HOUNDSTOOTH FAME IS TOO GREASY FOR GLITTER : GAGA AS THE GUTTERDRUG : FAME & THE ANAGIRLS LIMITED $$$ ENGAGEMENT! : A RETROSPECTIVE OF PRODUCTION-VALUE FASHION; OR, AN ANALOGY INVOLVING GLITTER, VOMIT, AND PAIN.

By Carina Finn

the details scream over-privileged teen aristocracy, the jamaican-flag knits & houndstooth nails. everyone needs some low-culture kitsch in their closet; if you’re under 25 & “legit” you have to have it. 

“POP MUSIC WILL NEVER BE LOWBROW”

pop music makes its own language & the language is made of refrains. the repetition of the hook which is a mask all monsters wear is a loop of constant passwords. if the passwords do not unlock value that is to say style or worth then the password is of little consequence and is repeated endlessly (see: rebecca black’s FRIDAY or The Black Eyed Peas’ I GOTTA FEELING).

In the original video version of FRIDAY, the illusion of style is chemically reproduced; the image is screenprinted in toxic ink, the inhabitants of the video are uncannily animated mannequins produced by the same kinds of machines that produce pop with a high production-value. because the economy of pop music is dictated by either cost or exclusivity, rebecca black’s video has a low production-value because its language is not exclusive and its materials are not costly.

In this hipster cover of FRIDAY, the password does not acquire its referent-value by means of repetition, but by its imitation of an exclusivity that acquires its value via a semantic disjunction. the components of the image projected in this video have randomly assigned values, and the viewer must work harder to establish objective correlative indicated by the combination of coke-bottle glasses, tie-dye, harmonica descants, college sweatshirts, tween-girl pop lyrics, etc.

Contrast these with THE FAME PART ONE, in which the password, or refrain, is not repeatedly endlessly – it is not even complete. A constant loop of pop creates a language that is minor and exclusive and therefore raises its value. The language can exist because it steals from itself, makes a hinge of its own parts.

EITHER A MINOR LANGUAGE CONNECTS TO MINOR ISSUES, THEREBY PRODUCING PARTICULAR RESULTS, OR IT REMAINS ISOLATED, VEGETATES, TURNS BACK ON ITSELF AND PRODUCES NOTHING

“I do not think that is an elitist attitude” [i]

THE POWER-VALUE OF GAGA is imitation, intimidation. the fashion is a repetition of the antithesis of such, such that the imitators become the gods themselves, the paradigm like a virus rather than a symptom. in this way, gaga’s power, which is desire (defined by the fact that her acolytes wear her style like masks), infects her public with military tactics. she demands that they comply they acquiesce it’s their desire to be loved by their object, so they make of their bodies, idols.

IDOLATRY IS AN ESCAPE FROM FORMAL REDUNDANCY

the repetition of a system : ESCAPES FROM POWER FORMATIONS. DESIRE IS NOT INFORMED, INFORMING; IT IS NOT INFORMATION OR CONTENT. in which case is the system by which the same is conveyed – form rather than information, the matrix which defines a quality of GAGA-NESS, into which a given agent might input the components allowed by their own economy and press it through the mesh. the result is a disposable fabric which can be mass-produced, becomes weaker with every wear, shifts the status of desirability of the wearer from a concentrated fabric with a high production-value to one which has been stretched to a level of transparency due to a scarcity of luxurious resources; or, DESIRE IS NOT SOMETHING THAT DEFORMS BUT THAT DISCONNECTS, CHANGES, MODIFIES, ORGANIZES OTHER FORMS, AND THEN ABANDONS THEM[ii] –

or, fashion is a collective constant present: In The Fashion System, Barthes says that Fashion Time is “festival time,” that “festivity is tyrannical, it conquers time” (Barthes, 250). Fashion Time is time and its afterlife, the moment of the outfit & its temporal death, an undeath that endlessly cycles through the collective consciousness as Fashion continues to infect itself with a constant rebirth. Fashion Time is of and outside of time but never in Time.[iii]

time in THE FAME is a fantasy of form. the action of being fashionable is urgent; there is an object of some value that must be acquired immediately. there is a sale – this implies rarity, as this particular value is only available for a limited amount of time. to turn value into an object is to commodify the insubstantial substance à STYLE.

the value of the individual song is cut so the value becomes the conglomerate, the collective. the soundtrack changes songs like outfits. every hook is on sale there is a small tear of entrance. the tear is a needle-hole, or a lesion, which allows the contamination of the body by the drug machine.

teenagers ripping apart sales GIVE ME MY DISCOSTICK just dance wearing sunglasses breaking glass with glittery scepters and taking taking taking and wearing black and finding the one thing they want which has value only because they want it; or,

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY is I WANT THAT machine.

