with these regressed states, to both avoid and survive them. Furthermore, pleasure centers are often stimulated even during traumatic experiences, further fusing together destructive and creative drives. Symptoms of self-mutilation, displaced anger, substance abuse, eating disorders, and obsession and compulsion that are seemingly unrelated to anything in particular – all these may arise to help repress the libido and aggression triggered during the original trauma. There are also “socially acceptable” forms the repression might take – e.g. becoming a cop or a soldier as a way to acceptably exert authority and aggression, becoming a doctor who, essentially, invades bodies for a living, or becoming a trauma counselor who bears witness to the trauma of others.

Those deeply in touch with their internal creative forces – like artists – often make something from the destruction they have experienced. I would not argue these artists always repress less, but they may expose more of what is true not just for them but also for many others – expose unspoken truths, histories, pain, and joy that hit the centers of unassuming witnesses. An artist may not even be aware of what she is exposing and communicating; she offers palates to be projected onto, imagery and ideas that may appear disjointed but that nonetheless resonate on some deep, gut level with those creation and destruction forces that are so inherent in human experience, whether one has been deeply psychically traumatized or one has merely experienced the normative trauma and recovery of living in a mortal, unpredictable, pleasurable, and terrifying world.

* * * * *

While the videos for “Yoü and I,” “Telephone,” “Bad Romance,” and “Paparazzi” also conjure the gutted and exposed libidinal and aggressive psyche, in no music video of Gaga’s is her transformation through trauma, sexuality, destruction, and creation so clear, exposed, and moving as it is in her new “Marry The Night” video. I have read a couple of initial reviews that describe her as self-indulgent and navel-gazing in this video, and one that criticized her acting chops in the opening sequence.

To these critics, I say, “For shame.” Her opening voiceover is nothing less than brilliant, as she tackles the slippery psychological process of remembering trauma. She rightly claims that trauma is the ultimate killer; it does something that could be considered worse than death – it allows one to live with a shaken psyche, sometimes without full memory of the trauma and without ability to make any sense of it.

In the opening, she presents herself as a recent victim, apparently assaulted and perhaps raped. She is told she cannot be “intimate” (read: have sex) for two weeks. She notes that she has lost everything. But she notes this in the context of great hope: she says that she will be a star because she has nothing left to lose. She points out that she has created this depicted trauma and has used things that bring her pleasure to do so – the mint gauze caps, the nurse on the right with the great ass, the next season Calvin Klein. She has been, in a sense, destroyed. And while acknowledging this, tearfully, she holds on to a reality within her that tells her she can do something with this destruction; she can create. She can hold death and life, destruction and creation, pleasure and mortality, at the same time.

What she has lost here is her innocence; it has been forcibly taken from her and that is physically manifested as opposed to just psychically manifested. Gaga is fairly genius at making her internal world external. She shows her polymorphously perverse nature, and it strikes me as quite the opposite of self-indulgent: she gives her viewers total permission to enjoy her perversion, thereby owning – not even vicariously, because her cinema is so sensorily pleasurable – their own perversions. She invites the linking of libido and aggression; she invites the dynamic interplay of sex and death. She doesn’t just show you it; she is fairly certain you’ll love it, that you will join her in that linking. 

When we then see her in her flat, defending her artistry and essentially displaying a mental breakdown of anguish, anger, and despair – clearly externalizing regressive states of sexuality and aggression – I cannot help but notice that her eye make-up positions her as potentially lending a nod to Amy Winehouse. Whether this was an intentional reference to the deceased pop star who struggled with addiction or not, this is certainly a plausible reading of her internal existential crisis in the flat. Ms. Winehouse was found deceased in her flat; she was a vocalist of epic proportions who brought joy (pleasure) by writing and singing about pain (destruction). The song “Rehab” was at once tragic and impossible not to dance around to, singing along. That Gaga might identify with Ms. Winehouse or feel a need to pay subtle homage to her does not surprise me. They are two women who bare something of the gutted soul for mass enjoyment.

