Soldiering Emptiness : Inverting Crucifix

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first piece in our series on "Marry the Night."

The origin, argues Maurice Blanchot, does not truly exist, for there’s always something that precedes it as a generative source. He further argues that even if the origin did exist, it would be impossible for us to comprehend or approach it without sullying and thereby destroying the origin itself: it would be irrevocably transformed and changed just by our presence, by our coming into contact with it. What Blanchot is interested in, however, is our fascination with origins in the first place, with our desire for our bare, unaccommodated selves at all. “Man at point zero,” he writes. Blanchot attributes this desire for the zero-point – the chimerical origin – as oriented not so much to the past as to the future: that is, we desire to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse our worlds of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero.

It’s incredibly appropriate, therefore, when Lady Gaga tells us at the onset of the video for “Marry The Night” – her “origins mythos” video – that she loathes reality, and that the story of her origin that the video will reveal is just as much her artistic creation as it is a description of what “really” happened. “Marry The Night” isn’t about what really happened; it’s about what “really” happened.

See, when talking about “origins” or “reality,” we can no longer do so without the recourse to quotation marks (as Nabokov so famously claimed). Artistic creation (the quotes) marries reality; analogously, Gaga (the artist) marries the night. And reality is all that shit, trauma, emptiness, and horror that artistic creativity somehow makes beautiful and bearable. Sometimes I think it’s terrifying, what art has the power to do: make palatable and even beautiful real suffering – that kind of suffering that has no redemptive quality or spark of beauty when one’s enthralled in it.

When Gaga, cradled by suffering, dyes her hair in the bathtub, she’s trying to aestheticize that trauma, make it beautiful somehow. In doing so, she transforms the trauma into something redemptive, into something that’s no longer trauma. Again, when she puts on lipstick and blush in the car. When she bedazzles her denim. The hair dye, lipstick, blush, bedazzler become the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, and Gaga becomes the artistic vision. And the trauma? It becomes the canvas, that blank space or emptiness upon which a pure potentiality of creations may come into existence.

As Gaga speaks about losing everything, and about being a “soldier to her own emptiness,” she articulates an awareness that sometimes nothingness itself can become the ultimate creative force, that even, perhaps, nothingness is absolutely necessary for artistic creation at all. You’re a soldier to your own emptiness, but emptiness allows for a kind of infinite freedom, a borderless space that allows for new things to exponentially be.

Infinite bedazzled emptiness.

So she’s turned that trauma into a creative power, into an artistic vision. And in doing so, she’s inverted the trauma, freed it from its own ontology and thereby allowed it to become something beautiful. You’re watching a video that is trauma mirrored; you’re face-to-face with your own trauma inverted. After all, you’re the one watching the mirrored reflection of Gaga’s trauma; Gaga’s mirrored trauma positions you as its spiritual hologram.

No, seriously: didn’t you notice that parts of the film were inverted (take a look at the writing on the wall)?

When I flipped the shot, I found that the wall reads this:

As we watch “Marry The Night,” we’re watching an inverted cross: Gaga has taken the trauma of her crucifix and transformed it into beauty. And what’s more traumatic than the crucifix? What’s more beautiful than its inversion?

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

JudasGaGa: The Double Kiss

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for “Judas.” Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

Lady Gaga’s project has long dealt with doubles. During the Fame era, her performance was often reflective; much like Warhol, she positioned herself as a mirror upon which to imitate her interviewer (e.g. Barbara Walters, Larry King), her audience (e.g. The Queen, little monsters), cultural narratives about the female body (the Meat Dress) and about the pop star (VMA “Paparazzi” performance). She was accompanied, in a way, by doubles (and triples, and quadruples…) wherever she went, reflecting her fans and thereby embodying their “spiritual hologram,” becoming their double. Her first album, The Fame, was really a double album, soon attended by its dark underbelly, The Fame Monster. Whatever pop lightness and fierceness The Fame presented, it did so while casting shadows whose shape revealed a grotesque monster. Similarly, the video for “Born This Way” witnessed two miraculous births – one good, the other evil. Mother monster split into two, embodied both a prejudice-free heavenly being, and a violently hellish one. If Gaga was herself a mirror during The Fame/Monster, then she now looks into her own mirror during the era of Born This Way. Warhol said to himself, “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” His answer was “nothing”; Gaga’s answer appears to be another mirror. Think of Gaga’s birthing vagina in “Born This Way,” composed of two mirrors that reflect one another infinitely, thereby generating the infinite birth of Lady Gaga. Another mirroring: Gaga costumed and made up to reflect Rico’s skeleton tattoos and Mugler suit, but in a feminine form. Gaga mimicking Michael Jackson and then Madonna at the end of “Born This Way,” enacting their zombied doubles. Finally, I’m reminded of the recent photo shoot for Bazaar, not one but eleven Gagas, copied or cloned – the mitosis of now.