“We must begin by enlarging the definition of drugs” (Felix Guattari, MACHINIC JUNKIES).

we must acknowledge FASHION-AS-DRUG. we must look to the origin of the term HEROIN-CHIC, in which the body that seeks to imitate purity of form for the sake of fashion must suffer by entering into the physical language of fashion, which requires a salve, a rupture of “reality,” an injection :

everything that contributes to provide a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are ‘drugs’[iv]

what is the value of the sick life, or the life of the sickness, the natural development of disease?

the fashion junkie, the heroin-chic, the organless body, the anoretic, the reverent. these things have value they are LIMITEDTIMEONLY! this is because they are going to die, soon. their extremity, their excessive withholding of “nutrition” in favor of “luxury”, is fatal. the fact that it is fatal is part of its appeal. a drug can kill you; that’s why it’s fun. we want to be saved, we want absolution, we want to die.

“this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence”[v]

the teenagers take to the streets they are starving. they take bites of things with value they spit it out they taste like poison. the ultimate fame is adoring degradation.

the rush of glitter-vomit is a drug. it feels good to be watched, adored, sacrificed. the point is to adore oneself to the point of destruction. the point is an absolute quality of vanity. to love the imitation so much so it’s ”true”. to lose oneself in the materials of oneself, to be constantly breaking, combusting, on purpose. to keep making ruptures, to keep reinventing, to keep up with the economy one must constantly be emptying. becoming-nothing is style; fashion is waste. the wasteless are the totally wasted, they break.

THE RESIDUAL CRYSTALS THAT CONSTITUTE MACHINIC DOPE CAN PENETRATE THE ENTIRE PLANET, REANIMATE AND RELAUNCH IT[vi]

in order to be reborn one must die. there has to be an ultimate excess; the body must first be emptied, then filled, then emptied and filled again, must be pressed & pressed many times through the mesh of reality to become unreal, to transcend the organic, to achieve fame – to not need. to exist in a constant revolution-state of teen which has value because it is always-rare; or, the becoming-body is always limited-edition.

inside of the temporality of fame time is malleable, shifts, condensed and stretches, is defined by a quantity of light; or, glitter. the light burns holes in the fabric, makes lesions, or sites of affliction, harbors for drugs. the need of the constant-present is continuous destruction, never-ending consumption of the materials of construction. there has to be a loop. there has to be a digesting, a regression. one gets a bit obsessed with the process of crafting the body such that value is a goal rather than an assignation, an alienated, all-encompassing sign with no signification other than fame.

in this case, fame forms an absolute-zero, attainable only when the subject has transcended substance, become a specter of reflection, smashed glitter, vain annihilation.

---

[i] Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions: I AM AN IDEA THIEF p. 21

[ii] Some of the above CAPITALISED text is from Guattari, Soft Subversions: The Adolescent Revolution, p. 156

[iii] The italicized text is from my talk, THE COLLECTIVE FASHION CONSCIOUSNESS, presented at the IU Collections and Collaborations Conference in Spring 2010 . The full text is linked here: http://ladyblogblah.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-collective-consciousness-look-at-my-outfit-we%E2%80%99re-at-war/

[iv] Guattari, Machinic Junkies, p. 158

[v] Derrida, “Dissemination,” p.1845

[vi] Guattari, Soft Subversions: Machinic Junkies p. 161

Author Bio:

Carina Finn is an MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her chapbook, I HEART MARLON BRANDO, was recently released by Wheelchair Party, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SUPERMACHINE, TYPO, boo!, Alice Blue, CutBank, Seven Corners, and elsewhere. She has won two Academy of American Poets prizes and been nominated for a Pushcart. Her plays have been performed at Notre Dame and The Bowery Poetry Club.

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What's Paglia Got to Do With It?

By Jack Halberstam

Oh no! It was just as a new semester began, as the football season kicked off and right when Jersey Shore moved to Miami…right when Justin Bieber was adjusting his diaper for the VMA’s and the Jackass crew had figured out new ways to showcase male moronism in 3D…indeed just as Gaga chopped up her filet mignon to wear the next night at the VMAs, just then, someone let Camille Paglia out of her box.

