Jesus ◊ Judas

By Vanessa Place

The following piece is the sixth in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here; the second, here; the third, here; the fourth, here; the fifth, here.

With uncanny historicism, the Judas video was released while another great cultural metaphor played on the world stage, one which also revealed the workings of terror and desire. For, in addition to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Jodie Foster’s The Beaver was released in theaters nationwide. For those who missed the picture, The Beaver, directed by Foster, was about a “hopelessly depressed” toy manufacturer (played by Mel Gibson) who finds his way back to nuclear family happiness via his discovery of, and communication through, an old hand puppet – a cloth beaver. In a review, The New York Times critic noted that the character of the mad father was upstaged by his mouthpiece: “Take away his puppet, and the man disappears.” While this is true of Gibson and his anti-Semitism in particular, could we not also say more generally, take away his beaver, and man disappears? And what we have in Judas is a case of the disappearing beaver.

The video begins with a nod to Judas Priest/Hell’s Angels, a nod that nods twice, as the coupling of heaven and hell has been a match made here on earth at least since Blake put the two in tasty proximity. If this sounds like a candy treat, it is that as well: while the video is full of iconography, it is iconography sans bite or significance. Jesus is a very cute Latino man who mostly stares, blank and beautiful, his lips fruit-juicy and apple-pink, while Judas is the kind of bad-news-but-scruffy-cute white guy who is at home anywhere there is canned beer and Nikki Sixx. Lady Gaga, as Magdalena, wears a prescient crucifix, because there’s no future tense like the past. For today’s transgression lies in the absolute lack of transgression, in the smooth absorption of all that was once considered something worth fighting or fighting for. We’ve seen it, done it, dismissed it, embraced it; the human stain is but a birthmark, meaning nothing more meaningful than pigment. By way of iconographic comparison, Madonna’s Like a Prayer (1989) featured fistfuls of Catholic referents, played, as Madonna will play them, straight. A saint is a saint is a saint. A crucifix means something, especially when it’s set on fire, and sure enough, a person of color completes the object-circle, making sure we get the goddamn point about love or whatever. In Judas, Jesus is cute, Judas cute, a gold-plated gun is no more or less phallic than a bright red lipstick, and what’s divine is the decoupage. WWJD, indeed: J who or who’s J to you?

Lacan’s lozenge (◊) represents envelopment-development-conjunction-disjunction, the meeting of that which is greater than (>) and that which is less than (<), that which is alienated from (˅) and that which is conjoined to (˄). In the matheme for fantasy ($ ◊ a), it is the punched-out point (poinçon – being the signature punch of a silversmith on a piece of silver) between the subject and the petit objet a, the ineffable “thing” that is both the Other’s desire (never the desire of another) and the what’s left over from the process of symbolization (more accurately conjugated in the gerund). It is the desire for desire, the self-constituting itself by way of its own traumatic lack. The lack filled by the beaver. Beaver, as you know, is American slang for a slash, a slit, a hole, a rocket socket pocket, a pussy. The woman played in Judas as Gaga as Magdalena, for the story of the Magdalene in this case is not the story of any other Other. The Woman does not exist, and you can’t holla for a dolla if you’re working for fun and for free. But given that this Jesus is not appreciably different, though arguably less life-like, than this Judas, and this betrayal is not between J & J, but is a three-way with Gaga in the middle, this woman, in other words, being the only real actor – the others being simply script, something in the passé compose – the action or passion being played purely as theater, as a series of shuttling sets and crowd shots, then is it not the not that is in play? Though there seems to have been some ruffling of religious feathers after the video’s release, Judas does not offend in the heretical sense because there is no unspooling of real belief. Rather, the imagery here is excremental, sacrament as excrement, as the residual of symbolizing that looks like the shit, but isn’t it. The constituent absent.

