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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The Trajectory of the Monster: Some Musings on the Ascendance of a Myth and the Decay of the Female Celebrity

By Ella Bedard

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

To periodize Lady Gaga’s work up to this point, I would rather consider the evolution of her music videos than her music. I say this not to dismiss Gaga’s music, but to suggest that we look elsewhere for the artistic intrigue in her work. If, like the editors of this journal, one gives credence to the view that Gaga is not simply a musician but a performance artist, then it is the juxtaposition between her seemingly formulaic music and the bizarre spectacle of the performer that warrants our critical attention. I have suggested elsewhere that Gaga’s remarkably typical pop sound is part of a greater performative statement about identity, cultural conformity, and celebrity. In this short piece, I consider how these themes are taken up in Gaga’s latest music video. In my psychoanalytic reading, “Born This Way” is a comment on the fragmented selfhood of the celebrity. The video reveals how fame creates a disparity between the Ego of “Mother Monster” and the female body upon which that myth is written. However, in order to glean this meaning from “Born This Way,” we must pay attention to the carefully constructed aesthetic of her performance, and how it has changed since the beginning of her career. For this, we turn to the videos.

If we consider the spectrum of Gaga from early videos like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to later epics like “Telephone,” the trajectory goes something like the following. In 2008 and early 2009, when Gaga emerged with hits like “Just Dance” and “Eh, Eh,” she was fairly typical of the pop star type. There was something vaguely grotesque about her bow-hair, but nothing all that off-putting. At the very least, we could identify her by familiar cultural symbols: she had Italian heritage, she was young, she was confident, and liked to party. She was American – irreverently so. Also at that stage, Gaga was pretty unambiguous about her sexuality and gender. Her hips and heels identify her as female; the way she rubs them against her male interlocutors indicates her heterosexuality.

“Poker Face” delivered the first signs of gender ambiguity, which emerged more strongly in subsequent videos. Lyrics like “bluffin’ with my muffin’’ had Barbara Walter’s raising her eyebrows and asking questions about Gaga’s sexual history. Around this same time, a video circulated on the Internet that supposedly exposed Gaga as a man. The video shows her mounting a motorcycle during one of her performances. Apparently we see her penis slip out of her red booty shorts. Of course, the footage is hazy and confirms nothing. In later videos like “Telephone,” Gaga makes allusion to this hype, without setting the record straight.

Also at this time, we saw the emergence of cyborg feminist and post-humanist themes in Gaga’s videos. In “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” Gaga’s exudes a grotesque technological sexuality: hers is the smashed-up body where feminine flesh is inseparably twisted with cold hard robotic metal. In “Telephone,” Gaga appears in a skeletal cat suit with deathly white make up: she is woman, she is feline; she is alive, and she is dead. It is not only her status as woman, but also her status as human, that have been thrown into question.

                

To my mind, what is most interesting about Gaga is how she performs herself as a contingent site of citation. This is best encapsulated in the heavily collaged video for “Telephone,” where Gaga alludes to a plurality of possible identities without settling in any one. She has cultivated an elaborate aesthetic of pastiche, citing the style and sound of Madonna, Cher, and others. She is subversive and commercial, gendered and not, original and derivative. By continuously switching roles, she complicates these dualities and reveals how her identity, like any identity, is a contingency and a performance. She succeeds in her failing to play every part; she is unique only insofar as she acknowledges that her celebrity identity is a mimetic performance that draws on the gendered performances of her predecessors.

As a self-styled Fame Monster, Gaga’s acknowledges the extent to which her identity is constituted through the recognition of her followers. The ambiguities that surround Gaga reflect the myriad of contradicting sources that inform her identity. As her career progresses and Gaga becomes better known, we become increasingly less certain about what Gaga is. This is because Gaga is only the collage of photos and Internet rumors that constitute her celebrity. She is a reflection of the pluralized and fragmented field of information through which she appears for our consumption.

