"[Gaga Stigmata has] very modern, edgy photography to free flowing, urban narratives without censure to analytical essays, et cetera—like Gaga, imagination without ... limits. And the beauty is that anyone can submit work to the site, so artists and writers from all over the [world] have joined this experiment." -The Declaration.org
"Since March 2010, [Gaga Stigmata] has churned out the most intense ongoing critical conversation on [Lady Gaga]." -Yale's The American Scholar
This is the fifth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.
There is only one consistently salient factor in artistic creation, and this is insanity.
By this I mean: when creating a new cultural product, the goal is to draw together elements that are noticeable and affecting, and since our attention mechanisms are governed by pattern differentiation, we must create something that does not slot into the automatically processed functionalities of quotidian cultural life. Our eyes must not pass over it unfazed.
This is simple stuff, and covered by everyone from here to Timbuktu, but the frequency with which this principle is revisited by artists suggests a kind of fractal blossoming at the center of the idea. Madness is not a finite thing, and therefore does not produce finite things.
When we speak of madness we speak either of an underfunctioning or an overfunctioning of certain aspects of consciousness. We parse the largely unpredictable world around us into patterns and organizing narratives. We must do this to a certain extent to be sane – we must slot our narratives into the narratives of the social superstructure and oil the juncture well so’s to avoid grinding gears. We become the things we believe in this way, and social life is a thing we all believe together.
If you don’t create enough patterns, you clearly can’t function socially; our society doesn’t leave time for you to process undifferentiated experience and large systems of heuristics are necessary. But you run into problems if you go in the opposite direction too.
If you create too many patterns. If you believe in something else, something the consensus doesn’t cover.
So Gaga has hit bottom. She’s lying (not laying) in that hospital bed and she’s telling that nurse that she’s going to be a star because…because…because she has nothing left to lose. We can safely interchange star with artist, here, I think. We could problematize that too, but we won’t for the time being.
She says she fills in the holes in her life with art. What does that mean? Yes, mean indeed. What does it mean. Any of it.
That’s the point, you know. She’s trying to make it mean something. Her life.
The artist in this case has been rejected by the social superstructure. The ordinary corridors of expression are closed, the tendrils of hierarchical unworthiness tighten their grip. No more dancing for you. So what’s the solution? Where do you go?
You go crazy.
All you need is a bedazzler and some torn denim. And Cheerios. Lots and lots of Cheerios.
This crisis scene is a scene of degradation, because degradation is what is necessary. We assess social value and appropriateness on a relative scale of familiarity, and so to become crazy you must become low. If you want immediate positive social recognition for your crazy, you’re going to be disappointed. This scene isn’t comfortable, and it’s not supposed to be. It has a certain glamor, because of the production value – and she discusses this in her video interview afterward. The cameras do certain things. But she immersed herself in the scene for a half-hour. She lost her mind. Free association. Rejection of usefulness. No social value. Let’s writhe around and play with our food.
Victor Turner discusses how, during initiation, the social role and value of the initiated are removed. They are reduced to being nothing. To being no-one, so that they can build a new social identity on the other side. Or seven.
She goes crazy. But this is the process. And she looks like she could take on the flaming, exploding world at the end of it. She looks ready for anything. Her armor and her makeup, and her makeup is her armor, and her armor is her makeup.
Gaga reclaims, over and over again, the idea of the hero. We’ve spent long decades politicizing and autopsying that kind of rash, egoistic self-confidence. Baptizing yourself in your own worthiness is so hegemonic. So pre-postcolonial. Who are you to hold your own values aloft and obsess over them? You’re a crazy person.
I was, before I saw the video, planning on placing her work in theoretical juxtaposition, antagonism really, with Chris Kraus’s work. Kraus, in Where Art Belongs, talks about the necessity of art as an outgrowth of marginal spaces; the artifacted embodiment of a particular time and place, a local grouping, an immediate culture, a self found in alleyways, a vital street-level or interpersonal dialog. But Gaga has always been about projection of artifice into a monolith of heroism, a kind of collaged who’s-who of Springsteens and Warrior Princesses and other larger-than-life cultural übertropes; in a way not marginal at all (despite her politicizations, she is very pop). There is no space of “real-moment-documentation” a la Kraus’s work in "Telephone" or "Judas" or whatever; they’re almost the opposite of that.
But this bombshell is one of the most Krausian works I’ve ever seen, and the moment I watched it I knew she was fucking my thesis all to hell. In I Love Dick, Kraus transforms her obsessive love, her adulterous madness, into an object that demands recognition in all its size and complexity, and consequently transforms herself into the same. This is what Gaga is doing here – unmediated moments like the ones we see are unassailable in their unconstructedness, like documentary. This is the kind of performance art I love – if a real loss of self occurs, if instinctive, method-actor emotionalities are accessed, we’re assaulted by the aesthetic arrest of the unclothed human animal.