Unlike Christ on the Cross or a crutch, or the crotch of Christ analyzed by Leo Steinberg as the Renaissance artists’ proof of Christ’s humanity (necessary for the Renaissance audience, who had no problem believing in the predicate divinity), the Judas Christ is done before He’s begun. He’s Risen and Ready to Rock & Roll. For this “king with no crown” there’s both purple and gold, buckets of the stuff, and backup guys and gals galore, but the turf is astro- and gang-ish, the music Euro synth-pop-like, not percussive or otherwise prone to beating, the break water is just water breaking, and a cistern of holy water is transcendent as a hot tub time machine. The Judas lyrics are a comparable grab-bag of Christian iconographic sound-bites stripped of iconic sense: “Even after three times, he betrays me.” Three times being incantory of something, though not of Peter, though there is a reference to a brick, which is sort of like a rock, which is sort of like an item that can be used for good or bad, though there’s nothing inherent in this or that which underscores or troubles any thesis or theodicy. We’ve got nothing but signification and a star to sail her by. But we also know this nothing is not nothing, that the beaver must be in order for it to not be (the trace of the vanishing signifier presupposes its predicate), effacing the man, any man, man being me in addition to you and whoever you happen to be beside, and thus the Gaga/the Magdalena/the Beaver subs in for saviour & sinner & the sinner who saves. It means nothing but its own allusiveness where allusiveness is simply allusion. Excremental-lite, like long sentences for minor crimes. The only thing that saves Judas from the weight of its own triviality is the way Gaga herself stands for the residual of the Symbolic via the excess of the Imaginary. As noted in the line “I just speak in future tense,” just as the players in this faux-Passion wear the talismans of that which is to come – crosses, cruciform, a crown of thorns – but it’s not bloody, but bling, cachè-4-cash, there’s no trauma in this except the punched-out hole of our desire for meaning. This is the minor note of nihilism, one not born of belief, or belief’s best friend, irony, but one thrown from a subject that only knows itself via its facebook profile. And that’s the face of real terror: the stone-cold stare into the fact there is no mirror, just mask and the nothing that lies beneath. Gaga is not a Warholian screen, for the Warholian screen fundamentally participates in our fantasy of self, that we are something, that I somehow am. Gaga is the digital surface, a composition that exists only in the act of composing, which is always an adaptation, another kind of referral without referent. “Judas kiss” is the kiss that betrays; when Gaga sings, “Judas kiss if you’re offended, you betray me,” she plays a faux mirror-move because if you take offense to this, this beaver, this punch-point, you betray the “me” of Gaga, but there’s no “me” that’s her, because, if you’ll remember, she’s monstrously “you.”

Author Bio:

Vanessa Place writes poetry, prose, and art criticism; she is also a criminal lawyer and co-director of Les Figues Press. Her most recent work is available in French as Exposé des Faits, and in English as Statement of Facts. Kenneth Goldsmith has called Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex, and controversial literature being written today.”

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Refusing to Atone for Atonality: Gaga’s Rupture of Affective Mirroring

By Amanda Montei

The following piece is the fifth in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here; the second, here; the third, here; the fourth, here.

Lady Gaga notoriously serves up deceptively simple lyrics, but in “Judas” there is an apparent note of mockery in her voice, an accent that vamps up and parodies the hyper-masculine biker culture that lays the narrative framework for the video. The vocal tone is reminiscent of much of her other work, particularly “Poker Face,” with its drawn out yet truncated pronunciation of final consonants and syllables (e.g. “Ma” instead of “My”). This apparently mocking, slang-slanted tone is inviting, and begs interrogation from the viewer, but also seems to have a special relationship to Gaga’s use of aesthetic tonality.

The tone of Gaga’s career – that is, “its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world” – is essentially the tone she evokes in the “Judas” video writ large. Sianne Ngai has written, using Melville’s narratives as a reference point, that tone can no longer be considered something inherent to a work, but is rather a process of affective circuitry that occurs between an aesthetic object and its reader/viewer.[i]

Gaga’s vocal tone in “Judas” reeks of irony, as does the general “disposition” of the video: the lyrics are Madonna-esque in their pop girlishness; the conceptual framework of the video, in characteristic Gaga style, is ostentatiously chic and iconoclastic; the dancing is relatively simplistic, at times even charade-like (Gaga shapes a heart as she sings “still in love with Judas, baby”); the bathtub scene is highly satirical as an unapologetic embodiment of “pop” soiling religiosity. But as Ngai reminds us, irony is a target-directed stance, and Gaga infers no clear target in the video. If Judas and Jesus are to be interpreted as dual dueling forces, whose side is Gaga on? Not even the gun – the infamous lipstick gun – can really be said to indicate any sort of organizing affect, as its normally masculinized violent inflection is re-inscribed, making it a symbol of the “feminine.” Interestingly, it is at this point that the video goes silent, and a marked void or absence pauses the narrative flow as Gaga sweeps her hands up her body, signaling a nod to feminine desire as void, as only defined, in Western patriarchy, by what is not male. Or in Mary Magdalene/Gaga’s case, what is not Jesus and/or Judas.

But the video quickly abandons this pause, and we return to scenes of desperate “clinging” to. We get another scene, in the tub, and we wonder: who is Gaga in bed with?

The final scene is perhaps the only indication of any clear target of irony. Finding herself torn between the duality of good and evil, between Judas and Jesus, Gaga/Mary herself becomes the victim of stone-throwers. She collapses in a bird-like akimbo fold, and we end on Gaga (now outside the narrative, though there is no indication as to where she “stands”) with a single jewel on one cheek, a single tear on the other, and her face full of yearning. Are we to believe that Gaga then is the aim of the irony here? This could be said to align with lyrics from the bridge, which explicitly name Gaga a “fame hooker.” Is the irony directed then towards fame itself? Or is she a networked symbol of all of us, torn between too many dualities? Or, in a circular fashion, can we conclude that Gaga’s split loyalty between the false dichotomy of good and evil – which is the heavily frontloaded force throughout the video – is the ultimate target of Gaga’s ironic play?

