Playing with Pearls: The Adornment of the Selves

by Laurence Ross

There was a table set out … and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it. – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In 88 Pearls, Lady Gaga and Terence Koh sit at a table, laughing, playing, dressed up in costume. Indeed, dressed up in pearls. There is an empty wine glass and an empty tumbler, but these glasses are ignored. Gaga and Koh care only for the teacup. “Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked. “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare. It seems, from the viewer’s perspective, that we, just as Alice has done before us, are crashing the party – a party we have not necessarily been invited to, and one in which we are left to interpret what we see and hear, to attempt to make some sense of the whole mad affair (if we wish to make sense of the whole mad affair). We are spectators of (not participants of) the spectacle.

Illustration by Sir John Tenniel

Games/Performances of Madness

I’m afraid Alice is a bit of a killjoy. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life” She doesn’t know how, exactly, to respond to Wonderland. (Perhaps this is because she “grows” so much when she gets there? She drinks the wrong potion? There is nothing left in her of the Peter Pan?) She certainly doesn’t know how to respond to the mad Hatter and the mad March Hare at their mad tea party. Alice never actually becomes a part of the party. Yes, from a technical standpoint, there is dialogue between Alice and the party, but there is a persistent separateness, a failure of language, that prevents the occurrence of genuine communication. This same separateness exists for the viewer of the spectacle, the spectacle here being Gaga and Koh counting pearls. As Guy Debord comments in his The Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule” (17). Even the absence of rule – zero rule – is itself a rule, and we are not privy to the rules of the game Gaga and Koh play. Not only do we, as spectator, lack agency in regard to the spectacle, we cannot even inquire, in the absence of understanding, explanations from the spectacle. This information, the logical answer, is cut off from the audience.

Mad Tea Party (1969), illustration for Alice in Wonderland by Salvador Dali

This is, perhaps, a trouble with madness, in dealing with one who is mad: there is often an assumption on behalf of the other (the viewer) that there is an absence of logic with the mad person and that this absence is a totality. That the one who is insane, the fool, is incapable of uttering a truth. (Let alone the chaotic horror, the apocalypse that might develop if we were to entertain the notion that perhaps the madness is the truth). “Why not?” said the March Hare. Alice was silent. I remember, as a theology student, one of my professors saying, “You have two options: you can either believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that he is insane – there is no in-between.” This bi-versification is one that never sat well with me. Wasn’t Galileo’s sanity questioned when he posited that the sun was the center of the universe? Wasn’t Shakespeare constantly placing his truest lines in the mouth of the fool? The scientist who studies (for example) Water Crystal Theory is ostracized from the scientific community and defends her scientific beliefs from the outside, much in the way Wordsworth defends his poetic beliefs in Preface to Lyric Ballads. There is ridicule, disapproval, banishment. This or that person is (literally) out of line, an outlier, out of his mind, mad. From the perspective of many, the mere idea of Gaga’s “Holy Fool” is one that is not possible. It is not possible to blend madness and divinity, madness and truth. It is a blending, a bleeding, a conflation of two incompatible and unrelated attributes.

As I have stated before, if Gaga is consistently anything at all, she is a paradox. In 88 Pearls, she is both a girl at play and a woman (an artist) at work (performing). She is a figure rendered in both black and white. She is playing/performing a game with Koh that both makes sense (the simple task of counting to 88) and does not make sense (numbers and pearls are skipped, and why are Gaga and Koh counting them in the first place?).

Dali, The Pearl (1981)

Lady Gaga and Terence Koh are clearly not fans of following rules. Rules, in fact, are facts or constraints that artists have become expected to break. “Is that the way you manage?” asked Alice. Alexander McQueen stated: “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” Koh playfully skips ahead while counting to the number 69, expecting that we will accept the fact that he has cheated a rule of mathematics and altered it to his own whim. Yes, Gaga and Koh count 88 pearls into the teacup in the reality of the film, but in our reality (our numeric reality) there are not 88 pearls in the teacup. There both are and are not 88 pearls here, a pearled paradox we can choose (or choose not to) swallow.