Once a decade, Paglia, an acid tongued Susan Sontag wannabe, rents space in some national newspaper to tell us that we are all wrong about everything. Usually we are all wrong about a cultural icon we all love…or else we are all wrong about an entire movement of theory and philosophy, or we are simply wrong about our historical moment, the meaning of sex, the politics of gender, Madonna, Italians, John Donne, lesbians, drag queens, the economy, universities, cultural revolt…and now, we find out, **newsflash** we were all wrong about Lady Gaga. Yup, we were wrong. We all thought that Lady Gaga was actually doing something interesting, cultivating new combos of avant-garde innovation and popular recycling. We thought she sounded good, looked even better and straddled the divide between Warhol and whimsy while flashing her notoriously ambiguous meat purse. Many of us found her musically interesting, culturally thrilling and inordinately fabulous. We liked her in leather, in chains, in a wheelchair, in bed, in a sandwich, in a pussy wagon, on the phone, in jail, under meat, we liked her but then we found out that, well, we were wrong.

Lady Gaga, I learned from Camille Paglia, is just a copycat who latches onto a generation of glazed eyed internet clones and exploits its incapacity to think without an Iphone app at hand or to know anything without a twitter feed. She is a rich girl playing at being marginal, “a diva of déjà vu,” less sexy than a drag queen, less talented than Elton John, less charming than Lily Allen (is that possible??), and a “rootless” pretender who manipulates her fans, the “little monsters,” into pathetic displays of fanatical admiration. Gaga, for Paglia, represents the end of culture, the end of civilization, the end of truth, values and meaning, the end of sex, and the triumph of a kind of Baudrillardian age of the simulacra (only she wouldn’t cite Baudrillard because he is French and therefore…wrong).

In a kind of counter-Haraway move (think Haraway of “Cyborg Manifesto” rather than Haraway of “Companion Species Manifesto”), Paglia argues that we have lost touch with what is real, true and good in our mania for media manipulation, video games and cell phones. If Haraway recognized an interpenetration of humanity and technology in the digital age that was exciting and wondrous (even as it was also exploitative and dangerous), Paglia, sees, predictably, a manufactured public realm populated by media puppets and their passive and stupid fans. If Lady Gaga’s supporters have recognized in her a newish formula of femininity, phones and desire, Camille Paglia sees only same-old same-old or, in her words “the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.”

Like a bad drag queen imitation of Allan Bloom, the prophet who preached the end of culture just two decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind, Paglia worries that “the younger generation” is missing out on all the really important cultural texts that made up her own education. The Iphone generation take pleasure in cheap imitations when they could be thrilled by “real” culture, i.e. canonical English literature; they are literate in texting but hopeless at real expression and they are not even original in their forms of rebellion. Paglia has always seen it all before and she never tires of sending her readers back to school circa 1950 to bone up on their John Donne, Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Like a manic T.S. Eliot guarding the “great tradition” and prowling around its archive with claws out, Paglia reminds one of the schoolmarm host of the British quiz show The Weakest Link. Ann Robinson became famous for dispatching her victims on the show with the immortal words: “you are the weakest link, good bye.” And it is this tradition of learning (rote memorization of the tried and true authors memorialized by new criticism) that Paglia returns to time and time again. Why the popular media returns to Paglia time and time again is another question! But probably the answer has something to do with a kind of media masochism, a desire to be spanked for not paying attention or for succumbing to banal mind candy. But at any rate, when Paglia does come out of her box, we get to watch a completely unselfconscious right-wing libertarian blurt out high-minded nonsense while thumbing her nose at all the other academic drones who believe in crazy shit like “the construction of gender,” the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction and the mediated nature of reality.

Paglia knows better. She knows that women are women, feminists are stupid, communication networks have replaced real intimacies and Madonna was ripped off. What she doesn’t seem to know is that all cultural production consists of wild combinations of the new and the old, the borrowed and the bold, the real and the fabricated. She also doesn’t seem to know that every generation must have its icons and the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations within which older people sneer at younger people’s tastes never does change anything. She also does not seem to know that Madonna was the queen of rip offs and that her cultural borrowings were almost never acknowledged and often fell within a long tradition of white absorptions of Black cultural innovations.

Many people have noted that Lady Gaga lives in the long shadow of Madonna but noting this is not the same as totally collapsing two performers from very different historical and cultural milieux. Weird then that Paglia condemns Lady Gaga for her “poker face” when she adored Madonna’s performance in 1990 in “Justify My Love” because it confirmed that “we are nothing but masks.” Strange that Paglia charges Gaga with “obsessively trafficking in twisted sexual scenarios” while casting Madonna’s Christian upbringing as inspiring because “without taboos, there can be no transgression.” Bizarre that Paglia is so taken with Bowie’s androgyny and Warhol’s relation to the marketplace but can find not a single shred of glamour or talent in Lady Gaga’s gender-blending and articulate performances.