We’re crazy, crazy animals, we are.
Crazy, like I said, can involve building an intimidatingly signifying mythos disconnected from reality, and Gaga’s done that too. But it’s less completely disconnected, and more pathologically disconnected. Her movement and gesture are clearly informed by her pain. This is not some escapist fantasy, but a baptismal reliving; a ritual, in the sense of a really vital ritual, like a drug-addled shaman being ridden by a voodoo loa. She is allowing her past to control her to the point of possession, and she is turning that into a game – a bioanxiety-defying act of existential courage.
But the past is still there, and the sculpture of madness is chiseled with knives of pain. When we stand back and behold it, it’s beautiful. But the painting, the one she’s filling in the holes of, is a tableaux about very egoistically threatening human experiences. This is not an escape from pain, but a bent, schizophrenic compromise with it, the way some of the most agonized religious iconographies are also some of the most beautiful. She made the difficult choice to excavate what pieces she could of her traumas, and made a deal with a devil we all know, because once we were all scared little kids that hated ourselves. She married the night.
This is also a video of celebration, of liberation. But it is a mad celebration, a mad liberation – in our limited lives, perhaps the only kind we can really have.
Author Bio:
Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, and branding practitioner. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com and http://devinoneill.blogspot.com.
This is the fourth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.
Lady Gaga’s performance of “Marry the Night”on the UK television show TheX Factor opens with Gaga singing from beneath a lit cross, a sacred symbol that is also a secular mathematical sign, its x and y axes connected with the valentine shape, symbolic both of Saint Valentine who was beheaded and of the only thing that can connect opposition, which is the binding and magnetic force of Love. Lady Gaga’s song manages to link the world of imaginary street-walking, which is the literal meaning of marrying the night, to the world of intimacy with her dark side to achieve wholeness and thereby holiness, or self-actualization, realizing the divine image within. Behind the cross is a full moon. The images Gaga uses in this particular performance of “Marry the Night”carry with them an excess of meaning to achieve polysemy. Gaga uses images and icons from sacred and mythic realms that bring with them residual authority to empower her humanitarian message of not giving up on oneself after facing adversity.
Gaga stands behind an iron grate of a mausoleum, or perhaps the grate of a confessional, her right hand crossed over her heart in profession of truth and/or confession of sin, which St. Augustine believes is ultimately a confession of faith, making her commitment in song to marrying the night, to exploring the streets on her own, to confronting her dark side, to being alone without grieving, to looking at her own otherness and making peace with it, and/or to creating in solitude; she accepts her decision and all the ramifications that go along with it. As the song progresses, she gains ardor and confidence in her words, and acquires the ability to take off the old woman, so to speak, and to put on the new one. She comes to life, resurrected, as her true self, for in her commitment to the Night, she finds her light, akin to those who take the via negativa.
As Gaga exits the crypt or tiny church, like a female Christ rising from the dead, the audience discovers that she, like the medieval Green Knight who exits Camelot’s court in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight holding his head, holds her own head in her own arm; but unlike the Green Knight, who arrives whole and asks for a challenger to decapitate him, Gaga’s decapitated figure arrives onstage a fait accompli, her audience having no clue of her history. Given the gist of the song, and the mythical female images of moon, heart, and night used thus far, the viewer/listener is lead to believe the figure was a victim of some kind of unspecified tragedy at the hands of patriarchy. Moon, heart, and night are common and repeated images in the sonnet sequence tradition, which are a series of poems that create a narrative usually constituting a long and detailed complaint about love. In light of this, Gaga’s trauma when dropped by her first record label wounded her to the core. And in this performance of the song, Gaga picks up her shattered being and commits to move forward by re-investing in her work instead of buying into that company’s evaluation of her.
The audience surmises the body is upper class because of the lace outfit and ornate necklace, but the blood around the neck speaks of female sacrifice that conjures up both suffering in love as well as religious devotion. Once again Gaga uses a host of icons in this performance – from the cross to the grate and the blood – which provides overtones of the sacred to the lyrics. These overtones provide a great deal of power and authority to the overall message of her performance. Matthew Fox writes that Christ is not just the light in everything but He “Is also the wounds in all things.” Furthermore, the decapitated body image conjures up some early French Feminist pieces of writing by Helene Cixous such as “Castration or Decapitation,” for example, which deal with a time in women’s history when woman was threatened with decapitation if she did not follow male orders. Since woman could not be castrated, given her biology, cutting off her head was the next best punishment. Actualizing this threat on two female leaders in front of 180 women, the Chinese General Sun Tse convinced the 180 to repress their desires and follow the King’s commands. In Gaga’s performance, however, the woman refuses repression. Gaga reverses the narrative by resurrecting the decapitated woman.