Gaga, in the midst of this crisis in her flat, has two choices: give up or change. She chooses change. Because she has felt through the trauma – has allowed herself to regress as she flails about nearly nude with a box of cereal (here she is in an oral psychosexual moment, the first of the infantile stages of development: grappling with what should nurture her, grappling with trust, using her mouth for pleasure and aggression) – she is empowered to then have these options. She dyes her hair – connoting metamorphosis – in her bathtub, naked, again mixing destruction and sexuality together, primal and pre-verbal (now she is playing at anal stage themes of controlling the body and bodily functions), and we hear a voiceover of Gaga quietly singing some lines to what later becomes an enormously popular hit single “Marry The Night.”

As she later leaves the building (brothel? hotel? hospital?) of women, some prim and proper ballerinas, some indistinguishable, she says, “You may say I lost everything. But I still had my bedazzler.” And there it is. I laughed out loud when she said this, because, hey, it’s hilarious. It’s also another claim on transformation: she possesses the tools – metaphorically a machine that tacks rhinestones onto clothing – to transform harsh and traumatizing realities into something if not conventionally beautiful then at least beautiful to her. Destruction and creation. Sex and death. This burst of laughter and understanding instantly reminded me of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wherein humor fashions itself as simultaneously revelatory of inner conflicts and reveling in them. Additionally, she is arguably progressing through the phallic stage of development as she exits a re-fashioned woman, claiming her gender by dressing it up, quite different from the tomboyish brunette we first encountered in the clinic.

Is she navel-gazing? Is she self-indulgent? What human being shouldn’t be, in the midst of internal and external crisis? If one does not feel through such events – which may, in the face of great trauma, include intense regression to infantile stages of development – accepting the destructive forces and the effects those have on one’s intra-psychic and possibly physical self, one represses. One denies. One acts as if nothing happened. And in this way, trauma, violation, and destruction win. When one does this, one loses the opportunity and authority to create in the middle of what is destructive, loses the opportunity to take these new pieces of reality and transform them, to dominate them, to integrate them into a newly made world, and to even find pleasure through them.

Gaga goes on from exiting the building to offer us one of the most gratifying music videos I’ve seen from her. As we see her in her Firebird Trans Am, she is now at the final psychosexual stage of development, the genital phase: she is not merely woman, but sexual, empowered with her ability as a mature woman to create. The video is evocative of not just the music video for “Thriller,” but of the entire movie The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which takes us behind the scenes – like Gaga in the dance studio – and onto the street with a crew of dancers who back up her vision for her life, macabre and transformative, creating sex and pleasure in the midst of grit, destruction, and trauma. Just as Michael Jackson somehow made the threat of zombie attacks and death a pleasurable and erotic experience for the viewer, Gaga, in essence, takes back the night, whatever “the night” means to her. She won’t give up on her life. Her story, rather than ending in a clinic with bruises all over her back, surrounded by crazed young women and doped up on morphine, began there. Creation from destruction.  

* * * * *

As with the trope that “white” is culturally invisible, so too is it generally true that the “white male” form is invisible, especially in the United States, and is treated in the popular mainstream eye as a blank canvas onto which we can project our fantasies and desires, wild, tangled, and disturbing, joyous and free. Historically, the female form has been more difficult to digest as a blank canvas, as it has been so very objectified and imbued with what that form must mean to the ruling class. For a female pop artist to become a blank canvas – as I believe Lady Gaga is becoming in each of her videos and especially in “Marry The Night” – that is available for all kinds of projections and deeply felt visceral responses is a revolutionary and radical gift to audiences of any gender. We see Lady Gaga in “Marry The Night” as trauma victim, androgynous, naked, costumed many times over, masculine, feminine, sexual, aggressive, innocent, outcast, leader. She is believable in all of these roles.

