From Polavision to Gaga Glasses

By Stefan Helmreich

Much has been written about Lady Gaga’s astonishing eyewear, from her razor-blade glasses in the video for “Bad Romance” to her smoking-cigarette sunglasses in the “Telephone” mini-movie. Gaga’s glasses signify a traditional celebrity opacity, but also torque and augment – and sometimes even impair – her vision. Hers are more than mirror-shades, more than sunglasses that enact or enable reflection, reception, protection, and/or deception. Gaga’s glasses are simultaneously tools of projection – and especially so when they display video images, as with the TV specs in “Pokerface.” Gaga’s glasses concretize vision as double, as simultaneously seeing and being seen (lots of stuff is going on, here, of course: insofar as Gaga pitches herself as a [hetero]sex object/subject, for example, her refractory eyewear might be imagined as ricocheting a straight male gaze back onto/into itself for a kind of auto-destruct [akin to what McCaffray and Vicks [2010] suggest in their analysis of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s “Video Phone”]). 

In light of all this doubling and troubling, how fitting, then, that Lady Gaga has become the Creative Director of the re-booted Polaroid Corporation (http://store.polaroid.com/Gaga/), a company founded on the double vision of polarization, which permits light waves to be split into components vibrating vertically and horizontally (a split that can be used to reduce light and glare by superimposing polarized discs at angles to one another). More intriguing, Gaga has now imagined a Polaroid product that combines the paradoxes of her own doubled and double vision: GL20 Camera Glasses.

Polaroid’s GL20 Glasses permit wearers to take pictures or video of their framed viewpoints and to upload those images to other devices (via Bluetooth and, perhaps, later, other wirelessnesses). These digital images can also be displayed on the glasses’ 1.5-inch LCD screens, flipping perception outwards, replaying interior experience as exterior display.

Lady Gaga in a GL20 Camera Glasses prototype, displaying Polaroid logo

The product not only puts the dialectic of seeing and being seen into a Möbius trip, but also plays with Polaroid’s fetish of instantaneity, collapsing perception and projection – and making explicit that Polaroid’s “instant” has always entailed a time lag (Polaroid’s cameras famously included a 60-second-or-so interval of wait-time, during which span people would impatiently agitate developing photos [Outkast commemorated this action in 2003, in their song “Hey Ya”: “Shake it like a Polaroid picture!”]).

More than one hundred years ago, philosopher Henri Bergson imagined an interval between reception and cognitive composition as the very essence of sensing, which he described as unfolding with a mechanism analogous to that of a movie camera:

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality....We may therefore sum up...that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind (1911: 332; see also Grosz 2004).

Gaga’s cinematographical glasses put Bergson’s thesis into hardware but, more, they turn his claim into a cartoon, or, better, materialize it as a machinic, hyperreal caricature. In so doing, the GL20 Camera Glasses make clear the fact that sensing has become inextricably entangled with the media techniques we use as analogies for it. In making such a technologically enabled phenomenology so lucid, the glasses may contain the possibility of tweak and, perhaps, critique.

Relevant disclosure: I grew up in a Polaroid family. My grandfather, who invented the dye-developing molecules in SX-70 film, treated we grandkids and kids and cousins as home lab animals for testing new Polaroid products (Helmreich 2007). In retrospect, I think what made this fun for us was that the products didn’t always actually work all that well. Pictures would warp, discolor, seem to melt; they were experimental not only technoscientifically, but also aesthetically. “Polavision,” for example, an “instant” movie camera system released in 1977 that came with its own table-top developing and projection box (it took movies 3 minutes to manifest), was undone by its dense and muddy frame resolution and by its chemical instability, which left home movies dissolving into pixilated psychedelic Stan Brackage-like celluloid wonders. The projector box’s sleek, Eames-brothers-styled casing notwithstanding, the thing was a mess. It may be no wonder that artists like Andy Warhol loved Polaroid products.

The Polavision movie camera system

Like Lady Gaga’s intentionally impossible high-heel shoes, which, at their best/worst, highlight the sometimes debilitating codes of some genres of fashion and femininity (see Durbin, Kinzel, and Vicks 2010), GL20 Glasses, like the Polavision system, promise to reveal – with an indeterminate mix of klutz and glamour – how much mediation, how many mistakes, go into seeing and being seen, and into doubling and troubling vision.

Bibliography:

Bergson, Henri. 1911. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. 1907. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Durbin, Kate, Lesley Kinzel, and Meghan Vicks. 2010. “Free Bitch Feminism: The Post-Gender of Lady Gaga,” Gaga Stigmata, Thursday, November 4.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke University Press.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2007. “The SX-70 Camera,” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Sherry Turkle, ed. Pp. 208-215. Cambridge: MIT Press.

McCaffray, Eddie and Meghan Vicks. 2010. “Beyonce's ‘Video Phone’ (featuring Lady Gaga) – Observations and Discussion,” Gaga Stigmata, Sunday, September 12.

Author Bio:

Stefan Helmreich is a professor of anthropology at MIT, where he teaches courses on science, technology, and culture.

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