Additionally, the movement in the song“Marry the Night”from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa, wherein she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold her back from exploring what New York, the streets, and her imagination have to offer.
The first three quarters of TheX Factor performance portray Gaga as a singing severed head held by the decapitated corpse; the concept of a singing severed head reminds one of Orpheus, the poet that could make the stones move, whose decapitated head recited poetry while floating down the River Lesbos, after being separated from his body. Orpheus is the primary mythic representative of the great patriarchal poet; here, Gaga is the great Goddess of Pop Music.
Gustave Moreau, Head of Orpheus
Finally, the decapitated head is reminiscent of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which includes and describes any threat to the integrity of human identity; at the place of the wound, skin breaks open, and what should remain inside – blood – drips outside of the body. Seeing the human body in such a compromised state disturbs people and reminds them of their mortality, making the wound socially unacceptable for public display except perhaps in museum paintings. Interestingly, when individuals hurt, they hole themselves up behind closed doors in hospitals or in their homes to suffer in solitude as if their wounds were something to be ashamed of; however, in Gaga’s performance of this song, she transforms this shame by showing her stigmata so to speak, displaying the major wound of decapitation, the wounding unto the death, and her determination not to allow it to kill her, but to resurrect herself and recover to produce art out of her pain. Her marriage to the Night is a fertile one. The fruit she produces are her performances of her music live, in CDs and on video captured on DVDs. Feeling empowered fuels her excitement at the multiple possibilities ahead of her.
In the lyrics to the song, “Marry the Night,” Gaga refers to the via negativa directly in the words, “Gonna make love to this dark/ I’m a soldier to my own emptiness.”[i] Sheldrake and Fox write, “The negative way is the way of darkness, suffering, silence, letting go, and even nothingness. Emptiness. Emptying. All these are prayer: experiencing silence; being emptied of images, verbal, oral, and imaginative; letting go; and suffering. It’s not just about asking to be relieved from our suffering, it’s about entering into the process, to learn” (Fox & Sheldrake115). Gaga guards her own emptiness; therefore, emptiness is not something to be dreaded and eschewed, but a necessary ingredient of her creative endeavors. Once again Gaga’s diction carries with it dual associations – secular and sacred. The idea of emptiness connects to Christ’s kenosis – His choice to empty Himself of the Godhead to take on human form. It makes perfect sense, that the next line contains the result of this, i.e. the light, or the assertion “I’m a winner.” Gaga willingly enters into the darkness, into the process of letting go in order to learn, and it is inside of that very darkness that she discovers divine energy.
Ma ma ma marry the night
Ma ma ma marry the night
So begins the refrain,which not only stylistically echoes the refrain of Pokerface (Pa-pa-pa –Pokerface)[ii] and Judas (Jud-a-a Jud-a-a) but also sounds like someone saying either, “Mamama Mary, the night,” or “Mamama, marry the night”; the former functions as an address to the Mother Mary or the Virgin Mary, and the latter represents self-encouragement/self-convincing to go ahead with committing herself to the night, whatever that might mean to her – perhaps something frightening. The syllabic repetition of “Ma ma ma” is reminiscent of what feminist critic Julia Kristeva calls the chora, which reflects the child’s early relationship to the mother’s body and its sounds.[iii] Gaga’s inclusion of the alliterations and rhythms of the prelinguistic state in the song’s refrain is an important part of her song since it is a significant step toward wholeness and healing and it forms a significant part of everyone’s personhood. Furthermore, the semiotic is a subtext of discourse repressed by patriarchy and looked down upon as disruptive, contradictory, and meaningless or nonsensical. Gaga’s use of it in the song’s refrain highlights its true nature – its musicality and poetic beauty.
After the first verse and refrain, the very next stanza Gaga sings is sonically altered. The final syllable of every word is met with an echo, which makes one think of the myth of the female character by that very name. In Echo’s adventures with the self-interested Narcissus, her body is totally destroyed by this male’s rejection of her, and all that is left are bones. Her bones are turned into a cave, and she is only able to repeat Narcissus’ last syllable. Unlike Echo, Gaga will not allow anyone to take her life and power away from her. She will guard and protect it all, even her emptiness. She will not give up on life. If there is going to be any echo, it will be of her own voice, not of anyone else’s. Hence, her echo is not one of powerlessness but one of emphasis. The echo in Gaga’s song reveals that she is her own partner. Not only does she not need a man, she can parent herself. Unlike the mythic Echo, who can never again begin her own conversations, Gaga initiates her own language. She can be both parent and child. Analyzing subjectivity in French psycholinguistic feminism, critic Valerie Cetorelli asserts that according to Cixous, “woman’s writing is also an echo of the voice and body of the Mother who dominates the fantasies of the pre-Oedipal baby, providing thus a link to the pre-symbolic union between the self and m/other” (29). Thus, the first step toward healing in this song is a rapprochement in the mother-daughter relationship within herself.