                                                                                      

That Lady Gaga occupies intense libidinal and aggressive drives in a female body – and that her persona more and more presents a duality of masculine and feminine – in a world that traditionally responds primarily to men as having the power and authority to do this is, again, revolutionary and radical. It is not that Lady Gaga has invented this revolution or the themes and complexes she presents in the “Marry The Night” video. Those who have followed transgressive female artists who transform the female body, like Cindy Sherman, would rightfully skewer me if I said Gaga invented this. But what gets me, and why I felt the need to write this piece, is that much of the entire world is responding positively to what Gaga is offering; that level of responsiveness appears unmatched in this time and place. 

It seems to me that the world that loves her so inexhaustibly is crying out, in part, for the “radical” notion that the female form (and any minority body) is not simply a subjugated object for white straight men – or anyone else, for that matter – to control, subject and violate. She has made her form a blank canvas in many ways, which she strips down, bares, mutilates, rejoices, births, re-creates. 

I refute any claims that Lady Gaga is merely another pop sex object in this video because she struts around half-naked and depicts a primal sexuality, especially in the sequence in the hotel room/flat. As she uses her own form as a carrier of multiple meanings, in this as in many of her videos, it is not a fair assessment to claim that any woman who shows too much flesh is bowing to the patriarchal male gaze. Lady Gaga’s persona is a subject of her own making; it is fiercely in touch with her libidinal and aggressive forces, sometimes mutilating and morphing her own obviously gorgeous female form (throwing a box of Cheerios on her naked body, stuffing her face; bowing to ballerina perfection, which many understand to be painful and sometimes destructive to the ballerina’s body) to present us with an external version of internal conflicts and wishes, fantasies, and desires – perhaps our own. To ask that she de-sexualize herself would be to halve what is so universally appealing about her, just as it would be antithetical for her to tone down the gritty, destructive, masculine forces within her – with which she grapples, and which she so brilliantly enacts. 

And while there is arguably a certain level of trauma just in being born female – or “different” – in a society in which minorities continue to be more often objects than subjects, Gaga claims that very trauma as a tool for her own self-actualization. And she offers that claiming of trauma, that re-invention of trauma, to her wildly devoted fans. I believe this all resonates viscerally, not necessarily intellectually, which is, ultimately, its genius and its profundity.

I’m convinced Freud would have utterly loved her and might have claimed she is offering some solution to neurosis and posttraumatic stress through popular art that no other pop star of her generation with her level of success is currently offering. She regresses in the face of trauma, and she imbibes the raw vicissitudes of mortality and sexuality. She aligns herself with fundamental complexes, so essential to the grappling of any trauma, to transform herself, to cathect, and catapult from infantile regression to a position of subject, power, authority, and invention.

Bravo, Gaga. Navel-gaze all you want. Self-indulge. And transform our pain again, as I know you will. I’m a 32 year-old little monster, with my paws up. 

Citations:

Freud, A. (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Executors of the Estate of

Anna Freud.

Freud, S. (1962) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud Copyrights

Ltd.

Freud, S. (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. W.W. Norton &

Company, Inc.: New York, United States.

Freud, S. Quotation.

http://www.apsa.org/About_Psychoanalysis/Freud_Quotes.aspx

Durham, M.G. & Kellner, D.M. (eds) (2006), Media and Cultural Studies. Blackwell

Publishing Limited: Massachusetts, United States.

Mulvey, L. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.

Rothenberg, P.S. (ed) (2004). Race, Class and Gender in the United States: An

Integrated Study. Worth Publishers: United States.

McIntosh, P. White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

Figley, C.R. (ed) (1985). Trauma and Its Wake. Brunner/Mazel: Pennsylvania, United

States.

Eth, S. & Pynoos, R.S. Developmental perspective on psychic trauma in

childhood.