Ultimately, what Paglia thinks about Gaga is about as interesting as what Sarah Palin thinks about feminism or what Glenn Beck thinks of Eminem. More important is the issue of what narratives about the popular, the avant-garde, innovation and cultural appropriation make it into the mainstream media. And somehow, Paglia always seems to find an open page ready to receive her rants, her crazed generalizations (“most of Gaga’s worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin”), her nutty projections about a generation, a culture, a movement. While Paglia is stuck in 1990, still spinning her narratives about atrophied affect, cultural decline and sexual inertia, we have actually entered new debates, developed new vocabularies and in creative interactions with new media, we have all of us become little monsters, chasing our own gaga urges and moving steadily further and further from the modernist splits between high and low, good and evil, sex and death.


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

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

Beyonce's "Video Phone" (featuring Lady Gaga) - Observations and Discussion

By Eddie McCaffray and Meghan Vicks

1.  Camera as Heads; Male Gaze

 
Vicks:  So, gaze theory anyone?  The men in "Video Phone" either (a) have video-cameras for heads or (b) heads covered fully with wraps (I'll discuss this latter point below).  I'm reminded of Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," (an essay, by the way, with a slew of faults, but nonetheless has some really important ideas), in which she talks about the male gaze, and how it structures, defines, and conditions the "pleasurable" image of the woman on the (movie) screen.  Here, Beyonce has reduced these men's heads to the symbol of the gaze itself - the video-camera - as if hyperbolically saying, So you want the male gaze?  You got it.  Both the song and the video are about Beyonce performing and existing for the video-phone/male-gaze, but the music video really heightens and underscores the perversity of such a project.  Beyonce embodies many different versions of the femme fatale and pin-up girl (e.g. Bettie Paige) that are produced by the male gaze, but she ALSO reduces the men to prisoners, victims, and slaves to their visions produced by their cameras. 

McCaffray: Besides Mulvey, I think Zizek is relevant here.  He writes (on the first page ofThe Plague of Fantasies): "This plague of fantasies of which Petrarch speaks in My Secret, images which blur one's clear reasoning, is brought to its extreme in today's audiovisual media."  Sounds exactly like "Video Phone" to me.  Even besides the camera-heads, who I think clearly represent what onlywords is talking about above (turning the gaze against the gazer and reducing him to it and only it), the basic shooting and editing of the music video recreate the effect of gaze-overload on the viewers (who are, of course, also exerting a hostile gaze).  The stuttering film, flashing lights, blurred-and-superimposed images over one another - all these devices make the person watching the video get the sense that their own gazing-apparatus, by which they limit and control both the world and the people they encounter in it, is being disintegrated, melted, and dismantled by some emancipatory (and avowedly-sexual) force.   

2.  Guns; Phallus Wielding/Worship

McCaffray: Guns and motorcycles are not exactly new metaphors for penises (er, phalluses), and it's that common connotational currency that Beyonce and GaGa are trading in.  They both wield and worship the phallus, and this double move gets a lot, semiotically, accomplished.  Beyonce and GaGa stroke, straddle, and oogle their guns - they draw in the eternally-male assumed viewer and turn the power of his controlling, dehumanizing gaze into their own, hypnotic power.  This isn't an uncommon way to "use" women in movies, TV shows, music videos, comic books, and so on, and often the idea of women exerting power over men by being sexy is, in my opinion, a cheap version of sexism and an attempt to hide the controlling male gaze's ultimate victory.  It plays into and promotes stereotypes about lust-peddling vixens (with no other form of power) and drooling, idiot, willpower-less men who don't and can't know better.

But in Beyonce's video, the concept of phallus-ownership and phallus-envy are mocked and destroyed.  Instead of a simple "man has phallus woman wants it" or even "woman captures phallus and is liberated," the garish and hilariously-fake plastic guns (even a bow), the comical sexy-soldier costumes, and the over-the-top sexualized dancing and video-editing (moaning, o-faces, sinuous choruses of "fiiiiiiilm me") serve to reveal the way phallus-oriented competition plays out in day-to-day culture.  Once revealed as such, this play becomes undeniably silly and childish.  By the time Beyonce is statuesquely-straddling a luxury motorcycle while firing an automatic rifle while moaning and groaning, the whole kit and caboodle has been thoroughly parodied.