Clearly, we cannot place Gaga’s performance here – or elsewhere – into such a definitive aesthetic category. Recent reactions from the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue only highlight the amorphousness of “Judas”:

In her “Judas” video, Lady Gaga plays fast and loose with Catholic iconography, and generates several untoward statements, but she typically dances on the line without going over it. Perhaps that is because the video is a mess. Incoherent, it leaves the viewer more perplexed than moved. The faux-baptismal scene is a curious inclusion, as is her apparent fondness for the Jesus character. But if anyone thinks the Catholic League is going to go ballistic over Lady Gaga’s latest contribution, they haven’t a clue about what really constitutes anti-Catholicism.

Donahue seems hardly able to contain the frustration he feels with the “loose” use of iconography, Gaga’s dancing “on the line without going over it,” and the “faux” quality that makes the video unable to be reductively labeled as simply anti-Catholic.

Gaga’s tonal ambiguity is precisely where the power of her work lies. By circumventing this ironic target-practice, Gaga’s work consistently gives the viewer the “meta-ironic feeling of an irony intended for and available to everyone but oneself.” To use Mikel Dufrenne’s term, the “expressed world” of the video, and of ideology itself, is destabilized, leaving the viewer in state of suspension. This denies any viewer the experience we normally associate with Hollywood glamour and fame: projection. We cannot map ourselves on Gaga, not even to say that she has created in “Judas” an aesthetically pleasing critique of Catholicism. This process of atonality forces viewers and Little Monsters everywhere into a confrontation not only with “Bartlebyan stuckness” – which for Ngai is inextricably linked to ideological marginalization – but also into a queer revelry within such stuckness.

Ngai argues that traditionally, two kinds of textual interactions have been used in art and aesthetics (both in practice and in criticism). The first is sympathy, which gives us “a perfectly symmetrical circuit of affective communication.” We feel what a character feels, and we identify with them. While “Judas” is full of “objectified affect,” and points to this through hyperbole and artifice (fake nails, fake eyebrows, Gaga faking feelings towards Jesus when she really loves Judas), we cannot feel what Gaga feels as we aren’t sure, in a holistic sense. Gaga-as-Mary, after all, is still just Gaga-as-Mary, where Mary as a character is a conduit for Gaga’s persona, which constantly invades our readings of her work.

The second kind of viewer-text relationship is that of projection, wherein the viewer misrecognizes the work, and slaps their “self,” and the feeling the objectified text evokes in them, right onto the work. The artwork is then understood “as if” the feeling a work elicits “were an intrinsic property of the work itself.” In both models, aesthetic encounters are reduced to “affective mirroring.” The process is a closed circuit, and the viewer can momentarily step into, in a Freudian-Lacanian sense, Ideal (but false) figurations of stable and fixed selfhood. This is normally how we interact with celebrity – fame is where we find ourselves. Gaga invites the death of this kind of interaction with fame symbolically, killing off Mary/Gaga/Fame Hooker in the final exultant scene.

It is only when our aesthetic judgment is forced “out of its mirror stage,” that we become incredibly uncomfortable with the affective experience we have with an aesthetic object. Ngai uses Melville’s The Confidence-Man to show how an alternative, negative model of aesthetic engagement produces “dysphoric feelings” in a reader/viewer – feelings of stuckness that mimic feelings of stuck agency – by offering only “the perception of an unfelt feeling.” We have a crystallized version of this in the scene of the “feminine” (as the category exists in Western thought/ideology) mentioned earlier: Gaga/Mary is captured in a moment of suspension standing on a bed of rocks in a fashion model pose as a wave hits her back. The moment is acathartic and liminal. Such a state of deferment is particularly analogous to the “feminine,” in that “woman” as a category is unreachable in any stable way, and as such, the gender category is a vast lacuna (as are all the other “categories” Gaga spotlights here), which Gaga proceeds to fill in with a kind of cultural fete.

Gaga’s work, which simply cannot be divorced from her persona-performance, actually furthers Melville’s negative model by triangularizing tonality. We are left only with questions, with responses, with G.S. and theory, and this points radically towards a vacuous space of unfeltness that exists at the center of a constellation of ideological binaries and systems, which seek to censure/censor her politics. Gaga takes pleasure in this space, and here is where her work becomes particularly radical. She actually transforms the feeling of stuckness – the state of abeyance experienced by marginalized groups in our imperialist late-capitalist moment – into a fuck-you moment of proudly debauched and decorated joy in resisting absolutist tonality. In turn, we feel this. She offers us that. This is not to say that she valorizes marginalized states of stuck agency, but rather that her work, if we let it, allows us to affectively proceed towards a pleasurable engagement with Symbolic rupture.

Refusing to allow pop a “status as an object of general unconcern,” and refusing to allow the “affective mirroring” normally associated with fame, “Judas” refuses to atone for atonality. This move seems to answer Claire Johnston’s call for a feminist/queer film practice that “opens up the possibility of a different Symbolic Order,” as well as Kristeva’s notions of rupturing “the structure or system of exchange and communication on which signification is founded.”[ii]

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[i] Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004).

[ii] Johnston, Claire. “Towards a Feminist Film Practice.” Movies and Methods. (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of Berkeley, 1985).