Pop artists, however, are not expected to break the rules. Pop artists are considered the hacks of the music world. There are many pop artists who are, perhaps, only called artists by default. They cannot be called musicians because, in many cases, there is no instrument in their hands. In fact, for many a pop artist, the pop artist is the instrument, at times even a corporate instrument, and certainly not the creator. And if the pop artist is a corporate instrument, then the corporation is running the show. Corporations that run on business models. Corporations that are accustomed to formula and replicating that formula over and over again until something isn’t working properly and then the formula (the pop artist) is scrapped. ‘N Sync is, perhaps, the most obvious example of this – the boy band that felt so tightly controlled by the corporation’s formula that they needed to cede, to cut all ties, and to produce No Strings Attached. But what happened once those strings were cut? The group soon dissolved. Even the group’s pro-pop anthem, “Pop,” frames pop music not as art, but as something contagious and fun, something that will endure the inevitable and never-ending criticism of the genre as garbage.

(Infinitely) Shucking the Pop Bivalve

The oyster, the bivalve, begets the pearl. Not every species of oyster is capable of producing a pearl. Not all bivalves are created equal. But there is a species of oyster, just as there is a species of pop star (of monster?), capable of producing a luminous object: the pearl. There is a species of pop star that can produce an object of (artistic) value.

Society establishes splits, artificial divisions, rules that exist only as we allow and invent them. Society has classified music into genres (species), divided music into the valuable and the worthless, the intellectual and the vapid, the good and the bad. In the face of this division, Lady Gaga must tell us – and tell us directly – “Pop music will never be lowbrow.” That pop music is not disposable trash. That pop music (as a genre, as a species) is something to pay attention to, something that could produce (and actually does, at times, produce) art. Lady Gaga takes a knife to the throat of pop music, shucks it in two, and shows us the effervesce of the nacre inside.

 And when a bivalve is split, a mirror image is created. A bivalve is, in a way, a living paradox of form: two inverse shapes positioned on top of one another, joined into one being. Francis Ponge, in his meditation on the oyster, tells us, “Inside one finds a whole world, to eat and drink; under a firmament (properly speaking) of nacre, the skies above collapse on the skies below” (37). When the bivalve is closed, its figure resembles that of a zero (0). When a bivalve is opened by its hinge, a new figure is formed, is birthed: a figure eight (8), which, viewed askance, is also the figure of infinity (∞). When closed, the world of the oyster is shut off from us completely, its luminous quality out of view, nullified. The open oyster, however, is an open world, a world, as Ponge tells us, that is two parts wide-open sky, two parts heavenly vault, two views of eternity. Whereas the closed(-minded) view of the oyster (of pop music) yields a zero, the open(-minded) view of the oyster (of pop music) yields an infinity.

And so Gaga and Koh count to 88. The pair counts – or, more accurately, creates – 88 pearls in a teacup. The pair creates not one infinity (∞), but two (88). A double-infinity, a concept that is itself a paradox, as infinity is already infinite in both directions and there is no need (and no mathematical reason) to double it. When Koh playfully skips ahead to the number 69, he skips ahead to a number that (if its two inverted figures were fused into one) very much resembles the figure eight, the figure of the bivalve, the figure of infinity.

This creation is play; this creation is work. This creation is game; this creation is performance. This creation is a world of dress-up/adornment/births/infinite births. The world, the play, the rule of play, is born this way, over and over again. The pearl from the oyster, the head from the vagina, the spectacle from the performer. “For the spectacle, as the perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all – although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself” (Debord 15-16).

In 88 Pearls, Gaga, adorned in the very pearls she plays with, conjures once again her trope of continual birth. the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells. But she also, by her very adornment, conjures the infinite death that must accompany that birth. “Once in a rare while a globule pearls in [the oyster’s] nacre throat, with which one instantly seeks to adorn oneself” (Ponge 37). And to shuck an oyster and retrieve the pearl (for adornment or the creation of a self) is to kill the oyster. When Lady Gaga wears these pearls, these pearls are not in the form of pretty necklaces, but affixed to her skin, to her jaw, to her cheeks. It appears as if the bone is being exposed, that we are viewing a glimpse of a skull. (Shaun Leane produced a similar effect for Alexander McQueen with his “Jaw Bone” Mouthpiece.) Gaga is both a woman in her pearls and a monster with a skeletal-pearled countenance. Gaga is (and has been) a series (a string) of selves through adornment, the new birthed through the death of the old, life and death piled on top of each other. “When a newly independent art paints its world … then a moment of life has grown old … The greatness of art makes its appearance only as dusk begins to fall over life” (Debord 133). Lady Gaga is continually paradox at work/play.

At the close of the film, as Gaga and Koh place the final pearl in the teacup, Gaga says, “Let’s do the last one together.” Gaga and Koh, together, each take hold of the pearl, each one’s thumb and finger carefully joining to pinch a side, their pair of hands forming two rings, two circles, which, when joined (jointed) at the point (joint) of the pearl, form the figure eight, form yet another figure of infinity.