Vicks: What you say reminds me of a line from Cixous' "The Laugh of Medusa":  "As a woman, I’ve been clouded over by the great shadow of the scepter [phallus] and been told:  idolize it, that which you cannot brandish.  But at the same time, man has been handed that grotesque and scarcely enviable destiny (just imagine) of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls" (85).  Haha!  Cixous said "clay balls"!  It's probably even funnier in French.

But in all seriousness, I think Beyonce IS making the phallus a quite comical thing to wield and parade about.  In fact, one of her first outfits displays the spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs from a deck of cards, implying that she's the joker or the jester.  THE TRICKSTER! - The figure that always parodies and makes fun of sacred culture.  And what's more sacred than a big dick (er, phallus)?

3.  Gaga as Beyonce; Mirror Play
Vicks: It has been reported that Gaga told Beyonce "I don't want to show up in some frickin' hair bow and be fashion Gaga in your video.  I want to do you."  I think that they nail this, this mirroring of Beyonce by Gaga.  Gaga's hair is always perfectly air-blown a la Beyonce, and her make-up plays up her femininity; when the two are filmed together they wear the same white outfits.  And then, there's that amazing dance centerpiece during which Gaga and Beyonce not only perform synchronized moves, but are also filmed, at times, as though they're looking at their mirror image, facing one another and mimicking one another's movements.  The overall effect, then, is that Gaga performs Beyonce, is a reverberation of Beyonce's image.  I'm tempted to launch into a discussion of Baudrillard's simulacrum (the image of the image of the image, with no original), and how both Beyonce and Gaga are exploring the ways in which images produce identities, but instead I'll just end with this thought:  one person dancing around/on a chair is really cool; two people doing the same dance around/on a chair is even better.

McCaffray:  I was also wondering if GaGa's vocals in the video/song weren't intended to imitate Beyonce a little bit.  She seems a little more opened-up, a little more amazon-y in her singing than she does in many of her own songs (where she might screech, sing-talk, or sing through her nose a little more).  Of course she also has those creepy "You wanna video me?"s that seem to be the opposite of what I'm talking about . . . so maybe not.  And what is the effect of the mirroring?  It seems to illustrate at once the dehumanizing properties of the male gaze (it doesn't matter which women, the specifics aren't important - any will do) and show how an attack on the gaze, however freeing, is also an attack to some extent on the discrete and stable self.  If we abandon our controlling, determining gazes, how will we keep one object from blurring into another?  If we no longer objectify women, are we subjectifying them?  And if we are, what happens to us as the subjects of all our actions, thoughts, feelings, and desires?    
 

4.  Blue head wraps; Man tied up 

Vicks: When I saw the images of the men with blue head wraps, and especially of the man who is tied up with a head wrap, I immediately thought of Abu Ghraib, and the pictures taken there of torture and prisoner abuse.  I should also mention that at one point, Beyonce is dressed in an army-green leotard and military cap.

In any case, the men with their heads wrapped signify a state of emasculation - a stripping away of their male gaze and their masculine power.  I think this emasculation and torture escalate as the video progresses, and perhaps culminate with Beyonce shooting arrows into one of these hooded men.  

McCaffray: It also continues the motif of linking gaze (at its most basic, vision) and dehumanization.  We can gaze at them but they can't see us (or anything).  We have every kind of power that they lack - the power not only to move fluently around in a world of obstacles and objects, but the power to constitute them as the kind of Other we want or need without them being able to use us in turn.   
 

5.  Arrows shot into human (male) target
McCaffray: Well, Beyonce has clearly mastered her camera-headed viewers as demonstrated by the one she shoots full of arrows.  Man is reduced to his gaze and then overcome by women using phallic (penetrative) power. When I saw this, I also thought of St. Sebastian.  Martyred for being a Christian and for converting others to Christianity before that was cool, Sebastian is usually depicted as being tied to a post and shot with many arrows.  Perhaps relevant to the video, Sebastian's patronage included soliders, and in representations he is often a nearly-naked, very sexy young man.  There are even reports that paintings of him had an undesired influence on young women.  If one wanted to string all this together into a cohesive message (as opposed to leaving it as a collection of nods to this and that cultural touchstone), one could say that Beyonce is destroying (sacrificing?) the dehumanzing power of the gaze by killing a representative both of those who control with their gaze, and those who control by drawing and fascinating the gaze of others. 