The video for “Judas” is also highly invested in the notion of the double, a double whose synthesis is Lady Gaga herself. Quite straightforwardly, both the video and the song present Jesus as Gaga’s light and Judas as her darkness – both are intimately a part of Gaga, part and parcel to her own being. As Gaga has said of the video, “If you have no shadows then you’re not standing in the light,” indicating that good and evil are symbiotically connected. The video for “Judas” thus synthesizes the double into a unified figure, demonstrates how this seemingly opposing pair comprises a whole, collapses oppositions into a single expression or being – Mary Magdalene/Lady Gaga is the synthesis of Judas/Dark and Jesus/Light.

Many elements of the video enact a doubling that is ultimately reconciled. The choreography, for example, is graphed along a kind of Hegelian thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. More than any of her previous choreography, the dancing for “Judas” is very even-sided: movement on the right (thesis) is followed by the reflected movement on the left (anti-thesis), finally punctuated by a third movement that synthesizes the previous two. Especially during the chorus, this seems to be the schematic design behind the choreography. Significant, too, is the heart-shaped gesture Gaga and her dancers make with their hands, which is often the synthesizing sign; love, (it has been rumored), has the power to reconcile opposites, and it does so as a gesture in Gaga’s dance.

Think, also, of the dancing when Gaga sings, “Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas Juda-a-a, Judas GaGa” (2:09-2:16) – this thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis is reenacted four times during this short segment, finally punctuating Gaga herself as the body of reconciliation. During the first three “Judas Juda-a-a”, she punches upward to her right then to her left for “Judas”, and then combines these opposing punches into a symmetrical two-fists for “Juda-a-a”. The final “Judas GaGa” ends with a defiant singular fist on the “GaGa”, which brings together the opposing movements, significantly upon the utterance of Gaga’s name. Gaga is thus both named and gestured as the site of reconciliation between oppositions, which enacts a third reconciliation: that of the word (the spiritual) with the world (the flesh, the material).

This synthesis of the word with the world – wor(l)d – ties in with the extensive religious imagery and narrative that the video employs. Unlike mundane objects, religious objects automatically carry with them both a material and a spiritual reality. In essence, the religious object is a kind of oxymoron – spiritual material, esoteric physicality, tangible God. The religious sacraments, too, are defined according to this same paradox: “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us.” The video for “Judas” employs the epistemology of the religious object in its narrative, its imagery, its costuming, and even in its formal filmic composition of Gaga. She is repeatedly composed according to the techniques of icon painting, and becomes, in effect, a kind of living icon. Icon painting is itself a spiritual process wherein the artist perceives himself as a vessel through which to channel God’s inspiration, and often fasts and prays for days to ready himself to paint. The noted characteristics of icon painting include two-dimensionality and purposefully unrealistic dimensions (to emphasize that what is visualized is not of our three-dimensional world, but rather of the spiritual otherworld), religious figures drawn with extremely large, almost-disproportional eyes (considered windows into the soul), and colors that are gilded to emphasize a heavenly glow. Often, icons are decorated with jewels and gold, left as offerings by worshipers.

In “Judas,” the headshots of Gaga are composed according to many of these characteristics of the icon.

Like iconic representations, Gaga’s eyes are emphasized, she seemingly glows (illuminated by a background light), her makeup is done in such a way as to flatten out her features and further elongate her nose (again, like noses in icons), and her nails – encrusted with jewels – recall the rich decoration with which worshipers adorn icons. The costume she wears during the scene of the “Judas Kiss” is also, perhaps not coincidentally, highly reminiscent of the blue robe and head covering Mary is often seen wearing in many icons (see the second and third icon, above; thanks to Roland Betancourt for drawing this to my attention).