Author Bio:

K.M. Zwick, MA, is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery, addictions and group dynamics, a gender theorist, columnist, and essayist in Chicago, Illinois. Find her opinions run amok on http://thehumbleopine.blogspot.com

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The Trajectory of the Monster: Some Musings on the Ascendance of a Myth and the Decay of the Female Celebrity

By Ella Bedard

The following piece is the ninth in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

To periodize Lady Gaga’s work up to this point, I would rather consider the evolution of her music videos than her music. I say this not to dismiss Gaga’s music, but to suggest that we look elsewhere for the artistic intrigue in her work. If, like the editors of this journal, one gives credence to the view that Gaga is not simply a musician but a performance artist, then it is the juxtaposition between her seemingly formulaic music and the bizarre spectacle of the performer that warrants our critical attention. I have suggested elsewhere that Gaga’s remarkably typical pop sound is part of a greater performative statement about identity, cultural conformity, and celebrity. In this short piece, I consider how these themes are taken up in Gaga’s latest music video. In my psychoanalytic reading, “Born This Way” is a comment on the fragmented selfhood of the celebrity. The video reveals how fame creates a disparity between the Ego of “Mother Monster” and the female body upon which that myth is written. However, in order to glean this meaning from “Born This Way,” we must pay attention to the carefully constructed aesthetic of her performance, and how it has changed since the beginning of her career. For this, we turn to the videos.

If we consider the spectrum of Gaga from early videos like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to later epics like “Telephone,” the trajectory goes something like the following. In 2008 and early 2009, when Gaga emerged with hits like “Just Dance” and “Eh, Eh,” she was fairly typical of the pop star type. There was something vaguely grotesque about her bow-hair, but nothing all that off-putting. At the very least, we could identify her by familiar cultural symbols: she had Italian heritage, she was young, she was confident, and liked to party. She was American – irreverently so. Also at that stage, Gaga was pretty unambiguous about her sexuality and gender. Her hips and heels identify her as female; the way she rubs them against her male interlocutors indicates her heterosexuality.

“Poker Face” delivered the first signs of gender ambiguity, which emerged more strongly in subsequent videos. Lyrics like “bluffin’ with my muffin’’ had Barbara Walter’s raising her eyebrows and asking questions about Gaga’s sexual history. Around this same time, a video circulated on the Internet that supposedly exposed Gaga as a man. The video shows her mounting a motorcycle during one of her performances. Apparently we see her penis slip out of her red booty shorts. Of course, the footage is hazy and confirms nothing. In later videos like “Telephone,” Gaga makes allusion to this hype, without setting the record straight.

Also at this time, we saw the emergence of cyborg feminist and post-humanist themes in Gaga’s videos. In “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” Gaga’s exudes a grotesque technological sexuality: hers is the smashed-up body where feminine flesh is inseparably twisted with cold hard robotic metal. In “Telephone,” Gaga appears in a skeletal cat suit with deathly white make up: she is woman, she is feline; she is alive, and she is dead. It is not only her status as woman, but also her status as human, that have been thrown into question.

                

To my mind, what is most interesting about Gaga is how she performs herself as a contingent site of citation. This is best encapsulated in the heavily collaged video for “Telephone,” where Gaga alludes to a plurality of possible identities without settling in any one. She has cultivated an elaborate aesthetic of pastiche, citing the style and sound of Madonna, Cher, and others. She is subversive and commercial, gendered and not, original and derivative. By continuously switching roles, she complicates these dualities and reveals how her identity, like any identity, is a contingency and a performance. She succeeds in her failing to play every part; she is unique only insofar as she acknowledges that her celebrity identity is a mimetic performance that draws on the gendered performances of her predecessors.

As a self-styled Fame Monster, Gaga’s acknowledges the extent to which her identity is constituted through the recognition of her followers. The ambiguities that surround Gaga reflect the myriad of contradicting sources that inform her identity. As her career progresses and Gaga becomes better known, we become increasingly less certain about what Gaga is. This is because Gaga is only the collage of photos and Internet rumors that constitute her celebrity. She is a reflection of the pluralized and fragmented field of information through which she appears for our consumption.