Author Bio:

Amanda Montei is recent graduate of the CalArts MFA Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ms. Magazine, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PANK, Nanofiction, Night Train, Harriet, and others. She blogs for Ms. Magazine, and sometimes maintains an amorphous blog of her own at bluebloodbabyblech.blogspot.com. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Gaga/Magdalene: Unpacking Prostitution in “Judas”

By Lesley Kinzel

The following piece is the fourth in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here; the second, here; the third, here.

The historical record of Mary Magdalene may well be one of the most far-reaching cases of posthumous character assassination that Western Judeo-Christian culture has ever seen, or perpetrated. The result is that she may be the most mysterious and misunderstood woman that the world has yet known, having spent most of recorded human history misidentified as a prostitute until the label was withdrawn during Vatican II in 1969.

A thousand years of alleged whoredom is not a mark easily washed away, and so Mary Magdalene’s name continues to be synonymous with “prostitute” in popular culture. These days, it is generally accepted amongst biblical scholars that in her own time, Mary Magdalene was not so defined by the “seven demons” – whatever they may have been – from which she was liberated by Jesus. Her primary role was as one of the more crucial apostles. This is not to suggest she didn’t run into obstructionist misogyny even then. In the apocryphal gospel attributed to Mary Magdalene there is a story of her receiving a vision from the resurrected Jesus, and Peter immediately gives her shit about it:

“Did he then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?” Then Mary grieved and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart or that I am lying concerning the Savior?”

With a woman. A woman, then as now, could not be entirely trusted to tell the truth, to take the high road, to lead a movement of people. Women are naturally wicked, of course, prone to lies and suspicious motives, and so Mary Magdalene had to be made a prostitute in order to prove out the view that women do not belong as leaders and thinkers and takers of action – in the church, or anywhere else, for that matter. Her actions no longer have meaning if she took them for money. Are we to turn back and all listen to her? To a woman?

In the video for “Judas,” Lady Gaga takes on the role of Mary Magdalene, traveling with him and the rest of the apostles to a reminagined “New Jerusalem.” The Gaga/Magdalene connection is not surprising, given that Gaga has often been labeled a prostitute, an attention-whore, or otherwise as a woman who does not know her place. In the video, Gaga is repeatedly torn between Jesus and Judas, between sainthood and sin. She plays the role tough, with a swagger that heavily (and more than a little problematically) co-opts Latino gang culture. Gaga attempts to protect Jesus, both from Judas and from her own sinful “hooker”-y urges in Judas’ direction, and she, like most of us, is only halfway successful.

In the video’s pivotal scene, Gaga stands between Judas and Jesus at the moment of betrayal, prepared to kill Judas to stop the events that will result in Jesus’ death. Jesus, with a subtle shake of his head, instructs her to stand down, and Gaga collapses in despair. Before she falls, she smears vivid red lipstick on Judas’ face – a screaming look-at-me color, nothing demure about it – and prepares him for the kiss that will ultimately destroy both of the men she loves.

Judas has also been historically misunderstood, long thought to have betrayed Jesus to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver, himself a prostitute insofar as performing an allegedly immoral action in exchange for money. Contemporary scholarship has begun to doubt this version of events, however, arguing instead that Jesus asked Judas to “betray” him because he was the only apostle he could trust to do so. Either of these stories involve equal amounts of prostitution, as in both cases Judas is not kissing Jesus because he wants to, but because doing so promises a valuable reward, be it money or immortality. Obviously, the Christ narrative means little without crucifixion and death – the betrayal and death of Jesus in this story is as necessary as it is tragic.

Interestingly, Jesus’ death is totally absent from the “Judas” video, as are any of the historical events to follow Judas’ betrayal. Gaga instead reshapes the betrayal narrative as a metaphor for her own persona, caught between the competing assumptions about who she is and what she is trying to do. Is she a “fame hooker” as others have called her, and as she calls herself? Are her motives selfish or selfless? She confuses us at every turn; all we can expect from her is something we have failed to anticipate.

Immediately following the lipstick application, straddling the distance between Gaga’s despair and the prostitute-kiss between Judas and Jesus, the video breaks to a dream sequence in which a motionless Gaga is overcome by a cascade of waves reminsicent of the early mythological origins of a much older deity: the Greek goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite.

Gaga thereby connects herself with another powerful, otherworldly feminine archetype worshipped long before Jesus was a glimmer in his [F]ather’s eye, and one also associated with sacred prostitution. Aphrodite literally means “out of the foam”; as the story goes, she was born of the ocean, after Uranus’ son castrated (or possibly emasculated) the elder god and threw his severed genitals into the sea. Given the persistent rumors that Gaga is intersex, or possesses both male and female genitalia, the depiction of her in the role of a distinctly feminine, sex-centric goddess born as a result of the removal of male genitalia is both tongue-in-cheek and incredibly apt.