6. Sirens
McCaffray: This topic is closely linked to a discussion of male gaze, as I think is only natural.  Beyonce and Lady GaGa draw men in and fascinate them, either to their metaphorical (being reduced to a camera-head which can only gaze) or literal (being murdered with arrows!) doom.  And much of the siren-effect of this video/song is aural - which makes sense, of course. The whole song is filled with a frightening-but-difficult-to-ignore beeping as well as with moans that are not-at-all-disguised sex noises.  But I think the important thing to note here is not that either woman is using her body or her sexiness as a weapon against men.  In contrast to many other supposedly-feminist songs, men are not insulted, attacked, stolen from, or tricked.  The only victim of real violence is a camera-head, a man reduced out of humanity by his gazing.  Or just a totally nonhuman reified concept/allegory-thing with legs.  The lyrics are entirely positive in their address to a presumably-male listener, and in the video the main violence is done against the seriousness and pomp of phallocentric posturing.  This is a video that, as far as such things go, is devoted much more to gender emancipation than gender one-upmanship.  Like that Cixous quote above implies, the patriarchy's crimes aren't just against one gender, but against them all.  

Vicks:  I can't help but mention Odysseus here:  tied to the mast of the ship, desiring to listen to that song that draws him in, captivating and deadly at once.  The song of the sirens stirs Odysseus to abandon his journey, give up his homeward-bound; in other words, relinquish his identity.

McCaffray: This is exactly what I happen to think, and what I was trying to get at in Point #3: gaze is a dehumanizing and discriminating force, but by the same nature it is a force that is vitally necessary for the constitution of stable personal identities.  I think that, if systems of exploitation and discourses that enable the use of power on humans are things we want to do away with (or at least cut back on), we have to be prepared for less stable personal identity.
 

7.  Connection to "Telephone"   

Vicks: Both "Video Phone" and "Telephone" playfully grapple with the ways in which media culture (the spectacle, the image, instant communication, etc.) affect and condition our lives, have become almost an organic part of the 21st-century human.  In "Video Phone," the male gaze, which is perpetuated by the camera, creates and dictates the ideal image of woman; woman then embodies or performs the ideal image (thereby becoming that image, I would argue), and in doing so becomes master over the man who creates and worships the image.  It's a cycle of creation, subjection, creation, subjection, and the image is the driving force, the catalyst of the entire system of identity.  "Telephone," too, is also concerned with the role the media plays in our contemporary existence: how it's both empowering and dictating at the same time.  
 

Other things to analyze and discuss:

- The Modern-Western Opening (Tarantino, again?)
- Beyonce's costuming
- Relationship to Beyonce's other videos

2010: A Gagadyssey

by Meghan Blalock

It's been a few months since Lady Gaga's video for Bad Romance premiered and I first wrote a blog post comparing the video's aesthetics to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, I want to take the comparison a bit further and talk about the two main themes that consistently present themselves in Gaga's work since the Bad Romance video premiered, and which also show themselves in Kubrick's work: ultraviolence and technological evolution.

First of all, the opening shot of Bad Romance is strongly reminiscent of a famous shot from A Clockwork Orange.

True, Gaga's shot is black on a white background, while Kubrick's is obviously white on black, but the composition is still essentially the same, and they serve as foils of one another. In the bottom photo, Alex (the main character of Clockwork) and his gang are holding glasses of milk or have glasses of milk on the lady tables in front of them. Gaga and her entourage have similarly shaped gold glasses on the floor surrounding them. The two girls sprawled on the floor in front of Gaga are strikingly similar to the lady tables in the Clockwork milk bar. Worth noting: in the film, Kubrick starts this shot wide and slowly zooms in, as if we the viewers are walking toward Alex and his gang; the shot in Bad Romance moves the same way. Also important: the tingy music playing during this part of Bad Romance - and again at the end of the video - is eerily reminiscent of the theme from Clockwork, called Ultraviolence, which you can listen to here, and which Gaga famously used during her time in New York, post-Stefani and pre-fame, as the intro to her performances in dive bars on the Lower East Side.

After the camera zooms in slowly for a few seconds, it cuts to a close-up of Gaga and her razorblade glasses. In an interview with MTV, she said that she wanted these to represent female strength, as an homage to the women she knew in New York who carried razorblades in their mouths - but when I saw them, I immediately thought of this scene from Clockwork, clipped below, during which Alex undergoes a Pavlov's Dogs-reminiscent procedure to make him physically ill when he witnesses or feels the urge to commit acts of violence.