Gaga as Gyre

Yeats had his own notions on infinity and birthing, notions that he forged in his poems and writings on gyres. In his poem, The Second Coming, he writes, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” (line 1), the gyre a type of geometric cone, a cyclone really, one that spirals wider and wider in time until the apocalypse arrives. The moment when the gyre is at its widest, the moment when the end of the world has arrived, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (2-3). This moment is chaos at its height, the world at its most advanced and complicated state, and Time at its lowest ebb. But this moment for Yeats is not entirely catastrophic, despite the fact that “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (4). There is anarchy, yes, but “mere” anarchy, anarchy that can be treated just a bit flippantly because, though the end of the world (death) is at hand, there is a new beginning (life) that will happen at the exact moment the end occurs. “But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

Diagram of opposing gyres, from W.B. Yeats’ A Vision

Here, there is a hinge, a joint, so that at the moment when the cyclone/world/game is at its wildest, widest end, that very same moment a new pinpoint begins. A new spiral is birthed. There is a second coming, a second birthing. The end of the world is not the end of the world. Or, rather, if it is the end of one world, then it is the beginning of a new one. “Surely some revelation is at hand” (9). And though Yeats’s vision in The Second Coming is not a cheerful one, it is one of birth nonetheless. “That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (19-22). So yes, there is a Second Coming after the birth and death of Christ. There is the cradle. There is the birth of the beast, a birth the majority of us might not expect to follow the last birth. Gaga does not give us what we expect either (just look at “The Edge of Glory” video and our spectator’s response to it). But Gaga is not only okay with the idea of the monstrous, of the beast – she has, as Mother Monster, embraced the notion, embraced the title of birthing what might typically cause fear, repulsion, distain.

These gyres, the overlapping, inverted cones of Time’s diminishment and history’s expansion, create the shape of an hourglass, the shape of the figure eight, the figure of infinity. The inverted gyres represent the interdependence of two forces that we do not expect to be linked. Yeats writes, in A Vision, “As man’s intellect, say, expands, the emotional nature contracts in equal degree and vice versa ... one always narrowing, one always expanding, and yet bound for ever to one another.” And, according to Yeats, these gyres continue on, linked in a never-ending chain, an infinite process of rebirthing, a never-ending string (of pearls). And she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal.

Digestion

So what is Lady Gaga doing with Terence Koh, playing with pearls and a teacup? She is making a short film. She is making a short film that we can either view as a piece of art or a piece of madness or both. She is, perhaps, making a short film that is part art and part madness, showing us, as many artists have done before her, that the two are not always separate entities. That one can stylize madness, that one can glue pearls to one’s body to create sequined fashion.

Debord discusses the spectacle in terms of style and fashion when he writes, “In contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous surface of a contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of our era can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet carefully concealed necessity for revolution” (116). Debord discusses the spectacle in much the same way Yeats conceives of his gyres and Gaga conceives of her project: an evolution of revolution that is not cyclical in its infiniteness, but linear. Though there will be another Gaga video, another Gaga song, another Gaga performance, there will not be another Gaga video, another Gaga song, and another Gaga performance. There will not be another, not more of the same, but an other, an addition that differs from the previous edition. Lady Gaga and her work has (and presumably will) evolve not revolve, cycle not recycle. This infinite birthing of selves is why she has become the spectacle she has become. This infinite birthing of selves is why we find ourselves continually watching.

Note: The italicized lines of the text are taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Bibliography

88 Pearls. “Terence Koh Show”. Dir Terence Koh. Perf. Lady Gaga and Terence Koh. 2010. Film.

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 21 July 2011.

Born This Way. Dir. Nick Knight and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1971. Print.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

Lady Gaga. “Born This Way.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Judas.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

‘N Sync. “Pop.” Celebrity. Jive Records, 2001. CD.

Poker Face. Dir. Ray Kay. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2008. Film.

Ponge, Francis. The Voice of Things. Trans. Beth Archer Brombert. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “A Vision.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume XIII. Ed. Catherine E. Paul. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

Author Bio

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

Agents Of Pop: “Of What Is Past, Or Passing, Or To Come”

By Laurence Ross

Britney’s first single, “Hold It Against Me,” off of her upcoming album Femme Fatale, initially seems to be yet another song about Britney trying to seduce yet another insipid guy. “If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” The lyric is so tired, so banal, that Britney is actually being sued for copyright infringement over its use (the “original” song in question produced over thirty years ago). But place those lyrics of Britney lusting on the dance floor within the context of Åkerlund’s video, and suddenly a song that I originally appreciated solely for its expected danceablity transforms under a much more complex concept.