Though Gaga’s aesthetic has changed significantly over time, the theme of celebrity is ever-present throughout the disparate phases of her career. In my reading of Gaga’s work, fame is synonymous with Ego, and is used to illustrate the performative and socially constructed nature of the Self. In his psychoanalytic writing, Jacques Lacan famously describes the paranoid-narcissistic structure of the “I”. He argues that the Ego is specifically not the reality-mediating faculty of the individual, but a form of alienating misidentification. The person whom “I” recognize in the mirror – the self that is reflected for me in the other – has homogeneity and wholeness that “I” find at odds with my own disjointed experience of selfhood. One always feels the gap between herself and the seemingly totalized other that stands before her. As opposed to competing with the wholeness of her reflection, the subject alienates her sense of self to it. It is this alienation of self to our spectral other that allows us to look in the mirror and proclaim “that is me!” Yet that projected and imagined self will always be a lie – an ideal – that one strives for but continuously fails to embody. In an attempt to banish the feeling of lack at the core of our being, we seek affirmation, love, and recognition from the other.

As Gaga acknowledges in the “Manifesto of Little Monster,” she exists by way of the mutually constitutive relationship between herself and her fans.

So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

This manifesto reads very differently from the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” which Gaga recites at the beginning of the “Born This Way” video:

On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.

Whereas the “Manifesto of Little Monster” acknowledges Gaga fans as the source of Gaga herself, the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” inverts the relationship, positing Mother Monster as first mover. In this creation myth, Gaga is the cause of the “new race” of little monsters. While the first manifesto explicitly acknowledges Gaga as a projection of her fans, the second manifesto denies this mutually. This is because the second manifesto is a performance of the projection. She is enacting the lie that she alludes to in the first manifesto – the lie “for which we kill.” And in fact, as we see in “Born This Way,” the negative side of this myth is destroying the physical body of Gaga, the site upon which the “spiritual hologram” is projected.

The moment the ego is constituted, a false dichotomy is created between the idealized ego and the failing self. This bifurcated “I” is the lens through which one perceives herself and the world: it is the constitutive distortion that will forever inform her perception of reality. The mythology that initiates the symbolic order of “Born This Way” introduces us to two Gagas: the good and the bad. However, when visually represented, the dichotomy is perhaps more accurate described as a division between Immortal Gaga and finite gaga.

“Born This Way” dramatizes the paranoiac-narcissistic symptoms of the fractured ego. As her celebrity grows, Captial-G Gaga becomes a more powerful, more intimidating Ego-ideal, which gaga can never live up to. The idealized Gaga sits bathed in light, surrounded by religious imagery. She is the “Spiritual Hologram,” the Gaga we constitute through our adoration. The anemic gaga who appears naked and in skeletal make-up is the negative image of that Goddess. As her Celebrity grows and the mythologized Gaga becomes a more powerful and convincing mirage, the disparity likewise increases between the idealized Ego and her finite counterparts, whom we see in varying states of decay.

The gaga who dances naked reveals the aggressivity buried in the narcissistic structure of the ego. There is something menacing about the way she moves. Whereas the added boniness on the face and shoulders of the eternal Gaga contributes to her regal expression, this same makeup on the dancing gaga gives us a different impression. We see how the desire to live up to her own image has taken its toll on the physical body of the celebrity. This gaga is what threatens the beloved Ego with disintegration. Likewise, in skeletal makeup, gaga dances freely, sometimes touching herself. She rejoices in the death of the Ego – that is, in her own death, which is the death of an impossible myth. She begs us to believe that she was born this way, while the visual juxtaposition between the two Gagas serves to undercut the song’s lyrics and fill them with irony. She is both Gaga and gaga, both Mother-Monster and the excess that disrupts the phantasm of the Ego-ideal. Simultaneously one and many, she exists somewhere in between, in that indiscernible zone between herself and her fans: and this is the Fame.

Author Bio:

Ella Bedard is a student of contemporary history, culture, and criticism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year she will be moving to Toronto where she hopes to pursue her interests in performance, gender ambiguity, and Gaga.

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