Though Gaga’s aesthetic has changed significantly over time, the theme of celebrity is ever-present throughout the disparate phases of her career. In my reading of Gaga’s work, fame is synonymous with Ego, and is used to illustrate the performative and socially constructed nature of the Self. In his psychoanalytic writing, Jacques Lacan famously describes the paranoid-narcissistic structure of the “I”. He argues that the Ego is specifically not the reality-mediating faculty of the individual, but a form of alienating misidentification. The person whom “I” recognize in the mirror – the self that is reflected for me in the other – has homogeneity and wholeness that “I” find at odds with my own disjointed experience of selfhood. One always feels the gap between herself and the seemingly totalized other that stands before her. As opposed to competing with the wholeness of her reflection, the subject alienates her sense of self to it. It is this alienation of self to our spectral other that allows us to look in the mirror and proclaim “that is me!” Yet that projected and imagined self will always be a lie – an ideal – that one strives for but continuously fails to embody. In an attempt to banish the feeling of lack at the core of our being, we seek affirmation, love, and recognition from the other.

As Gaga acknowledges in the “Manifesto of Little Monster,” she exists by way of the mutually constitutive relationship between herself and her fans.

So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

This manifesto reads very differently from the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” which Gaga recites at the beginning of the “Born This Way” video:

On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.

Whereas the “Manifesto of Little Monster” acknowledges Gaga fans as the source of Gaga herself, the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” inverts the relationship, positing Mother Monster as first mover. In this creation myth, Gaga is the cause of the “new race” of little monsters. While the first manifesto explicitly acknowledges Gaga as a projection of her fans, the second manifesto denies this mutually. This is because the second manifesto is a performance of the projection. She is enacting the lie that she alludes to in the first manifesto – the lie “for which we kill.” And in fact, as we see in “Born This Way,” the negative side of this myth is destroying the physical body of Gaga, the site upon which the “spiritual hologram” is projected.

The moment the ego is constituted, a false dichotomy is created between the idealized ego and the failing self. This bifurcated “I” is the lens through which one perceives herself and the world: it is the constitutive distortion that will forever inform her perception of reality. The mythology that initiates the symbolic order of “Born This Way” introduces us to two Gagas: the good and the bad. However, when visually represented, the dichotomy is perhaps more accurate described as a division between Immortal Gaga and finite gaga.

“Born This Way” dramatizes the paranoiac-narcissistic symptoms of the fractured ego. As her celebrity grows, Captial-G Gaga becomes a more powerful, more intimidating Ego-ideal, which gaga can never live up to. The idealized Gaga sits bathed in light, surrounded by religious imagery. She is the “Spiritual Hologram,” the Gaga we constitute through our adoration. The anemic gaga who appears naked and in skeletal make-up is the negative image of that Goddess. As her Celebrity grows and the mythologized Gaga becomes a more powerful and convincing mirage, the disparity likewise increases between the idealized Ego and her finite counterparts, whom we see in varying states of decay.

The gaga who dances naked reveals the aggressivity buried in the narcissistic structure of the ego. There is something menacing about the way she moves. Whereas the added boniness on the face and shoulders of the eternal Gaga contributes to her regal expression, this same makeup on the dancing gaga gives us a different impression. We see how the desire to live up to her own image has taken its toll on the physical body of the celebrity. This gaga is what threatens the beloved Ego with disintegration. Likewise, in skeletal makeup, gaga dances freely, sometimes touching herself. She rejoices in the death of the Ego – that is, in her own death, which is the death of an impossible myth. She begs us to believe that she was born this way, while the visual juxtaposition between the two Gagas serves to undercut the song’s lyrics and fill them with irony. She is both Gaga and gaga, both Mother-Monster and the excess that disrupts the phantasm of the Ego-ideal. Simultaneously one and many, she exists somewhere in between, in that indiscernible zone between herself and her fans: and this is the Fame.

Author Bio:

Ella Bedard is a student of contemporary history, culture, and criticism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year she will be moving to Toronto where she hopes to pursue her interests in performance, gender ambiguity, and Gaga.

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Manifesting Love: "Born This Way" and Surrealist Art

By Willow Sharkey

The following piece is the seventh in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” emerges into a world where questions of who may love whom are far from settled. Indeed, cultural anxieties regarding ambiguous gender identity, or any sort of otherness that falls outside clearly defined binaries, continue to so pervade the social body that the bullying of queer youth has become a sad emblem of recent history. “Born This Way,” then, is a deliberately queer anthem, ostensibly made to joyfully empower every “othered” being.