The significance of Gaga's nod to Clockwork and its pervasive theme of Ultraviolence has become more and more clear as she continues to produce work that focuses on the aestheticization of violence. Clockwork is arguably the best example of contemporary art - at least pre-Gaga - that thoroughly aestheticizes violence; the film depicts heinously random acts of violence performed by a beautiful person, wearing beautifully clean clothing, illuminated by beautiful light, in meticulously beautiful settings, and backed by the beautiful orchestrations of Beethoven. The influence of the film on the Bad Romance video is significant because the first video off The Fame Monster preceded a slew of work she produced that also aestheticized violence, the most prominent of which is her video for Telephone, which includes a scene of Gaga and Beyoncé doing a choreographed dance routine in a diner filled with the dead bodies of the people they just poisoned - not unlike how Alex and his gang dance around their victims before beating and/or raping them.

Even more abundant than the imagery of Clockwork in the Bad Romance video is the various imagery from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. First, it should be noted that the entire futuristic look of the Bad Romance video is incredibly similar to 2001: the white lights, the glowing floors and walls, the monster pods, the clothing. During the first part of the video, the camera zooms in to reveal Gaga's finger on some sort of black speaker/MP3 player. It reminded me of the monolith, the big black rectangle in 2001 that, depending on who you ask, might represent a number of different aspects of human existence. Here, in relation to both Kubrick's film and Gaga's video, I'm going to argue that it represents human technological evolution as it relates to the self.

The monolith theme - some sort of rectangular black object against a white background - keeps reappearing in Gaga's video, just like it keeps showing up in different places in 2001. First of all, the semblance below is undeniable. The first is a shot from Bad Romance, when the sun is coming up right before we see her little monsters emerging from their pods. The second is from 2001, a shot of the sun rising over the edge of the monolith, flipped on its side.

The monolith keeps appearing. First, Gaga herself as monolith.

We see Gaga crawling between two monoliths (her suitor's legs).

The computers that show the winning bid for Gaga are sideways monoliths.

Later, the suitor becomes a monolith.

Soon after, he becomes incinerated. However, he is replaced by a scantily-clad Gaga, all in black, on a charred black bed. Yep, huge monolith.

Oh, and speaking of that bed/bedroom - look at this famous shot from 2001.

True, the bedroom in Bad Romance is simpler - from what we see, there are no chairs or armoirs or Greco-Roman statues - but the similarities are still striking.

Now that it's clear that Gaga incorporates the imagery of the monolith from 2001 in her video for Bad Romance, it's crucial to understand why she does this. We first see the monolith in 2001 in the middle of a desert, during prehistoric times, when humans are still technically apes, covered in hair and not yet walking erect. We see a group of them huddling together, squawking and milling about while they, presumably, forage for food (grass) and water. We then see a sequence of events separated by black screens - the band of apemen fighting with another group, one of the apemen getting attacked by a leopard - before we see the apemen go to sleep, only to wake in the morning to the presence of the monolith, large, black and humming. They gather around and the group's leader hesitantly reaches out and touches the monolith; this is when the sun begins to rise over the edge of the object, producing the shot I mentioned earlier. Later that day, the group's leader is foraging for food when he picks up a bone and realizes he can use it as a weapon. He starts beating a skeleton with it, as an image of the monolith flashes before us again.

The next day, we see the apeman use his newly discovered tool to actually kill one of his fellow apemen. I would argue, in this case, that Kubrick intended the monolith to be the object that inspired the first step in human evolution. Had it not been for the contact with the alien monolith, the apemen may have never been inspired to think outside the box of their current forage-and-gather way of life. This is further supported by the various stages at which we see the monolith appear in the film. We next see the monolith in the year 2000, buried under the surface of the moon. It has been discovered by a group of spacemen, who treat it as evidence of alien life and make efforts to hide its existence from the general public. They go to the moon to see it, and we see Dr. Floyd, the leader of the spacemen, approach the monolith and reach out a gloved hand to touch it. They all gather around the monolith to take a photo as the sun rises and sunlight hits the object. Suddenly a deafening, high-pitched note emits from the monolith and they all crouch to protect their ears.

The third monolith is seen later in the film, during the main character Dave Bowman's voyage to Jupiter, orbiting the planet. The fourth and last appearance of the monolith in the film is when Dave, now a balding old man lying in bed in some sort of parallel universe, reaches out for it in the bedroom pictured above. As he reaches for it, he is transformed into a fetus in utero, which we then see floating in space. All three of the significant human interactions with the monolith immediately precede an important technologicaly evolutionary step: the discovery of tools, the discovery of alien life, and the discovery of the self, which is, Kubrick seems to be arguing, the ultimate point of all technological advancements. The films depicts a sort of direct lineage of evolution: apeman, apeman with tools, human, human with (bigger, better, badder) tools, aliens, and a return to the ultimately vulnerable state of the human ego.