Similar to the song “Judas” in which Judas, according to Gaga, “was not a betrayer [but] was just part of the over-arching destiny of the prophecy,” (qtd. on dtrtministries.com), so too in “Marry the Night” many opposing forces must be confronted, examined, and included in order for Gaga to achieve her creative dreams; she must marry the night in order to have the time and space to create. As she says about “Judas,”“Those things in your life that haunt you are just part of what you must go through in order to become great” (qtd. in Potter). This rich concept explains the visual symbol of the cross at the beginning of the performance that represents the need to own one’s crosses, the crypt or the need to die to one’s self-centeredness, the decapitated body or the need to confront one’s humanity and thus one’s vulnerability, and the need to marry the night or to couple with one’s darkness, in other words, to embrace one’s own otherness. Yin must love Yang. Anima must make peace with Animus as Carl Jung might say, or as Marjorie Garber, quoting postmodern Cuban writer, Severo Sarduy, puts it, in her book Vested Interests, “Transvestism … is probably the best metaphor for what writing really is: …not a woman under whose outward appearance a man must be hiding, ….but rather….the coexistence, in a single body, of masculine and feminine signifiers; the tension, the repulsion, the antagonism, which is created between them…” (Sarduy qtd. in Garber 150). We must have the ability to cross over to the other side in order to be imaginative creators. Marrying the night is one of Gaga’s metaphors for crossing over.
Many fire lit lamps line the stage and mist rises across its surface creating a mysterious and sacred aura. Dancers are silhouetted to appear – on the cusp of reality and fantasy – surreal. The movement in the song “Marry the Night”begins to change – first in the lyrics and then in the action onstage. The shift from decapitated female to young, active, whole womanhood parallels what Helene Cixous speaks of in her famous Laugh of the Medusa when she writes about “woman’s seizing the occasion so to speak, hence her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (264-65). The song reflects the refusal to allow anyone to suppress her energy and to hold back from exploring the streets of New York and all they and her imagination have to offer. The lyrics shift from the negative, “I’m not gonna cry anymore” to “Love is the new denim or black” and “Get your engine ready ‘cause I’m coming out front,” as Gaga returns to the crypt/church in her decapitation costume, only to come out transformed in minimalist clothing.
She takes off the dead self, almost molts, and puts on the living self; at this point the music changes to techno and the lights flash much more like Star Wars saber-lights-gone-to-disco-strobes across the entire stage, and Lady Gaga comes out as we are more accustomed to seeing her in a black lace bodysuit and black knee high boots, energized and dancing full throttle. This is Lady Gaga married to the night, working until all hours, in love with what she does and doing it with panache.
Marrying the night allows Gaga to write and to exorcise the spirit of death in order to move forward with newfound fire. When Gaga sings, I can almost hear Helene Cixous reminding those of us who have had the courage to say “no” to repression, shame and fear, those of us who have begun the process of exploring the scary territory on the other side: “We the precocious, the repressed of culture…we are black and we are beautiful” (878). Have you married the night yet?
Works Cited
Cetorelli, Valerie. Re-Thinking Subjectivity in French Psycholinguistic Feminism: A Path through Irigiray, Cixous & Kristeva. Essex Graduate Journal of Sociology. Vol. 10 (2010). 24-41. Web. 27 November 2011.
Cixous, Helene and Annette Kuhn. Castration or Decapitation? Signs. Vol. 7 No.1 (Autumn,
1981( 41-55). JSTOR. Web. 29 November 2011.
Cixous, Helen and Keith and Paula Cohen. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1 No. 4 (Summer, 1976) 875-893. JSTOR. Web. 28 November 2011.
[i] I did not want to skip the image “warrior queen” in the first stanza, which almost makes one think of an Amazonian queen, but because of the length of the paper, I will put the explication here instead of in the text. When Gaga calls herself a warrior, she is using the term metaphorically, reminiscent of what she said in an interview she had with the Wall Street Journal after her performance of “Bad Romance” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. When asked to extrapolate upon her idea of art, she replied as follows: “For me, art is a lie, and the artists are there to create lies we kill when we make it true. Francesco and I were like warriors on stage, trying to make a true moment….Art is life, life is art -– the question is what came first?” (emphasis mine). Here, Gaga’s use of the simile is about fighting as artists or investing all they had in their art to get their message across. The image is not one of violence but is simply a depiction of the struggle and energy it takes to make a single moment of “true” art – art that reveals a sincere message.
