MtN’s Tour de Negative Femininities

By Samantha Cohen

This is the seventh piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

The home-chopped bob with too-short bangs has always been my favorite haircut. It screams teenage theater girl or aspiring mental patient. It makes me think of knives. The girl with the home-chopped bob is so angry she’ll take a scissors to her hair, cut right into it at random, and probably use the scissors on other things, too. The bob chopper’s given up on being a good female – she’s given up on being pretty. She takes her emotions out on the very symbol of her good femininity: her hair. She externalizes her badness, advertises her desire to fail. And so she is institutionalized.

Only she hasn’t given up on being pretty, not really. The scissored-at-random look is different than the razored-all-over look. Her little bangs ask those who gaze upon her to still find her cute. Recognize my anger, her hair says, recognize its manifestation on my body, but adore me. The home-chopped bob externalizes the ambivalence and pathos of being female.

And so, in the mental institution with home-chopped Gaga we begin the “Marry the Night” video’s grand tour of negative femininities.

The mental institution has always been a fantasy space for me. I sort of blame the movie Girl, Interrupted for this.

Angelina's home-chopped bangs!

The mental institution is a place for unchecked feminine expression and sanctioned hysteria, a gathering space for failed females. It’s a lesbian separatist experiment-come-true. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona and Angelina sneak out for acoustic guitar sessions and eye sex. In “Marry the Night,” patients cavort madly in matching thongs, imaginary slumber party-style.

Gaga’s in the institution because she took a knife to her hair and then her body; because she couldn’t be a good female – “a saint” – like her mother.

But one must fail at femaleness in order to create. Creation is a selfish act, and the good female is unselfish. Gaga must accept herself as a failed female before she can be an artist, and so the mental institution is necessarily the first stop on her journey.

Gaga is not at the hospital to be restored to good femininity, like Winona in Girl, Interrupted, but to accept her failure. She just has to turn on some dramatic piano music and waltz into a studio apartment that, bathtub-in-the-kitchen, is the very signifier of glamorous New York artistic poverty, and that’s in some ways, an extension of the institution – a place for expressive seclusion.

And so she finds herself in the next incarnation of failed femaleness: the cloistered impoverished artist. She practices ballet, does performance art involving maxi pads and Cheerios, and writes songs in the kitchen bathtub as she bleaches her hair. Strutting around with a censoring black bar over her nipples, she even has an imaginary audience. Her speech is subtitled.

But Gaga’s already told us she’s beautified her past. Of course, real art poverty is the same as all other poverty. There’s no audience, and after awhile, it becomes difficult to imagine one.

And so, Gaga joins the world again, now as an artist. Which she can do, because she still has her bedazzler. She still has the tool to make herself into her own glittering object. And so she does.

And then she does “what any girl would do.” But what is it that any girl would do? She says it’s “start(ing) all over again” but her face tells us something different. 

Do you see it? It’s subtle. It could almost be that Gaga’s gum is stuck in her teeth. But, no. Gaga is going to suck cock. She’s going to embody yet another form of negative feminine: the whore.

Oh yes. She’s entered the capitalist/patriarchal system and she’s ready to sell herself to that ultimate patriarch: the Papa Paparazzi.

Gaga’s subtlety with her cock-sucking face is telling – she’s skilled at making her signals apparent only to those who know how to read them. This kind of coded signaling is itself a feminine form of communication. Men, Real Men (who may of course be women, too), the ones who run shit and to whom Gaga must whore herself are, as centuries worth of jokes and satire tell us, unobservant. Almost intentionally so – they wouldn’t want to be accused of the feminine activity of reading into things. And so, by convincing Real Men, at a glance, that she’s whatever they want her to be, Gaga gains the freedom to speak honestly, if clandestinely.

So Gaga’s a whore, but she can’t just be a whore. Like (Catholic schoolgirl) pop stars Britney and Christina, she must embrace both sides of the Madonna/whore binary. She must, too, be a saint. She clues us in on this in the same moment that she signals her intent-to-whore. Her studded denim, blonde 80s look alludes to Madonna, making a kind of visual pun that allows her to embody both the Madonna and the whore simultaneously, to effectively become a Madonna/whore hologram.

Unlike Britney and Christina, though, whom Real Men turn into whores and Madonnas in image only, Gaga becomes a real Madonna (more on this later), and a real whore. She “throw(s) on some leather and cruise(s)…in (her) fishnet gloves, (she’s) a sinner.” And it’s by embodying at once these opposing figures that Gaga has the freedom to create herself in her own image, to use those shiny patches.

By actually inhabiting both sides of the Madonna/whore binary, Gaga is able to become, while in the world, something that’s almost unfemale. By the time she’s ready for the world of the actual music video, she’s abandoned her uncontrolled, emotional femininity. Her movements have become precise, rigid, fierce. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling. She makes fists. She blows shit up. She’s become something that’s so far from popular representations of the Madonna and the whore that it’s not quite recognizable as female, so far from these representations that, upon her debut, U.S. audiences speculated about whether she was a man. In fact, she’s a Gaga. And it’s once she’s become a Gaga in this video that the actual music video can begin.

Throughout the music video, we see what it is to be a Madonna.

Whoring gives Gaga the freedom to return to the bathtub, to her space of creation, which is also her space of baptism.

Gaga purifies herself in order to “make love to this dark,” to create. In Gaga’s bathtub, the Madonna is not all about piety and selflessness. This Madonna communes with the divine, with the mystical, with the dark, in order to create. This is not a new idea of course – the Virgin Mary herself communed with the divine so hard, got so deeply in touch with the dark otherworldly, that she got pregnant with an actual baby who was part-human, part-divine. Gaga restores the image of the Madonna to what she is: another embodiment of the negative feminine.

Gaga’s Madonna is not a Madonna that the U.S. Christian right (who are almost synonymous with Real Men) would approve. She’s in touch with the dark, with the unconscious, with the frightening spiritual world.

Real Men are content, Gaga implies, as long as their cocks get sucked. And thus, Gaga turns the Madonna/whore binary on its head, making saintliness encompass emotion and darkness and everything scarily feminine, while the whore gives Real Men what they want, gaining freedom as currency.

And the chorus of “Marry the Night” sounds to me like an imperative as well as an invocation. I hear Gaga invoking Mama M-Mary, the night. Mary the dark, Mary the source of magical creation. But I also hear, “Mama m-marry the night,” which sounds to me like it sounds when I hear LA Latina mothers call their daughters mama, a term of endearment, a recognition of their inescapable femaleness. Mother monster is dispensing some advice. She advises us to marry the night. To embrace inner darkness and create from that darkness. To commune with the otherworldly, to reinvent ourselves. To turn tricks and be tricksters. To embrace solitude as well as the bedazzler. To do the home-chopped bob if we need to, but to eventually become so tough and glamorous in the world that we’ll be allowed space to return to our own rooms for emotional/psychotic/hysterical creation.

And with the Mary figure at the end of the video, Gaga offers us a god to worship. This Mary’s hard and shiny, content alone in the darkness, transmitting signals from her satellite head, knowing they'll be properly received.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen, creative editor of Gaga Stigmata, is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles. Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine. She teaches a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts.

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Let’s Go Crazy

By Devin O’Neill

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.

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Playing with Pearls: The Adornment of the Selves

by Laurence Ross

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

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

Illustration by Sir John Tenniel

Games/Performances of Madness

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

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

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

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

Dali, The Pearl (1981)

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

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

(Infinitely) Shucking the Pop Bivalve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaga as Gyre

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

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

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

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

Digestion

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Author Bio

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