Gaga, however, is not lifted up by the waves in this iteration, but is rather knocked down by them, foreshadowing her demise at the end of this story, and, as she vanishes beneath the deluge, illustrating an erasure of feminine archetypes of power and leadership. Following this interlude, Gaga shares a ritual bath with both Jesus and Judas; now she is no common whore but a sacred prostitute, as in Aphrodite’s temple in Cornith, where sexual intercourse is a form of worship. In so doing, she honors the two biggest competing parts of herself: the one that wants to create art that makes a better world, and the one that simply wants to be famous and adored.

As Gaga’s videos go, “Judas” is curiously chaste, even given the prostitution themes. The closest Gaga comes to intimating sex with either Jesus or Judas is in the looks she gives them, but her physical contact with both men is either protective (as in the fight in the electric chapel), or violent (as when she shoves Judas down the stairs when they enter), or caretaking (as in her efforts to ritually clean the feet of both men in the temple bath). Visible sex is superfluous in this context. Here we are not meant to be looking at the defining acts of a prostitute; we are meant to be looking at the ideologies that create her as a cultural monster, the anti-woman.

The video concludes with Gaga wearing a heavily-embellished white dress, similar to a wedding gown, a primary symbol of purity and chastity. Of course, for Gaga to present herself in such a way is the ultimate blashemy – prostitutes can’t be wives, you know; prostitutes are women to be used and thrown away, not loved or respected, and once you have been a prostitute you can never be anything else. And so she is stoned by an angry mob. The video ends with her death, both Jesus and Judas tellingly absent, Gaga facing her detractors alone.

Gaga’s demise represents not only those who would punish her for failing to know her proper role, for daring to aspire beyond acceptable limits, but also the quick and complete destruction of any form of feminine power that is not othered and subjugated to the masculine. The dead Gaga is both the erased Aphrodite and the slandered Mary Magdalene, as well as every other woman who has had her reputation and her life destroyed for daring to raise her voice, to draw attention, or to have sex outside the boundaries men have set. Gaga adopts her “fame hooker” mantle even knowing the potential consequences.

The church made Mary Magdalene a prostitute because, according to popular cultural connotations going back as long as misogyny has existed, a prostitute is one of the worst things a woman can be. A prostitute is a woman who squanders the one thing she has of value, her sex, by selling it to whomever is willing to pay. Prostitution is culturally-coded as the opposite of selflessness, the ministration of pleasure by a woman whose motives are only to satisfy her lover when doing do enables her to satisfy herself. She comes first, in payment, or gratification, or both. Sex is not her privilege, nor a treasured opportunity to worship the masculine, but is rather an occupation by which she can support herself. A prostitute is a woman who is self-sufficient, a woman who needs no husband, no man to tell her how to live. She is a woman who resists convention for the sake of her own survival. “Judas” demands we look at our assumptions about women who dare to step outside the gendered boundaries, sexual and otherwise, that culture defines for us.

Author Bio:

Lesley Kinzel is a writer, lapsed academic, cultural critic, and fat lady extraordinaire. She writes about popular culture and body politics at http://twowholecakes.com, and is currently working on her first book for The Feminist Press. She lives just outside Boston, MA with her husband and three very spoiled cats.

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A “Fame Hooker” Speaking in Future Tense: Prophets and Profit in “Judas”

By Keri Ferencz

The following piece is the third in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here; the second, here.

Like “Born This Way” before it, “Judas” finds Lady Gaga caught “between two ultimate forces,” aware of the dangers yet attracted to both. Whereas in “Born This Way” Gaga, “herself split into two,” embodies both creation and destruction, in “Judas” the oppositional forces are externalized and personified, making explicit her attempt at serving both. Given the complexity of Gaga’s project, it is possible to theorize any number of oppositions she might be caught between; of particular interest to this reading of the “Judas” music video are Lady Gaga’s seemingly contradictory desires for fame and transcendence through art, and how “the pendulum of choice” dances between the two.

With its undeniable ties to commerce and capitalism, fame or commercial success is generally positioned as oppositional and base compared to transcendence or religious experience, though today’s practice of deifying celebrities does mark a tenuous connection between the two. Gaga has made no secret of her desire to be famous, and the iconography of earlier videos, most notably “Paparazzi,” firmly positions her as a woman attracted to the spoils of her fame, however destructive that fame might be. Simultaneously, Gaga goes out of her way to assert that her fame is irrelevant without the platform it affords her, telling Anderson Cooper “I don’t want to make money…I want to make a difference.” Ultimately she seems to understand that fame is merely the candy-coated shell of divinity; true icons need more than flashbulbs and fans to mark them as divine, not the least of which is a clear doctrine. Though Gaga alluded to such a manifesto in the Fame Monster era, with “Born This Way,” she presents her doctrine in no uncertain terms: be who you were born to become.