[ii] The song “Pokerface” begins with the chorus singing the syllables “ma ma ma ma ma.” For the refrain, Gaga sings, “Pa pa pa pa pa pokerface.” Thus, we have both “mama” and ”papa” in this song. It is difficult for me to believe Gaga was not aware of this. This syllabic repetition reinforces the use of Kristeva’s semiotic/chora.
[iii] Kristeva appropriates the term chora from Plato, but unlike Plato, Kristeva does not conceptualize it to be a preverbal space or type of timeless time prior to history. It is more of a liminal rhythmic experience the child has through the maternal body before that child is subjected to societal constraints. Kristeva does not describe the chora in terms of a container or in terms of containment.
According to Kristeva’s understanding of language acquisition, before a child learns to speak, the child responds to the sounds and rhythms of the mother’s body, her heartbeat and her cooing sounds. This is parallel to the stage when a child gets a sense of whether they are loved by the faces mirrored to them from their mother or caretaker, something psychologist D.W.Winnicott called mirroring, which he found very important to a child’s healthy development. Kristeva emphasizes this pre-syllabic or semiotic period, since whenever language is taught the focus is on the symbolic stage of language acquisition and the semiotic stage is looked down upon as nonsense syllables instead of being seen as the roots of the poetic part of our language.
Author Bio:
Ingrid Pruss, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University where she teaches 16th and 17th century British literature, poetry, critical theory, and women’s studies. Her work has been published in the George Herbert Journal, JAISA, Quay, and online in Seam Ripper. She loves presenting ideas at conferences and is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge through teaching.
This is the second piece in our series on "Marry the Night." For the first piece, click here.
From the playful kiddie pool scene in “Just Dance” to the tub of transformative trauma in “Marry the Night,” containers of water, bathtub and otherwise, constitute an important visual motif in Gaga’s aesthetic project. The image of a splashing Yüyi the Mermaid in “Yoü and I,” the reperformative washings in “Judas,” the white tub within the installation-art futurism of “Bad Romance,” and the pool setting of “Poker Face” all point to this interest in wet spaces. Appropriately titled “In Lady Gaga’s Wake,” the new Vanity Fair cover article (Robinson 2012) opens with a photograph of the pop star poised rather precariously on the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, the foamy waves behind her leading to a blurry New York skyline in the distance. A flimsy reading of such imagery would involve casually tossing around phrases about cleansing the self, purifying the body, and so on. I am more interested, however, in linking this motif to what I see at the core of Gaga’s creative ventures: the possibility of an endless renewal of identity and its consequences for contemporary culture.
“The Prelude Pathétique,” the spoken introduction to the “Marry the Night” video, extends the premise that Gaga has already laid out in interviews and her Manifesto of Little Monsters: her career and the persona that enabled it are examples of the essential human struggle to make lies true, to posit future versions of our selves, and to consciously realize desired fictions. In “Marry the Night,” she applies the same logic to her history. If the future can be willed into existence, why not the past? As she declares, “And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it.” Indeed, memories “can be lost forever.” Gaga thereby aestheticizes “memory loss” and upholds its potential for individual agency and boundless creativity. This perspective opens up an alternative outcome for what George Orwell’s 1984 called “the mutability of the past,” the ideological foundation of a dystopia in which any artifact of an event or person deemed inconvenient to Big Brother’s dictatorship was simply dropped into a nearby “memory hole.” “Marry the Night” is thereby the Janus-faced product of Gaga’s artistic remembrance: the Mother Monster is imagining her past self preparing a future that is now her glittering present.
Pop culture offers other instances of fungible pasts. The DC Comics graphic novel The Killing Joke (Moore and Bolland 2008) provides a sinister look at the origins of the Joker, Batman’s great nemesis. The whole attempt at revelation, however, is ultimately cast aside. While taunting Batman about his depraved past, the Joker declares, “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Said to have been influenced by The Killing Joke, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) enacts this preference for imagined histories: Heath Ledger’s Joker gives his victims different accounts of how he was scarred. Here critics may step back and see a slippery slope toward a solipsism that negates the existence of any fixed, commonly shared reality. But in the hypermodern age of social media and mobile technologies, such a concern is as fruitful as discussing the merits of dial-up modems or beepers. What else are Twitter and Facebook, updated incessantly by smartphones, but opportunities to endlessly reboot one’s identity, to self-curate our past and present, to invent and perform new selves as we please?