Thus, Gaga paints herself as an icon in “Judas”; even her creative process is akin to the methodology of the icon painter – inspiration is understood to come from a spiritual source (e.g. God, a muse), and flows forth (in Gaga’s case, more of a vomiting forth). One then honors and worships that which is produced during those moments of spiritual inspiration. Gaga’s visual self-composition as a living icon positions herself as both a corporeal and a spiritual figure, the painting made flesh (or the biblical narrative/word made flesh), a site both literal and metaphorical at once, incorporating into one being traditional oppositions between the sacred and the profane – which are the oxymoronic qualities of all religious objects.

The scene of the Judas kiss brings to a beautiful crescendo both the idea of the double and the notion of corporeal spirituality. Indeed, we can argue that the kiss itself is doubled, split into two. The first kiss involves Gaga, the lipstick gun, and Judas, whereas the second kiss reenacts the biblical scene where Judas kisses Jesus. This doubled kiss frames the interjectory scene where the music pauses (3:44-4:19) and Gaga is seen, her arms outstretched to mimic a cross, with waves crashing into and over her, and also bathing Jesus’ feet (with Judas present as well). In the space between these two kisses, Gaga is both baptized by and sacrificed to the waves.

Baptism and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, reconciled in the figure of Gaga at this moment. Likewise, the scene in which Gaga washes Jesus’ feet also contains within it a doubling: it recalls both Mary Magdalene’s washing of Jesus’ feet with her hair, as well as Jesus’ washing of his apostles’ feet, (a rite that is still practiced on Holy Thursday when the priest washes the feet of his congregation). When Gaga washes Jesus’ feet, she both embodies the position of Mary Magdalene, and mirrors the position of Jesus washing the feet of his apostles. With Jesus before her, she reflects him, serves as a prophesy for what is to come. As such, during the space of the music’s pause, suspended between the two kisses, Gaga performs a synthesized doubling of baptism/sacrifice, as well as a synthesized doubling of Mary Magdalene/Jesus. The effect is to embody in a single figure what is traditionally at odds: whore with God, material with spiritual, salvation with destruction, feminine with masculine.

The first kiss – composed of the lipstick gun, Judas, and Gaga – makes literal the idea of a killer kiss in the object of a gun that shoots lipstick. It is the kiss of betrayal: Gaga does not want to give it, and collapses after having done so. The second kiss – between Judas and Jesus – is a kiss of forgiveness and acceptance: Jesus smiles slightly as Judas calmly kisses his cheek.

Taken together, these two kisses reconcile betrayal and forgiveness in the same gesture (as Gaga has claimed, “forgiveness and betrayal are hand in hand”), again uniting opposites.

With the Judas Kiss, Jesus is both betrayed and grants forgiveness; Gaga, too, is both forgiven and betrayed. If Judas is also to be considered a sacrificial figure (his betrayal prophesied and necessary for the crucifixion, and thus the resurrection, to come to pass), so Gaga, as the site of synthesis of light and dark, Jesus and Judas, depicts this sacrifice. In the final scene, dressed in a white wedding dress and accessorized with dyed-black hair and painted-black nails, she represents the marriage of light (Jesus) and darkness (Judas) into a unified sacrificial figure – assumedly stoned to death for the sake of forgiveness and resurrection. Mary Magdalene/Gaga is the marriage of Jesus and Judas, light and darkness, into a single sacrificial being.

It is also a stoning prophesied. Look at the final headshot of Gaga, which features another doubling: a crystallized tear on the right side of her face, and a living tear falling from her left eye. The crystallized tear prophesies the living tear that we witness come.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to "like" Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.


11 PM, May 6, 2011 - Edited to add:
Re-watching the video after posting this analysis, I noticed something I'd completely overlooked: the first dance during the chorus ("I'm just a holy fool ...") inside the Electric Chapel (between 1:38 and 2:16) is first done by a company of female dancers, and then, with the shot's cut, the dancers switch to a company of all male dancers.

Feminine Dance Company

Masculine Dance Company

The switch between male and female back-up dancers occurs with every cut during this scene – as if enacting a Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis through the composition of opposing masculine and feminine dance companies. Significantly, after the synthesis has occurred (discussed above, upon Gaga's singing of "Judas GaGa") the dance company seen thereafter during the second refrain of the chorus is a blend of all genders. Gaga's synthesis unites opposing genders into one dance company. 

Synthesized-Gendered Dance Company

Gaga's Anaphase, Gaga's Sonogram: the Mirror, the Cell, the Vagina, the Image

By Roland Betancourt

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

Dyed my bangs black. Its my new monsterlook. Let the mitosis of the future begin. Off to meet Judas.