All of this is significant because Gaga, as an artist and as a businessperson, continues to prove that she is ahead of the curve when it comes to technological advancement. She was named creative director of Polaroid earlier this year, and just recently tweeted about the work she is doing to advance their brand. When it comes to branding herself and utilizing the Internet to do so, she is at the forefront. She tweets regularly, and her Bad Romance video has been viewed more than 360 million times since it was released last fall, pushing her total number of Vevo video views past 1 billion - making her the artist with the most online music video views ever. This is quite impressive when you consider that she has only been making music as Lady Gaga for a few years, and she has only been super-popular for just more than one.

The Lady also doesn't shy away from product placement, regularly placing her Heartbeats by Lady Gaga headphones in her videos, in addition to ads for Virgin Mobile, who supports her concert tour The Monster Ball - both next to what one can assume are paid ads for PlentyofFish.com and her own Polaroid, among others. Everything she touches seems to turn to evolutionary gold, starting trends at the same time she taps into existing ones. She utilizes the technology of her (and our) generation better than perhaps any artist in the history of music, or perhaps American culture. At the beginning of May, she will release a USB version of The Fame Monster that contains 800 MB of content, including the album and all her music videos to date. And, of course, it's cleverly designed.

In addition to the correlation of Gaga's push for technological evolution with the evolutionary symbolism of the monolith in 2001, the overarching theme of evolution is prevalent in not only the Bad Romance video, but the Monster Ball Tour as well. In Bad Romance, the video begins with Gaga and her crew emerging from pods labeled "monster," then we see her slowly evolve from a creature with a hunched back and a protruding spine to a creature with a monster-inspired hair piece (barely visible, it's the dragon-like creature made of hair tied into her own hair), to a beautiful creature being auctioned off to the highest bidder, to an even more beautiful creature conflagrating her bidder. Similarly, the Monster Ball Tour begins with a dimmed Gaga, donning flashing LED lights behind a screen, walking around aimlessly, like she's looking for some sort of direction, and we see her slowly grow through different stages of her musical life. Gaga on the development of a concept for the tour: "We started talking about evolution and the evolution of humanity and how we begin as one thing, and we become another. I begin as a cell and I grow and change throughout the show." She evolves through different stages of battling her personal demons - love, sex, money, alcohol, fame - concluding by emerging from her now infamous orb to perform, of course, Bad Romance, the song that inspired the music video that most directly relates to Kubrick's emphasis on evolution.

More important than her ability to evolve the technology of pop culture before our eyes, I would argue, is Gaga's ability to do what Kubrick seems to be illustrating in 2001 - and this is also a prevalent theme in the Monster Ball Tour - to bring us all, ultimately, back to ourselves. Gaga has been quoted as saying things like, "When they ask my fans why they love Lady Gaga, I want them to say, 'I don't love Lady Gaga. I love myself.'" Just like Kubrick used the monolith in 2001 to trace the technological evolution of man away from and then back to himself, Gaga uses this same imagery in the Bad Romance video as a symbol for what she ultimately stands for as an artist: a celebration of the self. No matter what she reflects back at us, she consistently emits the message that it doesn't matter: we are perfect just the way we are.

The reason the Kubrick references in the Bad Romance video are significant is that they pinpoint two reasons why Gaga is important to current-day American culture: like no one else in mainstream media, she comments on the ultraviolence that we have all grown so accustomed to, and she pushes pop culture and music into the future technologically while serving to simultaneously illustrate various aspects of human evolution and bring us back in touch with ourselves. As Gaga wraps up working on the music video for Alejandro, one can only hope to see a Gomer Pyle or Dr. Strangelove type on the screen, talking to us about violence and technology, but really saying so much more.


Author Bio:
Meghan Blalock is a writer and editor based in East Harlem, New York. She is a research editor for Gotham magazine, and she writes for Gotham's website. She also maintains a blog that won Blogger's Blog of Note award in December and was linked to by The Washington Post in February. She also writes poetry, some of which she posts to her blog, and reads aloud at Cornelia Street Cafe and the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Her next reading is at the Bowery Poetry Club this Sunday, May 16, at 4 p.m. She also just celebrated the one-month birthday of her first tattoo, an inked homage to Lady Gaga's hair bow. Little monsters forever. She can be reached at mcblaloc@gmail.com.