Manifesting Love: "Born This Way" and Surrealist Art

By Willow Sharkey

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

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

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

 

Joan Miró, Love, (1925)

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

Salvador Dalí, The Accommodations of Desires, (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

M. What is solitude?

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

M. What is debauchery?

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

- From “The 1934 Dialogue”

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

 

Exquisite Corpse, (1934)

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

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

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

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

 

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, (1973)

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

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

Author Bio:

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

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From "Alejandro" to "Born This Way," Dirge to Liberation

By Cheryl Helm

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

Eight months ago, Lady Gaga released “Alejandro” to great hoopla over its religious imagery, and over its (apparent) similarities to Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” (musically) and “Vogue” (choreographically). Now she’s gifted us with “Born This Way,” a film with far more expansive religious imagery, and whose main controversies are the graphic birth scenes and inevitable debate over whether the song is a Madonna knockoff of “Express Yourself” (musically) and “Vogue” (the spoken/rapped lyrics).

“Born This Way” is not a narrative sequel to “Alejandro” (as “Telephone” follows the narrative line of “Paparazzi”). Rather, when compared with “Alejandro,” “Born This Way” reveals major conceptual pivots in Gaga’s aesthetic, and dramatic evolution in her approaches to certain themes. The most notable evolutions between the two videos are found in Gaga’s depiction of female power figure(s) and protagonists, in the progression from a closed gay community to an open inclusive community, and in a seeming shift away from the treatment of religion solely as a means of social and political oppression to a more catholic spirituality as a source of solace and strength.

Compare, for example, how the communities of the two films are shot and introduced. “Alejandro” is shot in cold low lighting, which matches its tonal darkness that stems from being a grievously sad story set in a bleak militant dystopia where solace in any form is in very short supply. Soldiers march bearing emblems of the Holocaust and its horrific human toll, which, as we well know, was justified by institutionalized racism and homophobia.

In contrast, “Born This Way” is shot in warm low-light that simulates birthing environments. The dancers are seen kneeling, in preparation for their births into full-grown offspring of the Eternal Mother. It is as joyous and celebratory as “Alejandro” is sorrowful and elegiac. While “Born this Way” is a liberation birth dance, “Alejandro” is a dirge, and an angry one at that.

“Born This Way” is strikingly different from “Alejandro” in tone and subtext, but a more careful examination of common elements and character types reveals them to be companion pieces that signify a change in Gaga’s overall project.

Institutional Religion vs. Popular Spirituality

An important distinction between “Alejandro” and “Born This Way” lies Gaga’s depiction of religion and faith. To the extent that “Alejandro” is, in part, about faith and freedom, it is both springboard and study in contrast to the philosophy behind “Born This Way.” Whereas the faith of “Alejandro” serves as sanctuary, escape, and justification for oppression, the faith of “Born This Way” functions as respite, solace, and a catalyst for liberation. The faith of “Alejandro” deals in stasis and death; “Born This Way,” in life and rebirth.

“Alejandro” presents faith in the context of a specific religious institution, which is rigid, controlling, and oppressive. It is faith in doctrine; it is a faith in which the light of divinity has gone out. The iconography in “Alejandro” is explicitly Christian, and of the Catholic variety. Crosses, crucifixes, rosaries, and nuns serve up an abundance of controversy. This Christian imagery is accompanied by symbols of oppression. For instance, a helmeted soldier and Gaga-as-nun are strung up like puppets, signifying that religious faith is a kind of bondage (and not the fun kind) – a sardonic twist in a film laden with lots of sex but no pleasure.

In contrast, “Born This Way” depicts faith as affirmative – something that can be called upon as a source of strength and comfort. More importantly, perhaps, the faith here is independent of any explicit religion or doctrine. The video contains a plethora of religious/spiritual images, however they are nondenominational: eastern and esoteric imagery abound while the cross is used only sparingly. From the upright and inverted triangles replete in both political and esoteric meaning, to the Eternal Mother’s lotuses, butterflies, and Third Eye chakra, “Born this Way” signals a shift away from religion (e.g. the Catholic Church) to a more universal, dare we say “catholic” (katholikos) expression of faith. Lyrically, Gaga invokes God explicitly (God makes no mistakes) and implicitly (Capital HIM), not as a basis for oppression but a spiritual affirmation of one’s own inherent divinity.