11:01 PM Feb 26th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Lady Gaga’s “tweet” concerning her new bangs serves as a forerunner for the “Born This Way” film. Her statement follows a very simple formula: she has made a physical modification to her look, and that physical modification becomes the new look for her monsters. While it is her look, it structures a new “monsterlook” that will be surely mirrored by Little Monsters. The TwitPic itself is produced on her Blackberry in a mirror, as many of the (in)famous MySpace profile pictures of the early days of social networking. Gaga uses the cryptic phrase, “Let the mitosis of the future begin.” Upon viewing the “Born This Way” film, this statement retroactively becomes foreshadow and reference; but at that moment of ignorance before the video was released, this statement latches on to its utterance context for meaning. Therefore, one is led to understand a connection between her image and its reproduction. It is as if she is saying to her Little Monsters, this is my new look, go and replicate it yourselves.

After viewing “Born This Way,” one understands this statement anew, this time within the context of the video and its focus on birthing and reproduction. It is necessary to point out here the bane of every high school biology teacher who has had to teach students about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. While meiosis is the production of sexual reproduction cells, which contain half the chromosomes to produce an animal, mitosis is the exact duplication of a single cell. Mitosis is the type of reproduction that occurs for single-celled creatures – it is a form of non-sexual reproduction. Therefore, there seems to be an incongruity here. Did Gaga mistake perhaps this basic difference? No. Gaga has stated that “Born This Way” emerged as an Immaculate Conception. Was she referring to the birth of Christ? Staging herself as the Virgin Mary as I have argued here before, having been impregnated by God through the grace of the Holy Spirit? Of course not, for the Immaculate Conception refers not to the Incarnation of Christ, but to the conception of Mary herself as a vessel free of sin so as to be capable of bearing the Son of God.

What Gaga has done is create what the Ancient and Byzantine Greeks referred to as chōra, a container or dwelling place. This existed for the Byzantines as a conceptual trope for the Virgin Mary, primarily addressed in the Byzantine world as the Theotokos (the God-bearer). Chōra, rudimentarily, in Platonic philosophy, was the space in which anything could be said to exist. Therefore, it served as a useful ontological construct for the entity of the God-bearer, whose body was the “Container (Chōra) of the Uncontainable (i.e. the Son of God).” Gaga has often placed herself in this position of the Virgin Mary, either advocating her chastity to stress her creativity or wearing the McQueen Annunciation dress. What she has done now is given birth to a race that partakes in this being, a race of immaculate humans – free of prejudice – that may exist as open receptacles of ideas and images. Yet this mitosis, this reproduction of an open container, is both a violent experience and presents a dangerous receptacle.

The violence of mitosis is in fact the manner in which evil is described as being created in the “Manifesto of Mother Monster.” Just as in mitosis, where the microtubules latch onto the chromosomes and tear apart the cell from within during anaphase, Mother Monster is violently split into two.

But on that same day, as the Eternal Mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.

And, as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance.

The text, however, can be misleading. We rely on word and image during the video to develop an understanding of the nature of these births. As she slowly speaks the Manifesto, the scenery changes and we are led through what seems like an early modern image of Hell; the music crescendos, and we are presented with the image of evil a few seconds after she has told of its birth, but not yet described the split. Costume-wise this is a different Gaga: she is not the Mother Monster that we saw earlier. It is not until after we see this evil Gaga pull a machine gun from her vagina that we are told how evil was created: “And, as she herself split into two...” For a brief period, the nature of the offspring is uncertain: are there two opposing individuals, or one with a dual nature? This ambiguity is lost when reading the Manifesto as a text independent of the video, but it is nevertheless crucial; Gaga employs this conflicted process of self-generative unfolding to suggest a fundamental confusion of natures and persons. She twists in agony because there are two ultimate forces, which we are left to believe are good and evil. Thus implying that good and evil pre-exist the birth. 

It therefore follows that Gaga’s birth of evil is not the birth of the force of evil, just as Mother Monster is never described as Good, but rather it is the incarnation of evil in flesh. Good and evil become potentialities of the flesh, forms of being that dwell within the container of Gaga’s image, and upon that incarnation are echoed in matter: the costume change between good and evil Mother Monsters. The “she herself” makes clear that Mother Monster is good and evil, that she is one and the same. Like the cell that has undergone mitosis, she is the shared interval of difference between good and evil, the distance between them, that makes possible both their sameness and difference. Same DNA, but she was born this way. Like a mirror, they are the same image but one is the “right” (figuratively and literally), and the other is left (literally) or an inversion of the “right” (figuratively) image. Their difference presupposes a more primordial similarity.