Whether based on superheroes, revolutionaries, or rock stars, the origin myths of most legends are steeped in the narrative power of a traumatic but necessary moment that elevates the ordinary into something far greater. The murders of Bruce Wayne’s parents and Peter Parker’s uncle trigger the careers of costumed crimefighters. In authoring her own origin myth, “Marry the Night” provides a glimpse of Gaga’s past trauma but culminates in the image of her apotheosis, a red-and-blue superwoman emerging phoenix-like from the fire of her years of toil. That journey has, of course, led to her victorious present, although some have an enduring preoccupation with the ordinariness possible in her extraordinary existence. This tension is lavishly depicted in the Annie Leibovitz photo spread for “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” She dons couture while standing in a laundromat or eating a hot dog but wears nothing but heels and sunglasses while being sketched by none other than Tony Bennett.
At the beginning of “Marry the Night,” moments after declaring that she will become a star because she has nothing left to lose, Gaga requests a bit of music while mentally disturbed patients prance and stagger around the hospital ward. The scene is reminiscent of the concluding scenes of Amadeus (1984), in which an embittered Antonio Salieri finally accepts the collapse of his own bid for stardom as he stands in the shadow of Mozart’s superior musical genius. Declaring himself to be “the patron saint of all mediocrities,” he assumes the role of champion for the deranged inmates at the asylum in which he resides. The contrast is clear. Salieri’s doomed musical career ended among quivering lunatics. Gaga’s stay in the mint-tinged ward was a mere step in a journey that led to her current place as one of the most celebrated recording artists in recent memory. Although not discussed in the Vanity Fair article, Gaga has also left a string of resentful Salieris in her wake, especially in New York. If they are DJs they do not play her music. They pretend that she does not exist, even when she sells out Madison Square Garden, when her image graces newsstands on every corner, when everyone from my students to my eighty-something Mexican grandmother is interested in what she is wearing.
Naturally, bitter detractors are as much a part of stardom as are magazine covers and red carpets. The curious development we see in “Marry the Night” is Gaga’s willingness to push aside the cloying gripes about authenticity and instead demonstrate her commitment to “show biz.” The aestheticized depiction of her trajectory from rejection and hospitalization to a glowing spot in the pop firmament has demonstrated the irrelevance of preoccupations with perceived realness. This is yet another indicator of why Gaga may appropriately be called Andy Warhol’s greatest inheritor. Films by Warhol and Paul Morrissey have become so celebrated precisely because of their conscious blurring of lines between the Superstars’ on-screen performances and off-screen personas. What was real? Consider the recently re-released biography of Superstar Joe Dallesandro (perhaps best known for the Flesh, Trash, Heat trilogy). As his biographer writes, “With the low budgets and improvisational nature of these movies, with an array of curious personalities parading before the camera often calling each other by their actual first names, as well as with the Warhol brand and the growing mythology of his Factory, the line between what was acting and what was real had been blurred to the point of obliteration” (Ferguson 2011, ii). When being interviewed, Dallesandro himself is said to have told reporters, “Whatever isn’t there, just make it up” (Ferguson 2011, 1).
I once interviewed a Warhol contemporary who expressed concern that Gaga’s stage persona had somehow eclipsed Stefani Germanotta. Definitely, I thought, just as the thirty-year old sociologist version of my self “eclipsed” the high school student version or the undergraduate activist version. I thought back to the interviewee’s comment while watching the enactment of Gaga’s honest lies in “Marry the Night.” Gaga states, “It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.” Watching Gaga apply her wet gloss to a bedazzled past revealed the best answer to the question posed by the Born This Way album. Born what way? This way, this particular version of a self that one decided to make real, a fiction that became true. It’s a challenge as much as a question. And that too lies in her wake.
Bibliography
Ferguson, Michael. Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor. Michael Ferguson, 2011.
Moore, Alan and Brian Bolland. Batman:The Killing Joke. DC Comics, 2008.
Robinson, Lisa. “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” Vanity Fair 617, 2012.
Author Bio:
Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., (http://victorpcorona.com) is a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. in sociology from Yale. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
This is the first piece in our series on "Marry the Night."
The origin, argues Maurice Blanchot, does not truly exist, for there’s always something that precedes it as a generative source. He further argues that even if the origin did exist, it would be impossible for us to comprehend or approach it without sullying and thereby destroying the origin itself: it would be irrevocably transformed and changed just by our presence, by our coming into contact with it. What Blanchot is interested in, however, is our fascination with origins in the first place, with our desire for our bare, unaccommodated selves at all. “Man at point zero,” he writes. Blanchot attributes this desire for the zero-point – the chimerical origin – as oriented not so much to the past as to the future: that is, we desire to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse our worlds of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero.
It’s incredibly appropriate, therefore, when Lady Gaga tells us at the onset of the video for “Marry The Night” – her “origins mythos” video – that she loathes reality, and that the story of her origin that the video will reveal is just as much her artistic creation as it is a description of what “really” happened. “Marry The Night” isn’t about what really happened; it’s about what “really” happened.