The word love repeatedly punctuates the lyrics of “Born This Way,” underscoring several different sites where love may operate. Gaga proclaims that it doesn’t matter if one loves an intimate partner or God, tells listeners to love themselves and their friends, says that she loves her life and this record, and that love requires faith. How love is incarnated is not of importance, rather the expression of love is paramount, integral to liberation; it also requires bravery, vigilance, and commitment.

 

Joan Miró, Love, (1925)

By highlighting an array of sites where love may be realized, “Born This Way” complicates the expression of love in mainstream pop music. It doesn’t celebrate typical boy-girl love and longing; rather, it aims to affirm self-love, and to so deal with the roots of social fissures and violence. The video pushes this complication further: the joyful anthem turns into a meditation on why affirmations of love are necessary. It posits that love exists and is created always in opposition to something else (evil). If Gaga is the mother monster who loves all the monsters she has birthed, she feels a mother’s love for her many creations – this new race whose very otherness is beauty. Yet she also feels protective of her fragile, newborn race. To be loving is also to be protective, and out of this instinct is born the impulse toward violence. The loving mother, advocating for and giving form to a species free of prejudice, harbors still the kernels of emotion that give life to violence. The opening sequence of narration positions goodness and evil as inextricably linked within the self, to be continually grappled with. While “Born This Way” redefines the outsider as beautiful, it does not absolve Gaga or her beautiful monsters of impulses that lead to violence. Instead, the video challenges all to continually make a difficult choice: the choice to love.

Salvador Dalí, The Accommodations of Desires, (1929)

Lady Gaga often directs her viewers’ understanding of her projects through cultural references and quotations; in turn, these cultural references complicate the meaning of her own work. For instance, Gaga evokes Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the video for “Telephone” to signify how the ephemeral pop commodity is both horrific and seductive, dumb and powerful, delicious and empty. This time, Gaga cites Salvador Dalí and other artists associated with Surrealism as influences on “Born This Way,” and so deliberately directs us to her thematic concerns. Appropriately, this points us to consider the complications to be found within notions of love and bodily desire, and how these complications may answer to a cultural moment ripe with fear and violence. The Surrealists sought to champion and embody the values of love and desire in their works, which they felt to be under attack. We may not share the intense threat of censorship and social inequality that functioned in the early twentieth century, but total equality remains out of reach, and so contemplations of love continue to be vital to art as humanist enterprise.

Max Ernst, Men Shall Know Nothing of This, (1923)

The Surrealists’ explorations of love and desire were intimately influenced by psychoanalysis. But Surrealists departed from Freud’s conception of desire, predicated as it was on a model of “illness” and “cure.” What Freud thought of as perversion in need of cure the Surrealists theorized as simply one potential element of human experience. Max Ernst’s painting Men Shall Know Nothing of This (seen above), often held as a masterpiece of the Surrealist movement, is said to have been inspired by Freud’s study of the delusions of Daniel Paul Schreber, whom Freud diagnosed as a paranoiac. Specifically, Freud identified Schreber’s fantasy of becoming a woman as a “castration complex.” In the painting, the central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber’s hermaphroditic desires. Ernst’s inscription on the back of the piece notes that in the rendering of the legs as symmetrical, “the two sexes balance one another.” 

Thus, Ernst made room for the desires of Schreber to be something other than madness. His “delusions,” could instead signify “balance.” Gaga’s mother monster imagery – on the one hand, a writhing evil body twisting in excruciating pain, and on the other hand, a perfected image of split-screen symmetry, which together comprise an intermingling of supposed oppositions – brings to mind Ernst’s project: a sensitive meditation upon finding the humanity in those that Freud’s psychoanalysis would deem the insane other, on finding the balance within imbalance, the love in pain, the human in what has been designated inhuman. All this is a project of love.