The “infinite birth” of the new race in “Born This Way” strikes to the heart of this doctrine and thus the religious or transcendent element of Lady Gaga’s project. In her Manifesto of Little Monsters, Gaga places special emphasis on the importance of “the spiritual hologram of who we…become,” which serves to remind that living is above all a process of becoming. French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari echo this notion, and suggest that becoming always begins by making a pact with an exceptional individual[i] – in the case of little monsters, that pact is with Lady Gaga herself. Gaga has, more than any entertainer that has come before, fashioned herself as a gateway to becoming (or self-realization) for her fans, hence her position as Mother Monster leading her children to salvation.

Once Gaga’s faithful have become self-actualized, confident in their individual monstrosities, there is little need for Gaga as guru unless she presents herself as a necessary, the one exceptional product that can offer passage to the plane of transcendence and becoming. In order to continue to make a difference – to “protect something so perfect” as her little monsters – Mother Monster must sell and re-sell herself as such, taking pieces of silver from her public as payment for being the one and only gateway to self-realization. Ultimately, she must therefore remain firmly attached to her fame, and thus her Judas, consumer culture.

Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver is undoubtedly familiar to most. The Gospel of John imagines Judas as a thief whose weakness was money, providing a scriptural basis for considering him as representative of consumer culture in Lady Gaga’s “Judas” music video. Whereas the video portrays Jesus as stoic, set above the violence and sex of the Electric Chapel, Judas is very much of the people, embracing multiple women (2:08) and gleefully engaging in a bar fight, at one point even disappearing into a group of writhing bodies (2:49), further aligning him with the mass often associated with contemporary consumer culture.

More explicit evidence for reading Lady Gaga’s imagining of Judas as an agent of consumer culture lies in the relationship between the two that is implied in the narrative. The pair’s mutual attraction is palpable, however there are two moments when it is clear that the Judas character sees Gaga/Mary Magdalene as an object to be possessed. First, with a glance, as Gaga and Jesus make their way through the crowd; Judas leers at Gaga with ravenous eyes as though she were a delicacy to be eaten rather than a human subject (2:38). The second instance occurs while Gaga is prostrate at the feet of both Jesus and Judas; Judas empties a can of beer onto her back (4:49) as though to baptise her with the holy water of mass culture.

Both moments serve not only to confirm Judas as the roustabout the song’s lyrics suggest, but also to make explicit that Judas – as an agent of consumer culture – understands Gaga to be a thing. Regardless, Gaga, the self-confessed “fame hooker” is “in love with Judas, baby,” and is thus wilfully complicit with that which objectifies her. She paints the lips that, with a kiss, will symbolize the betrayal of Jesus and a turning away from what is purely sacred. In love with and necessarily clinging to fame and that which is necessary for fame, Gaga cannot do away with her Judas, even if that means her seeming duplicity is revealed for all to see.

Complicit in his betrayal or not, within the narrative of the video Gaga as Mary Magdalene is also fiercely protective of Jesus, who can be read as a personification of all that is deemed pure and sacred in Gaga’s project, including her art, her doctrine, and her little monsters. Gaga leads a Jesus who is very much not of this world through the Electric Chapel as would a bodyguard, and when strife erupts, it is Gaga who protects Jesus and not vice versa (3:19). This is reminiscent of Lady Gaga’s attitude towards her little monsters, specifically the way she has been known to shield her fans from “violent and dangerous” right-wing protesters. Lyrically, Gaga claims “Jesus is my virtue,” (4:26) further suggesting him as representative of the most pure elements of her project.

Although she may play a part his betrayal, there is a sense, as in the Gospels of John and Matthew, that her betrayal is understood and forgiven even before it has occurred. During the second chorus of the song, as Gaga sings “I’m in love with Judas,” the camera finds Jesus watching blankly, seemingly unsurprised by her confession (2:05). Later, when Gaga as Mary Magdalene has the opportunity to prevent Judas’ kiss, Jesus almost imperceptibly shakes his head no (3:27), allowing the betrayal to occur. This moment of self-sacrifice on the part of Jesus causes Gaga to fall to her knees, in both grief and relief. Jesus has turned the other cheek to Lady Gaga’s duplicity, accepting her willingness to sacrifice him and thus the purity of her work as necessary for the greater good, the creation of the new “race within the race of humanity…which bears no prejudice, no judgement, but boundless freedom.”

“I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public…I can show you so you’re not looking for it,” Lady Gaga told Elle magazine in January of 2010. Though Gaga was referring to the “Paparazzi” video, the quote is equally applicable to “Judas,” which ends with Gaga stoned to death by a crowd partially comprised of the apostles-cum-gang members. Hyper-aware of the pitfalls of fame, Gaga delivers “Judas” and “Paparazzi” – portrayals of those pitfalls and her downfall – so that we may not seek to destroy her ourselves, as we have done to so many icons before her. More to the point of this analysis, with “Judas,” Lady Gaga is laying herself bare, washing herself clean by admitting her duplicity and necessary attachment to consumer culture and her love of the fame that comes with it.

Far from being a selfish act and yet not entirely selfless, Gaga’s mediation of the oppositional forces of consumer culture and transcendence personified in “Judas” is a task worthy of Atlas. Crafting her art from both while simultaneously working to prevent the destructive collapse of one into the other, in remaining upright under the weight, Lady Gaga holds herself open as a channel towards self-realization for all her little monsters standing in the darkness.