See, when talking about “origins” or “reality,” we can no longer do so without the recourse to quotation marks (as Nabokov so famously claimed). Artistic creation (the quotes) marries reality; analogously, Gaga (the artist) marries the night. And reality is all that shit, trauma, emptiness, and horror that artistic creativity somehow makes beautiful and bearable. Sometimes I think it’s terrifying, what art has the power to do: make palatable and even beautiful real suffering – that kind of suffering that has no redemptive quality or spark of beauty when one’s enthralled in it.
When Gaga, cradled by suffering, dyes her hair in the bathtub, she’s trying to aestheticize that trauma, make it beautiful somehow. In doing so, she transforms the trauma into something redemptive, into something that’s no longer trauma. Again, when she puts on lipstick and blush in the car. When she bedazzles her denim. The hair dye, lipstick, blush, bedazzler become the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, and Gaga becomes the artistic vision. And the trauma? It becomes the canvas, that blank space or emptiness upon which a pure potentiality of creations may come into existence.
As Gaga speaks about losing everything, and about being a “soldier to her own emptiness,” she articulates an awareness that sometimes nothingnessitself can become the ultimate creative force, that even, perhaps, nothingness is absolutely necessary for artistic creation at all. You’re a soldier to your own emptiness, but emptiness allows for a kind of infinite freedom, a borderless space that allows for new things to exponentially be.
Infinite bedazzled emptiness.
So she’s turned that trauma into a creative power, into an artistic vision. And in doing so, she’s inverted the trauma, freed it from its own ontology and thereby allowed it to become something beautiful. You’re watching a video that is trauma mirrored; you’re face-to-face with your own trauma inverted. After all, you’re the one watching the mirrored reflection of Gaga’s trauma; Gaga’s mirrored trauma positions you as its spiritual hologram.
No, seriously: didn’t you notice that parts of the film were inverted (take a look at the writing on the wall)?
When I flipped the shot, I found that the wall reads this:
As we watch “Marry The Night,” we’re watching an inverted cross: Gaga has taken the trauma of her crucifix and transformed it into beauty. And what’s more traumatic than the crucifix? What’s more beautiful than its inversion?
“When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened, it’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest, because I invented it.” – Lady Gaga
When Lady Gaga first tweeted about her forthcoming video for “Marry The Night” – a song she identifies as both her favorite on Born This Way and significant in that it depicts the moment she decided to make her passion for music her lifelong partner – she referred to it as the beginning of a story she has never told us. And when, over a week ago, she released the first minute and 48 seconds of the The Prelude Pathétique, she revealed the prelude to the yet-untold Prelude.
The effect of releasing the video in layers – first as a tweet unmasking it as an untold story and then as the pre-Prelude itself – is that Gaga leaves us questioning her work in a way we haven’t done up to this point in her oeuvre. The questions we find ourselves asking now, as we await the release of the full video, and why these questions are significant, will be discussed in more detail later in this piece. Thus far, The Prelude Pathétique presents a story that questions what is real and what isn’t – and how we, not only as consumers of Gaga’s art but also as people writing our own stories, perceive the difference between reality and fantasy (if we can, indeed, perceive such a difference at all).
This inquiry is of utmost importance to Gaga and her project. By this point, she has repeatedly underscored her hybrid existence as “halfway between” these two worlds, an existence that was initally declared when she re-created herself as a half-woman, half-motorcycle on the album cover for Born This Way. The album title itself embodies this reality/fantasy dualism that is reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s categorical assertion that “human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves” (Love in the Time of Cholera). In the pre-Prelude, this idea of autonomous, creative re-birth reaches a zenith during the first frames, in which Gaga tells us how she creates her lie and why, as the lie is happening before our eyes.
The Prelude Pathétique opens with a shot of Gaga lying on a gurney, her hair dark and cut short, her face pallid and lifeless. The appearance of the brown hair immediately suggests that we are watching a scene from Gaga’s pre-fame past, when she was still Stefani Germanotta. We hear Gaga’s voice booming over the ghastly images, in a recording that sounds like it may have been done on her BlackBerry or laptop computer: it’s gritty, unedited, and eerily familiar, as if she were sitting next to us, watching the video and describing its contents as the reel turns (one can hear the film reel spinning in the background throughout the video). The effect is unsettling in a number of ways that highlight the omnipresent duality of reality and fantasy, truth and falsehood; Gaga has broken the fourth wall by describing her process of creating her music video. (“Those nurses? They’re wearing next season Calvin Klein. And so am I.”) We know we are watching a music video that is supposed to reveal a yet-untold story, a secret – and yet Gaga admits she has created the story of her untold story before the untold story has even been revealed. It’s not unlike sitting in a theater and watching a play based on a true story, and while the play is happening on the stage, the director’s voice booms out over the loudspeakers to share with the audience creative choices such as, “The lead actor stands here with his feet apart to embody that he feels solid and grounded. His female opposite stands far away and facing the other direction to illustrate her fear and shame.” Of course, Gaga means to unsettle us; right from the beginning, she wants us to ask, “What’s going on here?” Because, ultimately, that’s the question she is always asking herself: what’s real, and what’s fantasy?