Two Faces of Liberation

The driving narratives of both “Alejandro” and “Born This Way” is a quest for acceptance liberation, but from opening to closing shots, those quests take place in very different worlds, and seek opposing kinds of freedom. These differences are largely functions of Gaga’s evolving artistic/political intentions and messages in the two videos.

“Alejandro” was created in the context of the debate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Although the video never overtly addresses the issue, it is nonetheless an impassioned plea for the abolition of policies, regulations, and laws that discriminate against LGBTQ people. Institutional liberation requires the rejection of religious influence behind every homophobic law and policy. On the surface it appears to be a denial of faith, but what it really requires is a change in the way people exercise their faith.

“Born This Way” is the Gospel of Gaga, which advocates for self-actualized liberation: self-acceptance, self-respect, self-empowerment. To achieve it requires no institutional acquiescence, no defeat of personal opponents or bullies (in fact, there’s not a hint of any adversarial personal or institutional relationships). It is an act of faith to embrace ourselves with full belief that we are exactly as we were meant to be, whether we consider ourselves to be divinely created or not. It is an article of faith to say, “I am beautiful, I am perfect in my own way,” and walk by that faith, live by it.

What Gaga seeks in “Alejandro” is escape, not self-liberation. She uses religion to avoid dealing with her grief and her frustrated relationships. In “Born This Way” Gaga seeks to find and express the liberation that is already hers by birthright. The Gaga of “Alejandro” desperately looks outside herself for freedom in other people and things, and uses sex to force her way to acceptance by a group that doesn’t really want her. The Gaga of “Born This Way” seeks her freedom within, and shares the quest and celebration of this freedom with kindred folk.

The Goddess/Queen Archetype

“Born This Way” begins with a Creation Myth, a Gaga Genesis tale. The Eternal Mother is a figure of Light, giver of life, protector of her young. We first see the back of her head, bearing a face that evokes both Metropolis as well as the faces on her offspring. The opening sequence accompanying the narrative is among the most visually powerful in Gaga’s oeuvre, particularly the skyward turn toward G.O.A.T., where constellations form a pair of ovaries. There, the Eternal Mother is the womb, and the vaginal birth canal is an amber-lit translucent ramp. She is attended by a midwife, and flanked on both sides by dancers in soft shadows. Note the recurrent appearance of the letter “V” visually framed in different ways, which reinforces time and again that “No, I don’t have a penis. I have a vagina. Now watch me put it to work.”

Her nature is procreative. She is chained to her birthing throne, her hoof-like feet raised in stirrups, but is otherwise not confined or restricted. At the birth of evil, she herself is torn in two, the Evil Mother sitting atop a lightning bolt ziggurat, birthing twin skeletal figures and an AK-47 (I’ll see your machine gun bra, and raise you a rapid-fire monster gun). Her corollary in “Alejandro,” the cyborg queen, trains an army of soldiers; the Evil Mother gives birth to the weapons with which to equip this army. While the army is not explicitly defined as evil, the birthing of their weapons is an act that promotes death instead of life. Rather than retaliate, the Eternal Mother wonders, “How can I protect such perfection without evil?” This is the essential nature and the moral challenge she passes on to her children.

The Dark Queen of “Alejandro” is as menacing and lustful as the Eternal Mother is protective and nurturing. She is an insectile cyborg vampire who exists in darkness and who rules a dystopia redolent with militarism.

She lusts after Alejandro’s barb-wired heart, stroking her red lips as the heart passes by in a funeral procession. This lust takes on added meaning as she opens her mouth and flashes gold fangs. She hides her eyes behind steampunk goggles, sardonically opening each lens one at a time to sing “she won’t look at you.” She’s malevolent and uncomfortably seductive, even though she never participates directly in the rampant sexual performances.

She is attended by a sleeping armed soldier and a high-ranking officer who peers over her shoulder as she reviews the troops. Under her watchful gaze, the soldiers perform their martial drills and Spartan training against the backdrop of a screen where images of war and violence are projected. The training exercises militarize sexuality and sexualize militarism. The eroticism is muted by their aggression and violent movements as the soldiers circle, embrace, shove, choke, and slam each other to the ground. These are the Cyborg Queen’s offspring. But she’s not birthing a new type of humanity; she’s overseeing the training of an all-too-familiar master race of soldiers.