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[i] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (London: Continuum, 1987), 244.

Author Bio:

Keri Ferencz is currently writing a thesis on the religious dimensions of pop music fandom as part of her M.A. in Popular Culture at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Culture junkie, movie maniac, bookworm, and lover of all things Yacht Rock, Keri lives in Toronto where she tries to inhabit a life-size choose your own adventure novel. 

She can be found singing like a bird at http://www.twitter.com/keri_lotion.

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Betrayal/Forgiveness

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here.

This essay examines four dualities surrounding “Judas” the song and Judas the video: (1) Gaga’s equation of forgiveness and betrayal in a recent interview, (2) the wordplay of “Biblical sense” and (3) of “conjugal sense” in the bridge verse of the song, and finally (4) that of Judas/Jesus themselves. What I suspect is interesting about each of these dualities is that, in the process of doubling or mirroring that takes place between the opposing poles, the emphasis is on the collapse of the duality into one (ambiguous?) unity. Though doubles may often operate as diametrically-opposed principles-in-conflict, or provide a better understanding of two concepts/characters through contrast, the doubles in Gaga’s “Judas” more often deal in reduction to a single principle or character, and the ensuing ambiguity of opposites becoming one and the same.

First, what of Gaga’s statement that betrayal and forgiveness “go hand in hand.” In the context of “Judas,” how are these two concepts, these two actions, similar, connected, even the same? How might this be understood? Betrayal can be thought of as abandoning or turning against a principle or person. For example, Judas betrayed Jesus in both senses; he abandoned, even attacked, Jesus by giving Jesus to his enemies. At the same time, he contravened and threw down the principle of Jesus’ teachings, to which as a disciple he had dedicated himself. He betrayed both Jesus and himself. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is purposeful, loving acceptance. A person can forgive another person or something more nebulous like fate or society. People even forgive themselves, either for something they’ve done to another or for some personal failing damaging or relevant only to themselves. In a more radical sense, forgiveness means to overlook or ignore something, as when God forgives the sins of men.

So what does it mean to say these two concepts “go hand in hand,” as Gaga does? What connection can they have? Over the course of her short career, Lady Gaga has espoused a message of self-acceptance and self-creation (or transformation) – isn’t this as much a paradox or contradiction as equating betrayal and forgiveness? These two uncertainties have the same answer: the self is fundamentally a continuing transformation; if it accepted what it was, forgave itself at some point, and thus abandoned that transformative nature, then it would have also betrayed itself. The self is not born that way, the way it was at some specific point, but born this way in an always-moving, always-changing present.

Lady Gaga, especially with the release of singles from and information about the upcoming Born This Way album, suggests that the true self is a kind of creative, transformative principle. It is artistic expression, rather than an artistic expression, and thus acceptance and embodiment of that true nature requires both change and artifice. The true self is art-ificial, something consciously made anew constantly.

In recently released HBO behind-the-scenes footage of the Monster Ball, Lady Gaga, in tears, says that she still sometimes feels like “a loser,” even when up on stage performing before thousands of screaming adorers. The Lady Gaga persona is not a comfortable expression of Stefani Germonatta’s true nature, it is not Stefani Germonatta’s essential self; rather, it is an act of will, carried out despite fear and weakness, a process of self-formation that is identical to the overcoming of fears and insecurities that are, of course, essential to her self in some way – the persona, her self, is a self-overcoming. In this sense, then, the transformative, performative aspect is united with the idea of an essence. Essence is self-overcoming. Continual transformation, despite and even for the sake of fear and danger, is what the self ideally is. Given this, forgiveness as an acceptance of what already exists in the self is also a betrayal, because it abandons the principle of that self as transformative.

Thus, when asked about “body modification” (her bone-horns) in a recent Bazaar interview, Gaga answered, “Well, first of all, they’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones . . . they’ve always been inside me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am.” This quote simultaneously captures the extent to which artifice becomes natural in Gaga’s aesthetics or ethics of self (the prosthetics are real and are hers because she chooses them as such), and the way that essence is not a completed existence, but a living principle according to which the self is manifested, according to which it is continuously transformed into what it is. If Gaga had accepted her bone-horn-less self, forgiven that lack, she would have betrayed her self by abandoning its principle of change. Consider also her statement regarding Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest in the same interview: “In the video, we use Rico, who is tattooed head to toe. He was born that way. Although he wasn’t born with tattoos, it was his ultimate destiny to become to man he is today.” And his destiny to become the man he will be tomorrow.

This equation – forgiveness as a betrayal of oneself – takes on new meanings when refracted through the lenses of the other dualisms in the “Judas” song and video. I now move to the bridge verse of the song, which precedes immediately the central interlude of the music video: “In the most Biblical sense/I am beyond repentance/fame hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind/but in the conjugal sense/I just speak in future tense/Judas kiss me if offenced or wear ear condom next time.” In this verse, both “Biblical” and “conjugal” are each presented as having a singular “sense” – but both adjectives have fully-functioning double meanings. “Biblical” refers either to, of course, the Bible and Christian religion/theology in general, or to “knowing” someone “Biblically” – having sex with them. Likewise, “conjugal” may refer to both sex or marriage, and verb conjugation (“I just speak in future tense”). How do these senses relate to forgiveness, betrayal, and the self as an essential, transformative principle?