Immediately, we understand Stefani is in an infirmary of some kind. And Gaga’s voiceover tells us the reason: “Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer; memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. They can be lost forever.” The word “trauma” is illuminating but also vague, suggesting that Stefani has been hurt in some way but keeping indeterminate the nature of this injury. More is illuminated with the line, “The truth is, back at the clinic, they only wore those funny hats to keep the blood out of their hair.” We know then that the nurses are dealing with physical injuries that may at times include blood. It’s also the first time Gaga chooses to use “truth” language, aside from her stated belief at the beginning of the film that her lie is more honest than the truth because she “invented” it. This is the moment we learn that this video is a depiction of events that “truly” happened; to do this, it paradoxically departs in some ways from how the events really unfolded. And of course, because Gaga’s self-confessed purpose is often interchanging the truth with the lie, it is tempting here to say that it’s still not really clear, even considering her linguistic choices, what “truly” happened and what is a fiction. However, I would argue that because of the peeling away of the video’s layers (which began when she announced that she was telling us an untold story), and because of her choice to break the fourth wall and thereby distinguish between what we see unfolding in the video and what she describes as the process of her creating it, we are indeed dealing with events that, at the very least, Gaga perceives as having really occurred. It is her own choice to distinguish between the untold story and her creative retelling of it that supports this position.
This is, perhaps, the only time in the course of Gaga’s project that she has openly confessed to creation as a mode of expressing a secret – meaning, before seeing the work, we know it is the telling of an “untold story.” One might argue that this is always true of Gaga’s work, and even of art in general – that art inherently depicts a story that has yet to be told. And this may be true, but it is not so common that the artist preemptively admits such a circumstance. And in Gaga’s case, she has never set up the release of a music video by saying, essentially, “I have a secret to tell, and this is it.”
The fact that she released the first part of the Prelude independent of and before the rest is also significant. The effect is that we wonder what happened to Stefani in the past that Gaga has not yet been open about but is still obviously wrestling with (“It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again”). As such, our state of mind as an audience is completely altered – we find ourselves asking questions that we have perhaps never asked before: What has Gaga not told us about her past? How will this information shed a new light on all her prior work? It’s the very idea of her confessing to having a secret, and now wanting to reveal that secret, that intrigues us.
The image of Gaga/Stefani knocked out and being rolled around a hospital with overtones of trauma just increases this state of wanting; the idea that Stefani, (though very open about her history with drugs, alcohol and the underground party scene of NYC), experienced some sort of serious but secret trauma pre-Gaga is intriguing because it has the potential to cast a new light on her entire project. This is especially true if – as the end of the introduction suggests – this trauma was somehow self-inflicted: “That girl on the left, she ordered gummy bears and a knife a couple hours ago. They only gave her the gummy bears. I’d wish they’d only given me the gummy bears.”
This last sentence is crucial not only for its content but because of its future perfect tense – I would wish they had only given me the gummy bears. It clearly distinguishes the Gaga speaking as an omniscient third person narrator, describing not only what is happening, but also what will happen. She knows the future we’re about to watch – because she lived it in the past. This is confirmed by a recent tweet about the video: “It is so true to my life it terrifies me.” She suggests not only that she ordered a knife, but that she indeed got it, which in turn suggests some sort of self-injury. This tense change also re-inforces the argument that what we are about to see in the video is a depiction of something Gaga considers to have really happened.
Many questions remain as we move from the Prelude’s introduction to the Prelude itself. Will Gaga continue to narrate her own story as she tells a visually amplified version of it? Will the trauma revealed therein cast an entirely new light on her work? Will it re-define her artistic concept of “truth”? Most importantly: will it signal a general transition from the world of “fantasy” to the world of “reality” in her project? Or perhaps the opposite – will it be the final piece of Stefani’s puzzle, which Gaga needs to share with us to completely reject the reality she seems to so loathe?
Author Bio:
Meghan Blalock is a writer and editor living in New York City. She edits for Gotham magazine, and has written pieces for the local music blog The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman’s Day, and other publications. She is also a certified vinyasa yoga teacher. Her poetry has been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here.