Now, I would argue that since we do not know what any of the births really were (other than seeing the embryonic heads being pulled out of her womb), we cannot be certain of the otherness of the offspring – precisely since it is a mitosis. We simply know how they were born, we know they were born this way. We may pretend that those beings pulled from her womb are the new race within humanity, but this is not what the Manifesto says precisely. The Manifesto says:

...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...

It is the act of perception of the atemporality of birth that forms the new race; it is not any birth in itself that mothered the new race. Birth and creation exist exclusively in the act of perception. Thus, the mirror-epistemology that structures the video demonstrates the importance of perception in these births, because there is no birth outside the praxis of perception.

When giving birth to a race free of prejudice, the Mother Monster is always depicted as a mirror image. She is mirrored in childbearing, having at times one presence but two countenances:

Her vagina, her birth canal, is the fissure of this mirroring: it is the non-interval, the non-slash through which the image is constructed. This image already has two countenances, two persons, but one nature, one body. The images of butterflies – creatures idealized for their bilateral symmetry – are prevalent. There is not a Gaga separate from a mirror: both are one and the same. Her vagina is the very origin of the images, it bears witness to the folding and its replication. Like the mirror-constructed image of the TwitPic and its viral distribution on Twitter, this image of Gaga giving birth in “Born This Way” is constructed in and by the mirror. In contemporary society, there is no better reification of Lacanian psychoanalysis than the MySpace mirror image, whereby identity is literally realized by the mirror – an almost too-crude literalization of Lacan’s Mirror Stage.

However, if it is true that birth did not occur until the moment of perception, why did the embryonic heads already bear the marks of the new epistemic humanity? Preliminarily, let me answer that by pointing out that the birth had not happened, only the wombs had numbered. We do not see the new humanity until after the Manifesto, before they are merely embryonic heads: non-animate potentialities, who merely bear a resemblance to Mother Monster. Perhaps more convincingly, however, is that as the “Eternal” Mother, Gaga never ceases to be a mother, but she also never begins to be a Mother: she is properly eternally a mother without beginning or end.

It is precisely this notion of perpetual birth that is conceived in the video. She states that birth “is not temporal, it is eternal.” Birth does not occur at a definite time, but rather is eternally occurring; not enduring or occurring in time, but wholly outside of time. Thus, time is collapsed and narrative merely structures a hermeneutics, thereby enabling common mortals to comprehend the cosmological ontology she has created and properly so; cosmology and cosmogony lose all distinction and become one and the same. In other words, the creation of the universe is the understanding of the universe.

Therefore, good and evil have always and will always coexist. Evil is not some other that has emerged to corrupt humanity; rather it is inherent within it. The new race that is without prejudice is birthed through “perception,” through the perception of this atemporality. It is the perception of this splitting/birth, this dichotomy between good and evil, that allows for a race without prejudice to exist within humanity, for humanity is the synthesis of the two. Humanity is the commingling of good and evil. But what precisely is this evil?

Unlike the image of Gaga giving birth to a race without prejudice, the image of Evil is not mirrored: even when giving birth to the machine gun, Gaga has one countenance and one person – despite the clear bilateral symmetry of the image. Only the image of Zombie Boy is mirrored, but he is not Mother Monster (although his mirrored and singular images deserve more attention, beyond the scope of this paper). Moreover, the image of evil is a sonogram:

The image of evil is not a direct image, it is an image that is seen darkly through the flesh, but is not the flesh, it is not externally manifested. It is not a direct contact, but rather an image formed through the reverberation of sound. Quite simply, a sonogram is not an optical image, but rather an info-graphic – it charts the echoes of physical bodies in order to produce an image from that data. This image’s format has a clear association with birth and expectancy. It therefore suggests that the birth of evil is an indwelling of an image that lurks within, as a potentiality in each human who is to be a container for infinite birth. Evil is the singular, oblique image of the self, the image that denies its own fluidity. It is not-viralized, it is not mirrored, it is instead kept within and not exposed. Evil is being insincere in the external representation of one’s own image of the self. It is an image that is corrupt:

Her image is not properly produced, perhaps due to interference from that concealment, seen darkly through the flesh. Like the murky sonogram, the image here represents the incongruous sound waves, it demonstrates itself as an icon of sound. Of supreme importance is that it is not virtuously pixilated as the Blackberry-taken, TwitPic-distributed image of social networking. Instead, it bears the formal traces of an alien corruption, one that we are not accustomed to seeing.