The two meanings of “Biblical sense” are brought out by the following lines: the reference to “repentance” indicates that Gaga is far beyond the betrayal of (asking for) forgiveness. Her revolutionary project – of self-fashioning, of artistic expression, of LGBT rights advocacy – is pure in its bravery, strength, and ferocity. In three senses, Lady Gaga is beyond repentance, is not afflicted by the doubt or hesitation with which acceptance of an imperfect world or self is to some extent synonymous. First, she does not risk caving to a fear that might prevent her continual self-overcoming. Second, her desire for fame is trumped by and cannot compromise her artistic drives. Third, she feels no desire to forgive an intolerant society its vices and thus temper her advocacy. But at the same time, the opposite of each of these propositions is true: she is only a “fame hooker,” prostituting herself for exactly what she claims to be beyond. The reflexive vomiting of her “mind,” her creativity, and even, perhaps, her advocacy, is all only a desperate ploy for acceptance.

“Conjugal sense” functions in the same Janus-faced fashion. Does the marriage suggested by “conjugal” indicate Gaga’s commitment to her revolutionary projects, or does it suggest her submission, her clinging to, fame and acceptance? Is she married to principle or to convenience? Is she a slatternly Eve (subservient wife and ancient damnation of Fallen Man), or is she the dedicated and pure nun betrothed to Jesus? Is her project all “future tense,” a continuously-evoked false promise? Or does it mean that she is truly committed to the future towards which she claims to work, the future of the “new race, free of prejudice”? Gaga is endlessly torn between two opposite poles (as suggested in the Manifesto of Mother Monster); Jesus, her virtue, calls her to self-overcoming, art, and the advocacy of social justice. At the same time, Judas, the demon she clings to, pulls her back to a betrayal of those principles – to an acceptance (forgiveness) of the world as it is now.

I believe that these paradoxes and ambiguities come to fruition in the final duality, that which is obviously the fundamental allegory of the song and video: Jesus and Judas. The intimate and fraught relationship of these two figures has suggested itself to many readers. Judas, in one sense the ultimate villain, is required for the success of the ultimate hero, Jesus. And who needs Jesus, who claimed to come for the sake of sinners, more than the ultimate sinner? Jesus requires Judas in order to be betrayed; Judas requires Jesus in order to be forgiven – both fundamentally need what the other represents. They make one another possible, not despite their diametrical opposition, but because of it. Would it be too extreme a stretch to regard them, like forgiveness and betrayal, like the unrepentant fame-hooker and the nun-whore, as two sides of the same coin?

This ambiguous unity of supposedly-opposed principles and identities is at the core of Gaga’s “Judas”: the collapse of distinctions is omnipresent in both song and video. The lyrics make it impossible to ever be sure who is singing to whom; indeed it is impossible to argue that there is a continual narrator or addressee at all. Take the first verse: “When he comes to me, I am ready/I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/Even after three times, he betrays me.” These lines include the possibilities of Jesus speaking about Judas (and about Peter), of Magdalene speaking about Jesus, and of the Gaga-character speaking about the Judas-character. They even suggest Jesus as a liar (or jealous lover), if the “he” of the foot-washing is the masculine owner of the lying tongue. What of the piercing, possibly furious, undoubtedly jealous gaze of Jesus in the video – who, it must be noted, lacks a name on his motorcycle jacket (another possible indicator that identity is ambiguous)? 

Does “king with no crown” refer unproblematically to Jesus, or does his crown of thorns, made not only explicit but positively gaudy in the video, disqualify him? Could Judas be the king with no crown? And given this uncertainty, is the Gaga of the lyrics “I’ll bring him down, bring him down-down” a weapon directed against Jesus or, as the video shows, a weapon directed by Jesus against Judas? Are the clung-to Judas and virtuous Jesus of the lyrics the same characters as those who bear their signifiers in the video? What does all this ambiguity suggest about that for which Gaga is struggling, and what is impeding, endangering, or opposing her struggle?

Nietzsche suggested, in a long-lost line from his posthumous-patchwork The Will to Power, the idea of “duality as too weak a unity.” I wonder if a similar thought is far from Gaga’s mind regarding the Judas project: she is clearly desperate to accomplish something, and at the same time desperately afraid of the forces (internal as much as external) that threaten that accomplishing. But in a song and video that set up an opposition so often treated as the ultimate black-and-white – Jesus and Judas – and then profoundly blurs the distinctions and identities involved, might she not be suggesting that, regarding her project and its impediments, her perception of duality is a weakness or a misunderstanding? Are her demons and her virtues, her weaknesses and her strengths, her fears and her hopes, really one and the same?

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