Jonas Åkerlund, who directed the video for Britney’s “Hold It Against Me,” also directed Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” and, more recently, “Telephone.” While there are certainly similarities in Åkerlund’s latest representations of the two women, ultimately the videos for “Hold It Against Me” and “Telephone” take two prominent pop stars – and their respective songs about being in the club – and produce two widely divergent personal statements.

In the “Hold It Against Me” video, the perspective of the camera is pulled back so that the viewer can see the many spotlights Britney stands beneath. While Lady Gaga relishes in the spotlight of the camera regardless of the holder (see her indulgent performance as she poses and reposes for her mug shot at the end of the “Paparazzi” video, Åkerlund’s first Gaga production), Britney has felt trapped by this very same paparazzi. For a long time. A very long time. I’ve lost count of the songs she has sung about being tracked down and sought after (“Piece of Me”), the constant presence of the media’s circus (“Circus”), and putting on a face for the camera (“If U Seek Amy Tonight”) – all sung by Britney in anger at the constant media charade, which Lady Gaga, conversely, utilizes as a medium to construct her (many) identity(ies).

The opening scenes of “Hold It Against Me” focus on the body, as Britney and her menagerie of half-naked backup dancers clad in colorful briefs prepare for a photo shoot. The product to be advertised? Britney herself – her scent, bottled for all (which she sprays on herself, raising the question: Is Ahab, Ahab? Is Britney, Britney?). Think of this bottled scent as a type of DNA preservation, similar to a deposit at a sperm bank or freezing one’s eggs when the end of one’s youth is near; for Britney, the end certainly seems near (see the video’s opening sequence: the apocalyptic meteor that crash-lands on Earth).

This is a Britney more than a decade older than the Britney of Baby, One More Time. In short, Britney is aging. She has had two children, and look, Britney’s waist is wrapped in bullets, waging metaphoric warfare against her own body. Internet comments abound about how Britney’s dancing in this video is nothing compared to “the old Britney,” the Britney of Oops!… I Did It Again. But Åkerlund seems to emphasize not Britney’s lack of skill, but Britney’s lack of agency in the video’s initial dance sequences. Her arms are manipulated into motion by her own “backup” dancers as she applies her Make Up For Ever – a commodified representation of her desire for eternity.

Pop stars do not sing about their aging selves, their fading fame, their bodies as paltry – we do not want to see our pop stars in this light. How could we dance to such songs? How could we grope and grind with strangers in a crowded bar or make out with the strobe-lit person to our left if songs about growing old and talentless and decrepit were blaring through the sound system? We can handle songs about rejection and breakups and being lonely, because hey, we have been rejected and broken up with and we are lonely. These misfortunes may be the very reasons we are listening to pop songs in the first place, and (cue bubblegum optimism) these misfortunes of the pop star do not preclude – might even predict – a come back, a revival, a new lover, a new life. 

Writers, on the other hand, write about the end of their lives all the time and have been doing so for centuries. Some writers, like pop stars, are also concerned about their fame, their existence in the public’s consciousness even after they have died, but very few writers are prized for their bodies or bound by the expectation of pop stars to make us happy or, at the very least, hopeful. When it became apparent to me that Britney, in the video for “Hold it Against Me,” was singing about just these taboo concerns, concerns of the aging self, concerns that seem inherently anti-pop, I could not help but place the video and the song in a literary framework.

Think of “Hold It Against Me” in a Yeatsian context. Think of Sailing to Byzantium (1928), a poem written by an aging Yeats about his desire to not only leave his country where youth and sex are most valued, but also to travel back in time to a place where intellect trumped all. Britney feels that she is in “no country for old [wo]men” (Yeats 1.1.1). She does not have the youth or the body that she once had, though she is expected to live and perform to those youthful standards. Indeed, the world of pop seems eternally “caught in that sensual sound of music” (1.1.7) though each individual singer is “begotten, born, and dies” (1.1.6). Britney has become – or at least fears that she has become – a member of “Those dying generations” (1.1.3).