Therefore, the thesis of “Born This Way” becomes quite clear here. The perpetual birth of the self exists as the perpetual duplication and distribution of one’s sincerest image. “Born This Way” inaugurates an important shift in Gaga’s work, particularly towards the focus on the ontology and phenomenology of the contemporary image in circulation, in its physical incarnation as Vicks and Durbin have pointed out. It also represents the inexcusability of closeting – one’s true image should not have to be excavated through a sonogram: found in the stalls of airport bathrooms, or under the masquerade of a bully (i.e. the foot-tapping Larry Craig, or homophobic Dave Karofsky on Glee).

The question that remains to be asked and which I have brought up previously in my response to the “Born This Way” Grammy performance regards the important shift that this entire visual and rhetorical logic evidences in contemporary identity politics from that of the 1980s and 1990s. The militant insistence on “just being yourself” is coupled with the virality of the contemporary image and its cloning logic. Gaga is not at all advocating an inherent, insular construct of the self, but rather allowing one to continuously partake in whatever virality he or she chooses. The Monsters will reproduce her bangs and form themselves in her image. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” was produced and recited by Mother Monster, but is a Manifesto of/for her fans. She is both her image and her representation, as the “Born This Way” film clearly articulates.

Her Little Monsters have the same DNA, but they were born this way. I-dentity is relegated to the shifter, as it always has been. It is the “I” that is the most powerful construct of identity, so personal that only you yourself can utter it if you wish for it to signify you. Even I am incapable of expressing to you this sentiment unless you put yourself in the place of my I. Here the deictic, relative pronoun, this constitutes the identity that exceeds the virality of your DNA. It is the preference of nurture over nature. Since birth is an anachronic renaissance, the “I” that once provided us with the insincere myth in language of a stable, fixed, and continuous identity for our self has been displaced to the relative pronoun, that whose deictic function craves an antecedent for any possible signification – and if there is no antecedent available, it must be taken adverbially to mean “in this manner.” The I is a shifter as much as the this, but we suspend disbelief to delude ourselves that we know what we means. By forcing identity onto a more dependant shifter, Gaga has forcefully pushed us beyond any lazy shorthand for defining our I-dentity and placed all weight onto our articulation of the perpetual this that constructs our performance of everyday life.

Author bio:

Roland Betancourt  is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in art history and anthropology. 

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

From The Fame to Born This Way: Lady Gaga and the Monstrous Evolution of Identity

By Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for "Born This Way." Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

When Lady Gaga hit the pop culture-scape with “Just Dance” in 2008, her performance was accompanied by the slogan “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow,” which was appropriately projected in her video-screen glasses, the first of many props that would celebrate the power of the image in culture. Since then, Lady Gaga has remained steadfast in her declaration that her performance – her lies – are her truths to be taken seriously, even while blatantly marketing, branding, and “selling” herself out. The power of performance was explored in depth throughout the era of her debut album The Fame, during which Gaga literalized and embodied the spectacle, perpetually drew attention to the power of the image in our everyday and humdrum lives, and exhibited how fictions, lies, performances, costumes, and poses make up our existence, personalities, and identities. In short, during The Fame era, Lady Gaga became synonymous with performative and creative identity – an identity that rejects essentialism, determinism, and foundationalism.

These notions are echoed in “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” a video shown during an interlude of the Monster Ball; in this video, Lady Gaga discusses “the lie” as the “real truth.” “It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill,” she says. “We are nothing without our image, without our projection, without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather to become, in the future.” During these two years of The Fame and its dark twin The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga repeatedly illustrated – in her daily outrageous outfits, in her music videos, in her stage performances – how life is art. There was no difference between the street and the stage: Gaga never took off her costumes, in fact, they were not costumes in the classical sense just as “Lady Gaga,” she repeatedly told us, is not a persona or a stage name – there is no fixed identity behind the mask. If art is synonymous with life, then life itself is but a performance – and we are all a part of the (freak) show. This was the idea of The Fame/Monster.