The Innocent Starchild vs. The Nun

In a vast nursery of gestating heads in translucent wombs, one Starchild has already begun to mature and take complete form. She is the new race in its infancy. Her wide-eyed look and playful nature speak of virginal innocence and oneness with oneself. She has not yet had to fight the battles for self-acceptance and respect that her older siblings are engaged in. She’s just a baby. She still remembers who and what she is. She is spiritual by her very nature. Like her Eternal Mother, she’s a creature of Light.

In contrast, the nun of “Alejandro” represents the grieving woman who buried Alejandro’s love. She flees to religion for solace, not only from her grief, but also from other unfulfilling relationships that require more than she wants to give (“Don’t want to talk, don‘t want to touch, just smoke my cigarette and hush”). Dressed in passionate red, she ingests rosary as an act of communion, and prays for release from the love/attraction of these men.

When she is dressed in pure white and bearing St Peter’s Crosses (papal symbol of humility), she seems to have achieved the spiritual release and wisdom sought by her red novice. She also appears free of the lust that drives Gaga to bed and dominate the soldier in the barracks. But lust is imposed on her by the soldiers: they surround and force her into a violent group grope in which she eventually sacrifices her religious purity for not-entirely-mutual sexual desire. In a clearly wry moment during the orgy/rape scene, however, the white nun’s cross over her crotch is revealed to be an arrow pointing to her vagina, as if to say…no no, gay boys, it goes in HERE! It’s also a sight gag: See, I have a vagina. No penis.

The Essential Gagas

To perform the central character in both videos, Gaga literally strips herself down to the essentials. In “Alejandro,” director Steven Klein forced her to cut her hair and appear without makeup, to make her feel more vulnerable in keeping with her character. In the barracks scene, she wears only a nude set of Calvin Klein underwear, silk hose, and pumps with a sensibly high heel of perhaps four inches. Her eyebrows are bleached and she wears virtually no makeup except for dark lipstick, giving her a pale, ethereal, fragile look. Even at her most sexually aggressive, she seems almost doll-like, the kind you would take home, put up on your shelf, and dust occasionally.

The Gaga of “Born This Way” is also minimally costumed and makeup. Most shocking is that Gaga gives up shoes and stockings altogether. She dances barefoot, wearing only a half-sole dance shoe for added stability and traction. In stark contrast, this Gaga is fierce and muscular, both physically and emotionally. This is not some porcelain doll, this is a strong woman fighting for her freedom from prejudice and condemnation, and celebrating her liberation.

The Pas de deux

In “Alejandro,” Gaga seeks to gain acceptance within the group of soldiers through sexual domination. The scene is highly sexual, yet not erotic: desperation and frustration characterize the mood.

None of the characters in this scene derive any kind of pleasure or even sexual release. Gaga’s partner responds to her advances with violent aggression bordering on rape. Both force themselves into this sexual pas de deux, and neither is satisfied by it.

In “Born This Way” Gaga partners with model Rick Genest (Rico), aka Zombie Boy, in a playful, joyful pas de deux. Using one of her favorite motifs, the mirrored performance, Gaga’s makeup mimics Rico’s whole-body tattoos, and she wears a matching Mugler tuxedo (which may reference her male alter-ego, Jo Calderone, instead of Madonna as some surmise). Alternately coltish and fiercely passionate, Gaga uses Rico as partner and sometimes prop, while he remains largely impassive as one would expect a non-hungry zombie to do.

The Dance

Gaga’s relationship to the dance company is quite different in the two films. In “Born This Way,” she celebrates and embraces them in relationships that are non-sexual; they share a common origin, quest, and struggle. This company is as diverse with respect to race, gender, class and fashion as is the human family at large, reinforcing “Born This Way” as anthem and ode to inclusivity.

More importantly, Gaga is the featured dancer, and dances solo throughout the video. BTW has been called Gaga’s liberation album, and this is certainly reflected in her movement, and her fiercely joyous personae.