In contrast to Yeats, Britney does not praise “Monuments of unaging intellect” (1.1.8); she praises the body. It is, in fact, the object of desire, and the object of the song. To become bodiless does not interest Britney, though she may certainly feel “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal” (3.1.21-22). Britney wants to be eternal, though Britney is not concerned (as Yeats is) with the perpetuation of the soul. She is concerned with the perpetuation of the body. Both Yeats and Britney want to be freed from their bodies, but while Yeats wants to abandon his corporeal form forever, Britney looks backwards from her age, longing to be her younger self again.

Placed in Åkerlund’s video, the lyrics for “Hold It Against Me” take on new meaning. When Britney sings, “Wanna know just how you feel … If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” we are forced to ask the question: who is the you Britney is speaking about? Where is the scruffy-faced, gym-membered, tanning-bed enthusiast we are so accustomed to seeing as the object of her desire? Britney briefly searches the online dating site Plenty of Fish, momentarily hovers over a profile picture, and then forgets about him – gone with the click of a manicured fingernail. This man is irrelevant, hardly of interest to her, and never makes a physical appearance in the video. The you Britney desires, the you whose body she wants, is her former, physical self. The aged, post-apocalyptic Britney doesn’t want another guy to dance with for a three-minute song and then toss away; Britney wants Britney.

Lady Gaga, on the other hand, is not trapped by her own body. In the “Telephone” video, the opposite is true: she is jailed, her body is detained against her will, but she is not held back by her own body. Lady Gaga is not ashamed of this body, a fact made explicit as she presses her exposed crotch against the bars of her cell for her captors and cellmates to see. While Lady Gaga strives for autonomy through escape from obstacles that outside forces have exerted on her (the fall from fame she takes in “Paparazzi,” and the jail cell of “Telephone”), Britney struggles for autonomy by trying to free herself from herself. Britney is not content in her contemporary skin.

As “Hold It Against Me” progresses, we see a Britney that is composed of both flesh and metal – in effect, a cyborg. But Britney is not proudly relishing in Donna Haraway theory. Britney is not seeking to tear down society’s constricting and reductive notions of gender; in fact, she is grasping for that antiquated image. She is no postmodern feminist looking toward the future. Much in the same way Yeats was a Modern poet who frequently looked backward to a more Victorian aesthetic, Britney, in 2011, looks backward to her self in 1999. She is dressed as a groomless bride. She wears a wedding dress, housed in a digital tower of memory she seems wedded to, accessorized and stabilized with IVs of rainbow fluids and diamond-encrusted surgical tape. The Britneys of the Baby, One More Time album dance on the many monitors that surround and encase her. She pines for what has been lost.

This pining ultimately leads to the battle Britney has with her former self, which represents Britney’s attempt to reclaim her former body. Aged Britney (outfitted with the blue train) fights Young Britney (outfitted with the red train); she upper cuts, gut kicks, and finally strangles Young Britney to the point of collapse.

During the fight scene, Britney sings “Gimme something good. Don’t wanna wait, I want it now. Pop it like a hood and show me how you work it out.” Aged Britney wants her younger self; Aged Britney wants that body now; Aged Britney wants to pop the hood of Young Britney and see just how she ticks. Perhaps swap out a part or two. There is, in fact, a mutual collapse at the end of the fight scene, and for a moment it appears the Britneys have killed each other despite the fact that Aged Britney should clearly be the fight’s victor (she delivers many more blows than she receives). When the fight’s aftermath reveals a Red (Young) Britney standing in a pose of victory with her arms spread and a Blue (Aged) Britney grabbing her skull as if she has undergone some serious head trauma, we must reconcile these images with the fight itself, a fight in which Blue (Aged) Britney seemed indisputably the winner.

The conclusion? Indeed, the body of Blue Britney has undergone serious head trauma, and Aged Britney did win the fight. Aged Britney’s fight-prize? Her mind in Red (Young) Britney’s body. And vise versa.

Lady Gaga exhibits no such body issues in “Telephone.” Gaga, in the prison, prepares for a fight as she gives her hair a slick swipe with the comb. But she is preparing for self-defense – to protect her body, not to discard it. In fact, standing right next to Gaga in the jail cell is Gaga’s little sister. They stand with no animosity between them. There is no desire from Gaga for a younger self, nor a desire for self-inflicted harm. Gaga, along with Beyoncé, acquire self-actualization through the manipulation and elimination of those who stand in their way. “Stop telephoning me,” they sing. Stop trying to hold us down. We are not yours to own. We are free to be ourselves. It is only after both men (Gaga’s lover in “Paparazzi” and Beyoncé’s lover in “Telephone”) are out of the way (granted, poisoned and killed) that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are finally able to dance together, to dance together clad in stars and stripes, to dance together in the Land of the Free, a land of their making.