However, with her sophomore album Born This Way, Lady Gaga problematizes the notion of performative identity by moving toward the flesh, the meat(dress), the immanent muck and essential ether of being. Her most recent fashion (especially the prosthetic shoulder and cheek bones), her 2011 Grammy performance, and the video for “Born This Way” further complicate her earlier explorations with performative identity: in the Born This Way era, Lady Gaga explores a new type of identity – both natural (essential) and constructed (performative) simultaneously.

In a recent Billboard interview, Lady Gaga discusses these notions of birth in relation to a constructed identity: “[Birth] is a process of living and it’s also not ultimately a goal. It’s something ever-changing. My bones have changed in my face and in my shoulders because I am now able to reveal to the universe that when I was wearing shoulder pads or when I was wearing jackets that looked like I was wearing shoulder pads, it was really just my bones underneath. My fashion is part of who I am, and though I was not born with these clothes on, I was born this way.” Lady Gaga views fashion and the human body as cut from the same cloth: as we witnessed in “Anatomy of Change,” “fashion is essential – become part of the essence of the human body.” And fashion, like life, is something that takes intentionality and, most importantly, choice. Gaga’s goal is to empower her fans to choose to consciously become, or to choose to become conscious of the seemingly limitless potentials of who they can be. Fashion is one important way to harness this evolving identity. As Gaga also said in that same Billboard interview: “[Fashion] is part of who I am. My creativity is in my blood and in my bones as I said, and it takes time to become myself every morning.” In a very real sense, Gaga has become her clothes, just as her clothes become her. It is in this play that one’s fluctuating identity is birthed and re-born, over and over. But it takes will and consciousness: one cannot be blind and born, at least not into Gaga’s new race.

Lady Gaga’s new looks have influences that are both alien/unnatural (her new bone structure, her sharply whittled fingernails, the latex) and organic (the amniotic hair-coloring at the Grammys). Though Gaga is dealing heavily with the theme of evolution with this new album, there is no survival of the fittest here, but rather the survival of the freak. The freaks, Gaga says, will become “a new race of beings within the race of humanity…one with no prejudice.” The song “Born This Way” proclaims: “I was born to survive.” Gaga (and it may be relevant to note that gaga is often one of the first things that a baby says upon speaking) sees birth – something usually viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime experience – as something that is an “ever-changing process.”

Lady Gaga is the lie that was “born this way.”

She puts performative identity in the space of essential identity; her creation of her identity becomes how she was born.

All these notions come to a beautiful crescendo in the recently released video for “Born This Way.” The video opens with a new manifesto – “Manifesto of Mother Monster” – which Lady Gaga reads while the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo plays in the backtrack:

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. But on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place, the birth of evil. And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

In this manifesto, Lady Gaga re-envisions and problematizes the notion of birth – as an infinite process of becoming, not as a singular moment of having become. As with the “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” which redefines the lie as truth and the image as reality, “Manifesto of Mother Monster” redefines birth as eternal, infinite, monstrous, and free – that is, one can choose to be born into whatever being one wishes. One is put in control of his or her own birth. 

The video features split-screen images of Lady Gaga giving birth to multiple versions of herself: both good and evil, alive and dead, nearly naked and fully dressed, Michael Jackson and Madonna. This hybridity is monstrous – it defies borders. In typical Gaga fashion, the video pays homage to much from the aesthetic arsenals of high and pop cultures: the expressionist paintings of Francis Bacon, the work of Salvador Dali and other surrealists, James Cameron’s Aliens, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the choreography of Alvin Ailey, and Madonna’s video for “Express Yourself,” to name a few. Given the theme of the video – Born This Way – Gaga’s use of these visual cultural quotations implies that she is unequivocally the offspring of these cultural giants, born in their images, created from their influences. This reflects what she said in a recent interview for Vogue:

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to – from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono – but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

Gaga as an artist perpetually messes with our notion of decades, eras, even time itself. For all her talk of “the mitosis of the future,” she is heavily informed by the past. She was born this way – organically fashioned from the cloth of the performer. These are the new identity politics of Born This Way: not just performative identity, but never-ending performative, infinite, and, above all, free births.

The video’s most interesting symbol of this performative birth is Gaga’s vagina, which houses the space where mirrors meet. Considering Gaga’s play with reflective performance and mimesis throughout The Fame era, the placement of the mirror at the vagina quite physically brings performative identity into the space of biological and essential identity. Mother Monster gives birth to little monsters; or, following the two manifestos, Mother Monster infinitely births “the spiritual holograms of who we perceive ourselves to be.”

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to "like" Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.