In “Alexandro,” Gaga’s relationship to the company is fraught with desperate attempts to engage them either as sex partners or as comrades. Gaga has described this as trying to have the same kind of relationship with gay men as they have with each other, but they don’t want her. The dance revolves around the company, not around her. Compared to the rich diversity of “Born This Way,” the dancers in “Alejandro” are homogenous with respect to race (and possibly, gender) and fashion. This homogeneity visually reinforces the film’s German subtext and connection to fascism, which cannot wholly be separated from the notion of a master race that is exclusive by its very definition.

Group Hugs, Gropes and Orgies

“Born This Way” features a number of group scenes in which Gaga lies in a tangle of bodies, touching and being touched, stroking and being stroked.

In some scenes, they lie in amniotic fluid/Mugler latex goo, recalling their common origin as the Eternal Mother’s children. These scenes are highly sensual but not explicitly sexual.

The orgy scene in “Alejandro” is violent and blatantly sexual. The soldier/dancers surround the nun in white, grab her, push her, shove her, toss her, hoist her in the air and throw her down to couple with a soldier on the floor.

In its own queer way, this scene is related to a rite of passage by which Gaga earns acceptance as a soldier. In a decidedly Fosse-inspired ensemble dance, she sheds her Liza with a Z vest, and dons a bra with machine guns attached.

In the end, she gains acceptance not by becoming more herself, but by becoming more like them. It’s not liberation; it’s surrender and resignation. In the closing shot, the red nun’s features dissolve, as if her embrace of religion has consumed her from within.

Implications

The trajectory from “Alejandro” to “Born This Way” signals something of a quantum leap for Gaga musically and narratively. There’s a clear progression in how she creatively, politically, and spiritually portrays female power. Does this reflect a shift in Gaga’s interpretation and/or depiction of a more conventionally recognizable feminist philosophy? More likely, it is a deeper reflection of how she has long defined her personal and artistic mission statement:

“Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we’re taught to view women, and my work is both visually and musically a rejection of those things. But more importantly, it is a quest.”

Showstudio.com, In Camera with Lady Gaga, May 2010

Rather than adopting a more recognizable feminist stance, her depiction of the female in “Born This Way” signals a broadening of her visual and musical vocabulary as she pursues her own quest for defining and empowering her own femaleness.

There’s also a clear shift in how she has chosen to shape her stance on LGBTQ equality. The militancy of “Alejandro” clearly stems from its ties to the policy of DADT, which was repealed not long before “Born This Way” was filmed. The song itself was written months before this political watershed, and we all surely know there are battles yet to come for equality on all fronts (marriage, adoption rights, etc.). It is unlikely that Gaga will abandon her strong political activism and advocacy on these issues, but she is striking at the heart of how we become victims of legalized bigotry and social bullying in the first place. Our oppression begins with believing that we are as others define us. When we accept that we are inherently less than because of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, etc., oppression is easy, whether it is institutional or social.

“Born This Way” also lacks the open attack on religious institutions (specifically the Catholic Church) that foster homophobia and misogyny, and that drive the legal codification of these prejudices. Instead, once again, she broadens her visual and lyrical vocabularies of faith and spirituality to make them as inclusive as the narration of the song itself. No doubt, she will continue to personally and artistically confront religious institutions that promote bigotry, but what she has done in “Born This Way” is to enrich the soil of spiritual alternatives in which this generation can grow and thrive without needing the approval of church or state.

Ultimately, with “Born This Way,” Gaga has shifted the frontline of activism. She has taken the battle away from a focus on outside forces and opponents, and instead towards a deep inward embrace of our inherent self-worth that needs no approval or institutional acceptance, thereby strengthening us both personally and in community. Considering the physical, visual, and musical energy of “Born This Way,” it is clear that the artist has experienced some kind of major leap forward on all fronts. A Hallelujah moment.

Author Bio:

Cheryl Helm is an old transgressive hippie, devoutly politically incorrect to all corners. She sold her soul to rock and roll in the 50s, picked up her first good electric guitar from Patti Smith’s husband (Fred “Sonic” Smith, RIP) in the late 60s, and never looked back. “Rock n roll, bitches, do or die,” as Gaga says. She’s written poetry, prose, the L-Word fan fiction, essays, editorials, music criticism, and some things she can’t quite define. She’s written alone and with others, published in obscure ancient feminist literary journals no one ever heard of, as well as alternative presses, newspapers, Creem Magazine in its glory days, blogs, fan forums, leaving digital traces behind like glitter.

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

By Roland Betancourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author bio:

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

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