Even in prison, Lady Gaga maintains her agency. Even in prison, the prison itself is, in a way, not a prison. Lady Gaga walks into the courtyard draped in chains, but the key is right there on her chest. The chains, both physically enacting and symbolizing her imprisonment, are also rendered impotent by her access to their antidote. Lady Gaga uses her agency to obtain a cell phone, mobility behind bars, the means of her bailout/escape. The aesthetic here is one of mutability, where meaning is in constant flux.

Sometimes a telephone is a means of escape (Gaga’s text to Beyoncé) and sometimes a telephone is a jail cell (“Callin’ like a collector”). Sometimes a pussy is a cat (Gaga’s cabdriver cat suit) and sometimes a pussy is a vagina (Venus’s symbol zeroing in on the Pussy Wagon in the final shot of “Telephone”). Sometimes a sandwich is lunch and sometimes a sandwich is a bit of dance choreography and sometimes a sandwich is poison – that’s the Wonder (Bread), the Miracle (Whip) of it all. And Lady Gaga exerts this freedom, this agency, over and over again. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187), Stein tells us in her poem Sacred Emily (1922), a poem that creates a world where words and phrases are repeated to diminish meaning’s stability and to emphasize meaning’s permeability. And this world is the one Lady Gaga inhabits, a world where the meaning and identity of a person/place/thing are never stagnant, always changing. If Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” possesses Yeatsian echoes of a modernist looking backward in time, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” possesses Steinian echoes of a Modernist looking forward to the Post-Modern, the dissolving of boundaries, binaries, and steel bars.

In contrast, it is only after Britney has defeated the younger version of herself and taken her body that she regains some of the agency she had lost. The choreography no longer enacts a manipulated Britney, but a Britney manipulating. She raises her arms and her dancers follow, rising like puppets on strings. She is the conductor, the maestro, the master once again.

No more wreath of microphones framing Britney’s disembodied bust – an image distant from any physicality that seems human. No pair of red lips that exist alone in the otherwise dark void (a nod to Rocky Horror Picture Show, the humanoid, the trope of taking another’s bodily form). The double iris, with the eyelids literally pried open to exhibit the mutation, becomes single again as Britney settles into her repossessed youth.

To the left: Britney’s eye at the beginning of the video. To the right: her eye at the video’s end.

What follows is a type of celebratory funereal pyre in honor of her aged body’s consumption. Golden, glittering confetti is abundant. Britney’s dancers (and our attentions to them) have receded into the background where they presumably belong, now appearing fully clothed in black garb and covered with facemasks. Here, Britney is the one who bears new skin, her segmented dress fastened with giant golden staples, a new life and body she has triumphantly pieced together in the face of her personal apocalypse.

Lady Gaga and Beyoncé don their own funereal garb as they drive away into the sunset, though theirs is a mock-mourning, a stilted eulogy, the face of grief with no real sadness beneath the mask. They are a grotesque vision of two women veiled in sorrow, their hats overly large, and Lady Gaga’s a pastel, almost the shade of baby blue, a shade much more akin to birth than death.

Britney wants to be rebirthed, yes. But not as something to come, as something past. Not an advancement, but a regression, a return to a lost identity. Britney does not want change. Britney wants to be Britney. She is the femme fatale and she is her own enemy. She wants her name and identity gathered into eternity, even at the expense of some slight artifice – a few staples here and there, and a little mind/body swap. She wants to forever sing to the world, “It’s Britney, bitch.”

Gaga has sung a similar statement, though one that portrays her identity as far less concrete. “I’m a free bitch, baby.” Gaga is not defined or limited by her name, just as Stein’s words do not hold stable definitions. Gaga embraces the mutations of identity, which include the mutations of others and the mutations of herself. Britney longs to be forever young while Gaga (and anyone who identifies as an offspring of Mother Monster) knows she is always and continually being reborn.

Bibliography:

Hold It Against Me. Dir. Jonas Åkerlund. Perf. Britney Spears. 2011. Film.

Lady Gaga. “Bad Romance.” The Fame Monster. Interscope Records, 2009. CD.

Michelson, Noah. “Britney E-Mails Her Heart.” Out Magazine. 7 March 2011. Web. 15 March 2011.

Spears, Britney. “Gimme More.” Blackout. Jive Records, 2007. CD.

Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: Four Seas, 1922. Print.

Telephone. Dir. Jonas Åkerlund. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2010. Film.

Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 2040. Print.

Writer Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism – among other things. 

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