In an experimental literary piece written by Surrealists Marcelle Ferry and André Breton, the two writers pose and answer a series of questions that demonstrate and rejoice in absurdity:

M. What is solitude?

B. It is the queen sitting at the base of the throne...

M. What is debauchery?

B. It is the place in a meadow where the grass suddenly becomes thicker. It can be seen from a long way off.”

- From “The 1934 Dialogue”

Just as the surrealists used techniques of displacement and dream logic to unsettle the reader’s relationship to “the real” – a conception of the world increasingly troubled by the chaos of modernity – so Gaga’s video for “Born This Way” employs a fragmentary narrative to unhinge the viewer’s conceptions of how the video’s narrative is to unfold, thereby unleashing the viewer into an elaborate dream fantasia, working to expand conceptions of what constitutes a “normal” experience.

 

Exquisite Corpse, (1934)

In a work from the same year – the drawing Exquisite Corpse (above) – Valentine Hugo, Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Nusch Éluard playfully approached fears about the limitations and possibilities of the human body. Gaga’s precise, gestural dance with the tattooed model Zombie Boy seems to echo and dramatize the sentiment of this piece: fear and longing intermingle in human encounters, decay is inevitable, loving play is the ward against the downsides of the complex human experience. Both the drawing and Gaga’s mirroring of and intimations with Zombie Boy make the monster body, something our bodies will no doubt become as their decay is inevitable – less of a curiosity to be feared and more of a form endowed with charm, to be embraced. The corpse – indicator of the fearsome unknown, the abject, lifelessness, a dead object or “thing” – is made into an exquisite subject, holder of agency, movement, life, capable of loving and being loved.

Gaga’s first visual representation of “Born This Way” was her Grammy performance in February 2011, during which she emerged from an egg-like capsule on stage. Aesthetically, this image seems to have derived from Salvador Dalí’s often used motif of new lives hatching out of eggs, such as in his sculpture “Birth of the New Man,” or painting “Geopolitical Child Watches the Birth of the New Man.” The sculpture itself is marked with the phrase “the new man has to free himself from the past.”

Salvador Dali, Birth of the New Man, (1943)

The beginning of Gaga’s visual expression of “Born This Way” depicts her being birthed, freeing herself from the past. However, by frequently relying upon an excavation of the visuals of the past, Gaga also reinvents the past for new purposes. Moving from the Grammy performance to the video, Gaga shifts from being birthed to giving birth, from being freed to freeing – at once inextricably bound to past, and attempting to liberate herself and others from its strictures and mistakes. The process is a painful one: the choice to love in the face of hardship is difficult.

 

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, (1973)

The final image of the “Born This Way” video is Gaga’s face, in her zombie make-up, situated within a pink triangle, blowing a big pink bubblegum bubble, which seems about to pop. The monstrous face is reminiscent of the work of another artist Gaga has cited as an influence for the video, the painter Francis Bacon, and his dark self-portraits, which, though often read as horrific, he claimed to “not find disturbing.” By referencing Bacon’s presentation of a modified face as an monstrous and anxious, yet still human representation of a body, Gaga once again cites a dynamic process, this one concerned with how pathologized or stigmatized objects may become subjects.

Moving from the agonizing beginnings of life to the inevitabilities of corporeal decay, Gaga consistently grounds “Born This Way” in a tension of bodily pain. But the several gestures she makes to intermingle the pleasures and healing qualities of love with the certainties of pain and opposition manage to make “Born This Way” an expression of the dialectical: the past exists in the present, intimacy is expressed publicly, absurdity resides in the everyday. Binaries are not reified, they co-exist. By evoking the complex imagery of Surrealism, Gaga creates anything but a simplistic take on the powers of love and desire – love is transformative, imaginative, and continually born, a dream always to be realized, expressed, and affirming of life and the varieties of experience. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” manifests, or gives birth, to contemplating love again and again.

Author Bio:

Willow Sharkey is an Art History graduate student at California State University, Chico. She’s interested in performance/time based art, and all things pop culture. You can read more of her writings at www.willowsharkey.com.

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